Chapter 1 ‘Something that has no Origin’: The Numinous in Aboriginal Australia

In: Numinous Fields: Perceiving the Sacred in Nature, Landscape, and Art
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Philip Jones
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Abstract

If the numinous can be regarded as the core of religious practice, perhaps we should turn our attention to the one world culture which, for most of the past 250 years, exemplified a ‘people without religion’. That judgement was founded on an assumption that Australian Aborigines had no concept of a ‘Higher Being’, accepted in earlier centuries as the locus of religious belief. From the late 19th century though, this assumption was challenged as ethnographers, missionaries, and other observers began to understand the implication of Aboriginal ritual performance. Pioneer anthropologists W.B. Spencer and F.J. Gillen were the first to understand that Aboriginal performers used ritual chant, choreography and sacred paraphernalia to merge their identities with their totemic ancestors—indeed, to enter that totemic landscape and assume its numinous power and resonance. Rather than an end in itself, the numinous was a means, for both performers and onlookers, to ‘pass through the mirror’ to the Dreaming itself.

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