dead
awaiting rebirth, may be a tree, a rock, or a pool of water; they
clearly correspond to the local totem centres (_oknanikilla_ among the
Arunta, _mungai_ among the Warramunga) of the Central Australian tribes
which I described in former lectures. The natives of the Pennefather
River observe a ceremony at the birth of a child in order to ascertain
the exact spot where its spirit tarried in the interval since its last
incarnation; and when they have discovered it they speak of the child as
obtained from a tree, a rock, or a pool of water, according to the place
from which its spirit is supposed to have passed into its mother.[160]
Readers of the classics can hardly fail to be reminded of the Homeric
phrase to be "born of an oak or a rock,"[161] which seems to point to a
similar belief in the possibility of human souls awaiting reincarnation
in the boughs of an oak-tree or in the cleft of a rock. In the opinion
of the Pennefather natives all disembodied human spirits or _choi_, as
they call them, are mischief-makers and evildoers, for they make people
sick or crazy; but the medicine-men can sometimes control them for good
or evil. They wander about in the bush, but there are certain hollow
trees or clumps of trees with wide-spreading branches, which they most
love to haunt, and they can be heard in the rustling of the leaves or
the crackling of the boughs at night. Anjea himself, who puts babies
into women, is never seen, but you may hear him laughing in the depths
of the forest, among the rocks, in the lagoons, and along the mangrove
swamps; and when you hear his laugh you may be sure that he has got a
baby.[162] If a native happens to hurt himself near a tree, he imagines
that the spirit of some dead person is lurking among the branches, and
he will never cut that tree down lest a worse thing should befall him at
the hands of the vengeful ghost.[163] A curious feature in the beliefs
of these Pennefather natives is that apart from the spirit called
_choi_, which lives in a disembodied state between two incarnations,
every person is supposed to have a spirit of a different sort called
_ngai_, which has its seat in the heart; they feel it beating within
their breast; it talks to them in sleep and so is the cause of dreams.
At death a man's _ngai_ spirit does not go away into the bush to await
reincarnation like his _choi_ spirit; on the contrary, it passes at once
into his children, boys and girls alike; for before their