Dear all,
As part of my current odyssey, my walkabout has taken me deep into the aboriginal territory of thinking.
The aborigines are not one people but are many, and there are as many as two hundred different languages.
They are an ancient people, having lived in Australia, some would say, for up to fifty thousand years, populating the land in a series of crashing waves.
They have a beautiful creation story called the dreamtime.
The following is from Bruce Chatwins Songlines*, a beautiful crafted book, in this passage he describes the Dreamtime:
In the Beginning the Earth was an infinite and murky plain, separated from the sky and from the grey salt sea and smothered in a shadowy twilight. There were neither Sun nor Moon nor Stars. Yet, far away, lived the Sky-dwellers: youthfully indifferent beings, human in form but with the feet of emus, their golden hair glittering like spiders' webs in the sunset, ageless and unageing, having existed for ever in their green, well-watered Paradise beyond the Western Clouds.
On the surface of the Earth, the only features were certain hollows which would, one day, be waterholes. There were no animals and no plants, yet clustered round the waterholes there were pulpy masses of matter: lumps of primordial soup-soundless, sightless, unbreathing, unaware and unsleeping-each containing the essence of life, or the possibility of becoming human.
Beneath the Earth's crust, however, the constellations glimmered, the Sun shone, the Moon waxed and waned, and all forms of life lay sleeping: the scarlet of a desert-pea, the iridescence on a butterfly's wing, the twitching white whiskers of Old Man Kangaroo- dormant as seeds in the desert that must wait for a wandering shower.
On the morning of the First Day, the Sun felt the urge to be born. (That evening the Stars and Moon would follow.) The Sun burst through the surface, flooding the land with golden light, warming the hollows under which each Ancestor lay sleeping.
Unlike the Sky-dwellers, these Ancients had never been young. They were lame, exhausted greybeards with knotted limbs, and they had slept in isolation through the ages.
So it was, on this First Morning, that each drowsing Ancestor felt the Sun's warmth pressing on his eyelids, and felt his body giving birth to children. The Snake Man felt snakes slithering out of his navel. The Cockatoo man felt feathers. The Witchetty Grub Man felt a wriggling, the Honey-ant a tickling, the Honeysuckle felt his leaves and flowers unfurling. The Bandicoot Man felt baby bandicoots seething from under his armpits. Every one of the 'living things', each in its own separate birthplace, reached up for the light of day.
In the bottom of their hollows (now filling up with water), the Ancients shifted one leg, then another leg. They shook their shoulders and flexed their arms. They heaved their bodies upward through the mud. Their eyelids cracked open. They saw their children at play in the sunshine.
The mud fell from their thighs, like placenta from a baby. Then, like the baby's cry, each Ancestor opened his mouth and called out, 'I AM!' 'I am - Snake . . . Cockatoo . . . Honey-ant . . . Honeysuckle . . .' And this first 'I am!', this primordial act of naming, was held, then and forever after, as the most secret and sacred couplet of the Ancestor's song.
Each of the Ancients (now basking in the sunlight) put his left foot forward and called out a second name. He put his right foot forward and called out a third name. He named the waterhole, the reedbeds, the gum trees-calling right and left, calling all things into being and weaving their names into verses.
The Ancients sang their way all over the world. They sang the rivers and ranges, salt-pans and sand dunes. They hunted, ate, made love, danced, killed: wherever their track lead they left a trail of music.
They wrapped the whole world in a web of song; and at last, when the Earth was sung, they felt tired. Again in their limbs they felt the frozen immobility of Ages. Some sank into the ground where they stood. Some crawled into caves. Some crept away to their 'Eternal Homes', to the ancestral waterholes that bore them.
All of them went 'back in'.
This is the beginning of the aboriginal creation story.
An aborigine inherits part of the dreaming when they are born. A child is born twice, the physical act of birth and the ancestral act of birth. When a child first kicks, that is the sign of his ancestor entering the child.
The mother carefully notes exactly where she was when the child kicks and then calls the elders.
They convene a council and look at the land carefully so that they can determine which ancestor has entered the child.
When the child is born, it inherits part of the dreaming, a few bars of the whole of the song of creation.
For they believe that the ancestors sang the land into being, and that the whole of creation is just one whole song, every human being inheriting part of the song of the creation at his birth.
In the next post I'll try and explain the concept of the songlines and how they fit into the Dreamtime.
yechydda,
*Bruce Chatwins Dreamtime is one of the most enigmatic books I have ever read. Compelling and haunting, though not without its critics, if you read one book this year make it this one.