ABSTRACT
Symbols achieve their most elaborate and compelling public currency in myths - those ‘sacred tales’ with which men seek to invest their lives with cosmic grandeur. A strong case can conse quently be made for treating myths as the real ‘soul-stuff of social anthropology. As a sensitive classical scholar, Jane Harrison, long ago remarked in a passage which reflects the influence of both Freud and Frazer, ‘myth is the dream-thinking of a people, just as the dream is the myth of the individual.’ 1
In this spirit myth frequently postulates a time before time, a kind of sacred prehistory, a drowsy surrealistic world in which the coordinates of time and space are suspended or shifting, and nothing is impossible. So the primordial dawn in which Australian aborigines set their creation myths is expressively described as the ‘Dreaming’ or ‘Dream Time’ which, as Stanner has put it, ‘was, and is, everywhen’. The most famous of these myths comes from the Murngin aborigines and was described and analysed by Lloyd Warner;2 it relates how the two Wawilak sisters were crossing the Arnhem Land bush during the Dream Time, collecting animals and plants as they went, and telling them that they would become sacred objects (i.e. totems) in the future. Having given birth by committing incest within their own clan, the two sisters and their children came to the sacred waterhole of Mirrimina, home of the mythical python, Yurlunggur. Here they stopped to camp, and the elder sister polluted the pool of the Great Python by accident ally allowing her menstrual blood to fall into the well. This action enraged the Python. When the women attempted to cook the animals and plants they had collected, each species leapt up and ran into the well. Then the snake rose from the water and
swallowed the sisters and their children. Afterwards the earth was covered by a flood. The terrifying noise of the snake’s thunder and the torrential rain attracted the attention of two Wawilak men who, fearing that some calamity had occurred, set out to trace the two Wawilak sisters. Eventually they picked up the tracks of the Great Snake, and one of them said (evidently with a magnificent sense of understatement): ‘I think the sisters had trouble: I think that maybe a crocodile or python has killed them.' Un daunted, the men continued their journey and eventually came to the sacred well, where they slept. The two women appeared to them in a dream telling them the story and the songs which they had sung to keep the snake at bay. Thus the sacred mysteries were revealed to mortal man to cherish and to celebrate in his rituals. As the Murngin told Warner: ‘We dance these things now, be cause our Wongar [Dream Time] ancestors learned them from the two Wawilak sisters.’ We shall come later to the relationship between myth and ritual. For the moment we need only note how this major aboriginal creation myth, in which the Python (repre senting the male elements in the society) is also the wet season and swallows and regurgitates the dry season to bring plenty, owes much of its sacred quality to its character as a cosmic dream.3
