But things as well as persons are often charged with the mysterious quality of holiness or taboo; hence it frequently becomes necessary for similar reasons to guard them also from coming into contact with the ground, lest they should in like manner be drained of their valuable properties and be reduced to mere commonplace material objects, empty husks from which the good grain has been eliminated.  Thus, for example, the most sacred object of the Arunta tribe in Central Australia is, or rather used to be, a pole about twenty feet high, which is completely smeared with human blood, crowned with an imitation of a human head, and set up on the ground where the final initiatory ceremonies of young men are performed.  A young gum-tree is chosen to form the pole, and it must be cut down and transported in such a way that it does not touch the earth till it is erected in its place on the holy ground.  Apparently the pole represents some famous ancestor of the olden time.[21]

[Festival of the wild manog tree in British New Guinea.]

Again, at a great dancing festival celebrated by the natives of Bartle Bay, in British New Guinea, a wild mango tree plays a prominent part.  The tree must be self-sown, that is, really wild and so young that it has never flowered.  It is chosen in the jungle some five or six weeks before the festival, and a circle is cleared round its trunk.  From that time the master of the ceremonies and some eight to twenty other men, who have aided him in choosing the tree and in clearing the jungle, become strictly holy or tabooed.  They sleep by themselves in a house into which no one else may intrude:  they may not wash or drink water, nor even allow it accidentally to touch their bodies:  they are forbidden to eat boiled food and the fruit of mango trees:  they may drink only the milk of a young coco-nut which has been baked, and they may eat certain fruits and vegetables, such as paw-paws (Carica papaya) and sugar-cane, but only on condition that they have been baked.  All refuse of their food is kept in baskets in their sleeping-house and may not be removed from it till the festival is over.  At the time when the men begin to observe these rules of abstinence, some six to ten women, members of the same clan as the master of the ceremonies, enter on a like period of mortification, avoiding the company of the other sex, and refraining from water, all boiled food, and the fruit of the mango tree.  These fasting men and women are the principal dancers at the festival.  The dancing takes place on a special platform in a temporary village which has been erected for the purpose.  When the platform is about to be set up, the fasting men rub the stepping posts and then suck their hands for the purpose of extracting the ghost of any dead man that might chance to be in the post and might be injured by the weight of the platform pressing down on him.  Having carefully extracted these poor souls, the men carry them away tenderly and set them free in the forest or the long grass.