RELIGION AND COLLAPSE OF THE ABORIGINAL CULTURE

One hundred fifty thousand years after the arrival of the original Australian people, the first colonization of Australia began with Captain Cook. The ‘natives,’ from now on all called Aborigines, had so little interest in Cook’s paltry presents, his material gifts, that Cook wrote in his journal: “All of the things that we gave them, they left lying on the spot and paid no attention to them. On my view, this means that they believe themselves to be provided with all of the necessities of life.” The key to the Aborigines’ behavior, so astounding to Cook, is to be found in their religion.
In the Australia of the Aborigines, a different worldview held sway from the one on the English ship. These people were not technologists, but cosmologists. Mastery of the world through material proficiencies—and they, too, possessed these proficiencies—were counterbalanced by inner abilities.

Myths of Origins: The Totem Ancestors

Once upon a time, as recounted by the Aranda and other groups of central Australia, the earth was uncreated and timeless. In the beginning there was only a bare, flat surface, without form and without life. But the moment arrived when a great number of supernatural beings, the totem ? ancestors, emerged from their everlasting sleep beneath the surface. Each of these supernatural beings was coupled with a particular animal or plant. Now they proceeded over the plane, and with their creative power began to shape the world, which had existed from all eternity, but without form or order. Mountains, hills, mud holes, plains, springs, rivers are all signs of the deeds of the ancestors of the totems. Here, in the totem-ancestors, were the exemplars and prototypes of plants, animals, and human beings.
They erected religious and social institutions, such as the procedures for marriage and initiation, they taught crafts, hunting, and fishing, they regulated natural phenomena such as the tides, seasons, and stages of vegetation. As the totem ancestors went about establishing all of their creative signs in every place, they bestowed on the world its inviolable order. The myths of the Aborigines identify all of the places where the totem ancestors exercised their activities, as they passed through them or performed ceremonies there. The wanderings of the totem ancestors are to be understood very concretely. Their passages, today as of old, can be retraced. The places where they paused—mountains, rock formations, water holes, and so forth—really exist, and it was these that became sacred by their presence. Their routes overrun the entire land, especially the sacred places of the totems—the special places of the mythical ancestors.
And so, as the myths relate, a consistent web arose, analogous to the network of modern streets. Over these pathways, the most divergent groups were mythically united, frequently from great distances, and when the seasons were good and fruitful, these peoples would gather in grand ritual feasts, and these could last for weeks.

Sacred Land

Thus, the root of the Aborigines’ solidarity with their land is religious. It is the intimate bond between human beings and the environment of their one-time existence, the existence of their ancestors, who continue to live in them. Were the people to be taken from this land, whether by displacement, enticement, or expulsion, they would lose themselves, their culture, their spiritual existence. Were they to be driven from their familiar land of myth, the new land on which they would have to live would no longer be sacred land. No longer would they know the name of each place, or what had once transpired there.
They would be ignorant of the myths connected with it. Their own myth and the foreign place would not be connected. The clan or family that had migrated to a specially prepared locale would become literally disoriented, and the hereditary myths would now be meaningless. The collapse of the traditional, mythically rooted social order would now be but a question of time. The older generation, which had once experienced the conjunction of myth and land, could no longer hand down, to new generations, this connection between the two.

Collapse of the Aboriginal Culture

Here we have an important cause of the rapid disintegration of the Aborigines’ cultures and religion. This is the result of two hundred years of European colonization, along with the devastation of fields and calculated genocide. The world is no longer the same. Aborigines no longer hunt for their own sustenance—they get their meat and vegetables out of cans now—and have gotten used to eating bread from plastic bags.
Their old disdain for all that is material, their enthusiasm for the invisible deeds of the invisible totem ancestors, has given place to the desire for their own automobile, their own television, and the latest fashion. And not only the Aborigines’ diet and values have changed, but their perceptions, as well. Now the rain comes down without the rain ritual. Of course, this situation scarcely relieves the ‘whites’ of their obligation to study the mythic rights demanded by the Aborigines, and at times to recognize them.

Phenomenon of Reception: The ‘Dream Time’

The cultures of the Aborigines, as with so many other indigenous groups and peoples, are subjugated to the need of the West for its own bestowal of meaning. And a concept like that of the ‘dream time’ is especially well calculated for the restoration of a little color to the dreamless everyday. And yet few concepts are the victim of such fundamental misunderstanding as that of the ‘dream time.’ The original word of the Aranda, altjira, means “eternal,” “uncreated.” The Aranda know no delimited ‘dream time,’ in the sense of a past or particular age. For them, altjira is a world that has begun in eternity, but whose end is impossible to predict.

The mythical totem ancestors—so it is believed—live today just as they have from all eternity, and just as they will do everlastingly. Of course, the exploitation of indigenous cultures is not limited to their original, spiritual property. In particular, indigenous music is submitted to availability for a price, in a billion dollar enterprise of big industry. And so it is no surprise today that a didjeridoo-player sits at nearly every street corner, making hopeless attempts to get a bit of Australia into the spaces between the shops and the consumption fetishists with their wild plunges.


From 'The Brill Dictionary of Religion', Edited by Kocku von Stuckrad, translated from the German by Robert R. Barr, Koninklijke Brill NV, Leiden, The Netherlands, 2006, p.1-3. Adapted to be posted by Leopoldo Costa.

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