Here Mungan-ngaur, a Being not defined as spirit, but immortal, and dwelling in heaven, is Father, or rather grandfather, not maker, of the Kurnai.  This may be interpreted as ancestor-worship, but the opposite myth, of making or creating, is of frequent occurrence in many widely-severed Australian districts, and co-exists with evolutionary myths.  Mungan-ngaur’s precepts are: 

  1. To listen to and obey the old men.
  2. To share everything they have with their friends.
  3. To live peaceably with their friends.

  4. Not to interfere with girls or married women.

  5. To obey the food restrictions until they are released from them by
     the old men.

Mr. Howitt concludes:  ’I venture to assert that it can no longer be maintained that the Australians have no belief which can be called religious, that is, in the sense of beliefs which govern tribal and individual morality under a supernatural sanction.’  On this topic Mr. Hewitt’s opinion became more affirmative the more deeply he was initiated.[18]

The Australians are the lowest, most primitive savages, yet no propitiation by food is made to their moral Ruler, in heaven, as if he were a ghost.

The laws of these Australian divine beings apply to ritual as well as to ethics, as might naturally be expected.  But the moral element is conspicuous, the reverence is conspicuous:  we have here no mere ghost, propitiated by food or sacrifice, or by purely magical rites.  His very image (modelled on a large scale in earth) is no vulgar idol:  to make such a thing, except on the rare sacred occasions, is a capital offence.  Meanwhile the mythology of the God has often, in or out of the rites, nothing rational about it.

On the whole it is evident that Mr. Herbert Spencer, for example, underrates the nature of Australian religion.  He cites a case of addressing the ghost of a man recently dead, which is asked not to bring sickness, ‘or make loud noises in the night,’ and says:  ’Here we may recognise the essential elements of a cult.’  But Mr. Spencer does not allude to the much more essentially religious elements which he might have found in the very authority whom he cites, Mr. Brough Smyth.[19] This appears, as far as my scrutiny goes, to be Mr. Spencer’s solitary reference to Australia in the work on ‘Ecclesiastical Institutions.’  Yet the facts which he and Mr. Huxley ignore throw a light very different from theirs on what they consider ‘the simplest condition of theology.’

Among the causes of confusion in thought upon religion, Mr. Tylor mentions ’the partial and one-sided application of the historical method of inquiry into theological doctrines.’[20] Here, perhaps, we have examples.  In its highest aspect that ‘simplest theology’ of Australia is free from the faults of popular theology in Greece.  The God discourages sin, though, in myth, he is far from impeccable.