Aboriginal Australian group

Usage examples of arunta.

Similarly, to take a few more examples, in a ceremony of the witchetty grub totem of the Arunta tribe the body of the actor was decorated with lines of white and red down, and he had a shield adorned with a number of concentric circles of down.

Yhi is the Sun Woman of the Arunta people who now live just west of Queensland in central Australia.

One such stone, for example, may be seen in the land of the Arunta tribe near Alice Springs.

For example, we have just seen that in the Arunta tribe the souls of dead people of the plum-tree totem congregate at a certain stone in the mulga scrub, and that in the Warramunga tribe the spirits of deceased persons who had black snakes for their totem haunt certain gum-trees.

Hakea flower totem in the Arunta tribe, as to which it may be premised that a decoction of the Hakea flower is a favourite drink of the natives.

This conclusion is suggested first of all by the practice of the Arunta and other Central Australian tribes, who observe very similar ceremonies with the avowed intention of thereby multiplying the totemic animals and plants in order that they may be eaten by the tribe, though not by the particular clan which has these animals or plants for its totem.

In the eastern Arunta tribe, indeed, it is said that sometimes a little wooden vessel used in camp for holding small objects may be buried with the man, but this is the only instance which Messrs.

Again, in the Arunta tribe mourners smear themselves with white pipeclay, and the motive for this custom is said to be to render themselves more conspicuous, so that the ghost may see and be satisfied that he is being properly mourned for.

Thus the Arunta imagine that for some time after death the spirit of the deceased is in a sort of intermediate state, partly hovering about the abode of the living, partly visiting his own proper spiritual home, to which on the completion of the mourning ceremonies he will retire to await the new birth.

For they have found that the tribes to the north of the Arunta regularly give their dead a second burial, that a change in the state of the ghosts is believed to coincide with the second burial, and apparently also, though this is not so definitely stated, that the time for the second burial is determined by the disappearance of the flesh from the bones.

The final ceremony which brings the period of mourning to an end is curious and entirely different from the one observed by the Arunta on the same occasion.