318 PROCEEDINGS OF SECTION F. 
ciated with the idea of bringing to life again in a new and better 
form, it may very well have the same significance among the 
Central Australian tribes, among whom at the initiatory rites 
the same pretence is made in a variety of very graphic forms 
by compelling the novices to lie down on a smouldering fire, to 
submit to have burning sticks thrown over them by the women, 
and so forth (h). As applied to the women, it should be ob- 
served that the pretence of burning them takes place just be- 
fore the ceremony which, if my conjecture is right, is intended 
to effect the new birth of the novices. Perhaps it may be 
thought that before the women can assist in this important 
ceremony they must be renovated by being burnt up and 
brought to life in a better form than before. Such notions and 
practices remind us strangely of the classical legends which 
relate how various goddesses sought to render human infants 
immortal by placing them on a fire and burning away all that 
was mortal of them in the flames. Demeter was said to have 
done this to Triptolemus at Eleusis (z), and as her myth seems 
to have been acted at the great Eleusinian mysteries, we may 
conjecture that a pretence of burning the novices and bringing 
them to life again perhaps formed part of the most sacred 
rites of the civilised Greeks as of the savage Australians. 
One point more in the Central Australian ceremony deserves 
our attention, and that is the composition of the Ambilyertkirra 
itself. It is made up of two churinga, or bull-roarers, tied 
together. Now, what is the meaning of the bull-roarer, that 
simple, but mysterious, implement which plays so important a 
part in the sacred rites of so many savage peoples? Perhaps 
the two things which characterise it as a sacred implement 
most generally are, first, its use at the initiation of lads into 
manhood and, second, the profound secrecy in which it is kept 
from the knowledge and the sight of women and children. Now 
when we remember that the great change which takes place at 
puberty both in men and women consists in the newly-acquired 
power of reproducing their kind, and that the initiatory rites 
of savages are apparently intended to celebrate, if not to bring 
about, that change, and to confirm and establish that power, we 
are tempted to conjecture that the bull-roarer may be the imple- 
ment by which the power in question is supposed to be im- 
parted, at least to males. An old black told Mr. Ridley, as a 
great favour, what other blacks had withheld as a mystery 
too sacred to be disclosed to a white man, that dhurumbulum, a 
stick or wand, is exhibited at the initiation ceremonies of the 
Kamilaroi tribes, and that the sight of it ‘‘ inspires the initiated 
(h) Spencer and Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia, p. 347 sqq. 
(i) Homer, Hymn to Demeter, 239 sqq. Similar stories were told of Thetis and Achilles 
(Apollodorus, Bib] TIL 13,6; Avollonius Rhodius, Argonautica, IV. 869 sqq.), and of Isis 
and the infant son of the king of Byblus (Plutarch, Zsis et Osiris, 16). 
