Larrakeah tribe in Australia. "A very good man
called Mangarrah lives in the sky.... He made everything" (blacks
excepted). He never dies.(4) The Melanesian Vui "never were men," were
"something different," and "were NOT ghosts". It is as a Being, not as a
Spirit, that the Kurnai deity Munganngaur (Our Father) is described.(5)
In short, though Europeans often speak of these divine beings of low
savages as "spirits," it does not appear that the natives themselves
advance here the metaphysical idea of spirit. These gods are just
BEINGS, anthropomorphic, or (in myth and fable), very often bestial,
"theriomorphic".(6) It is manifest that a divine being envisaged thus
need not have been evolved out of the theory of spirits or ghosts, and
may even have been prior to the rise of the belief in ghosts.

(1) See Modern Mythology, "Myths of Origin of Death".

(2) Mariner, ii. 127.

(3) White, Ancient History of the Maoris, vol. i. p. 4; other views in
Gill's Myths of the Pacific. I am not committed to Mr. White's opinion.

(4) Journal Anthrop. Inst., Nov., 1894, p. 191.

(5) Ibid., 1886, p. 313.

(6) See Making of Religion, pp. 201-210, for a more copious statement.

Again, these powerful, or omnipotent divine beings are looked on as
guardians of morality, punishers of sin, rewarders of righteousness,
both in this world and in a future life, in places where ghosts, though
believed in, ARE NOT WORSHIPPED, NOR IN RECEIPT OF SACRIFICE, and where,
great grandfathers being forgotten, ancestral ghosts can scarcely swell
into gods. This occurs among Andamanese, Fuegians and Australians,
therefore, among non-ghost-worshipping races, ghosts cannot have
developed into deities who are not even necessarily spirits. These gods,
again, do not receive sacrifice, and thus lack the note of descent from
hungry food-craving ghosts. In Australia, indeed, while ghosts are not
known to receive any offerings, "the recent custom of providing food
for it"--the dead body of a friend--"is derided by the intelligent old
aborigines as 'white fellow's gammon'".(1)

(1) Dawson, Australian Aborigines, p. 51, 1881.

The Australians possess no chiefs like "Vich Ian Vohr or Chingachgook"
whose ghosts might be said to swell into supreme moral deities.
"Headmen" they have, leaders of various degrees of authority, but no
Vich Ian Vohr, no semi-sacred representative of the tribe.(1) Nor are
the ghosts of the Headmen known to receive any particular pos