ote: These dramatic ceremonies were probably at first magical
rites intended to supply the people with food and other necessaries.]

What are we to think of the intention of these little dramas which the
Central Australian aborigines regard as sacred and to the performance of
which they devote so much time and labour? At first sight they are
simply commemorative services, designed to represent the ancestors as
they lived and moved in the far-past times, to recall their adventures,
of which legend has preserved the memory, and to set them dramatically
before the eyes of their living descendants. So far, therefore, the
dramas might be described as purely historical in intention, if not in
reality. But there are reasons for thinking that in all cases a deeper
meaning underlies, or formerly underlay, the performance of all these
apparently simple historical plays; in fact, we may suspect that
originally they were all magical ceremonies observed for the practical
purpose of supplying the people with food, water, sunshine, and
everything else of which they stand in need. This conclusion is
suggested first of all by the practice of the Arunta and other Central
Australian tribes, who observe very similar ceremonies with the avowed
intention of thereby multiplying the totemic animals and plants in order
that they may be eaten by the tribe, though not by the particular clan
which has these animals or plants for its totem. It is true that the
Arunta distinguish these magical ceremonies for the multiplication of
the totems from what we may call the more purely commemorative or
historical performances, and they have a special name for the former,
namely _intichiuma_, which they do not bestow on the latter. Yet these
_intichiuma_ or magical ceremonies resemble the commemorative ceremonies
so closely that it is difficult to suppose they can always have been
wholly distinct. For example, in the magical ceremonies for the
multiplication of witchetty grubs the performers pretend to be the
insects emerging from their chrysalis cases,[156] just as the actors do
in the similar commemorative ceremony which I have described; and again
in a magical ceremony for the multiplication of emus the performers wear
head-dresses to represent the long neck and small head of the bird, and
they mimic its gait,[157] exactly as the actors do in the commemorative
ceremony. It seems reasonable, therefore, to conjecture that the
ceremonies which now are, or see