This eagle and a crow created everything, and separated the Murray blacks into their two main divisions, which derive their names from the crow and the eagle. The Melbourne blacks seem to make Pund-jel more anthropomorphic. Men are his figures kneaded of clay, as Aristophanes says in the Birds. Pund-jel made two clay images of men, and danced round them. "He made their hair--one had straight, one curly hair--of bark. He danced round them. He lay on them, and breathed his breath into their mouths, noses and navels, and danced round them. Then they arose full-grown young men." Some blacks seeing a brickmaker at work on a bridge over the Yarra exclaimed, "Like 'em that Pund-jel make 'em Koolin". But other blacks prefer to believe that, as Pindar puts the Phrygian legend, the sun saw men growing like trees.
Bleek, Brief Account of Bushman Mythology, p. 6; Cape Monthly Magazine, July, 1874, pp. 1-13; Kamilaroi and Kurnai, pp. 210, 324.
Kamilaroi and Kurnai, p. 210.
Brough Smyth, Natives of Victoria, vol. i. p. 423.
The first man was formed out of the gum of a wattle-tree, and came out of the knot of a wattle-tree. He then entered into a young woman (though he was the first man) and was born. The Encounter Bay people have another myth, which might have been attributed by Dean Swift to the Yahoos, so foul an origin does it allot to mankind.
Meyer, Aborigines of Encounter Bay. See, later, "Gods of the Lowest Races".
Australian myths of creation are by no means exclusive of a hypothesis of evolution. Thus the Dieyrie, whose notions Mr. Gason has recorded, hold a very mixed view. They aver that "the good spirit" Moora-Moora made a number of small black lizards, liked them, and promised them dominion. He divided their feet into toes and fingers, gave them noses and lips, and set them upright. Down they fell, and Moora-Moora cut off their tails. Then they walked erect and were men. The conclusion of the adventures of one Australian creator is melancholy. He has ceased to dwell among mortals whom he watches and inspires. The Jay possessed many bags full of wind; he opened them, and Pund-jel was carried up by the blast into the heavens. But this event did not occur before Pund-jel had taught men and women the essential arts of life. He had shown the former how to spear kangaroos, he still exists and inspires poets. From the cosmogonic myths of Australia (the character of some of which is in contradiction with the higher religious belief of the people to be later described) we may turn, without reaching a race of much higher civilisation, to the dwellers in the Andaman Islands and their opinions about the origin of things.
Gason's Dieyries, ap. Native Tribes of South Australia, p. 20.
The Andaman Islands, in the Bay of Bengal, are remote from any shores, and are protected from foreign influences by dangerous coral reefs, and by the reputed ferocity and cannibalism of the natives. These are Negritos, and are commonly spoken of as most abject savages. They are not, however, without distinctions of rank; they are clean, modest, moral after marriage, and most strict in the observance of prohibited degrees. Unlike the Australians, they use bows and arrows, but are said to be incapable of striking a light, and, at all events, find the process so difficult that, like the Australians and the farmer in the Odyssey, they are compelled "to hoard the seeds of fire". Their mythology contains explanations of the origin of men and animals, and of their own customs and language.
Odyssey, v. 490.
The Andamanese, long spoken of as "godless," owe much to Mr. Man, an English official, who has made a most careful study of their beliefs. So extraordinary is the contradiction between the relative purity and morality of the RELIGION and the savagery of the myths of the Andamanese, that, in the first edition of this work, I insisted that the "spiritual god" of the faith must have been "borrowed from the same quarter as the stone house" in which he is mythically said to live. But later and wider study, and fresh information from various quarters, have convinced me that the relative purity of Andamanese religion, with its ethical sanction of conduct, may well be, and probably is, a natural unborrowed development. It is easy for MYTH to borrow the notion of a stone house from our recent settlement at Port Blair. But it would not be easy for RELIGION to borrow many new ideas from an alien creed, in a very few years, while the noted ferocity of the islanders towards strangers, and the inaccessibility of their abode, makes earlier borrowing, on a large scale at least, highly improbable.
The Andamanese god, Puluga, is "like fire" but invisible, unborn and immortal, knowing and punishing or rewarding, men's deeds, even "the thoughts of their hearts". But when once mythical fancy plays round him, and stories are told about him, he is credited with a wife who is an eel or a shrimp, just as Zeus made love as an ant or a cuckoo. Puluga was the maker of men; no particular myth as to how he made them is given. They tried to kill him, after the deluge (of which a grotesque myth is told), but he replied that he was "as hard as wood". His legend is in the usual mythical contradiction with the higher elements in his religion.
Journ. Anthrop. Soc., vol. xii. p. 157 et seq.