Barnumbirr- Aboriginal Australian SpiritSpirit"The Morning Star"

Guide to the Living World

Before the Djanggawul sisters set out from Bralgu, the spirit island where Wangarr the Great Creator Spirit dwells, it was Barnumbirr who showed them the way. The Morning Star guided the sisters as they rowed their canoe across the waters, leading them from the spirit realm to the shores of northeastern Arnhem Land, where they made landfall near Yirrkala at a place called Yalangbara. There the Djanggawul brought the Madayin Law to the Dhuwa people, and there the shaping of the human world began.

Once the sisters arrived safely, Barnumbirr did not rest. She flew across the land from east to west, and as she traveled she created a songline that named and brought into being animals, plants, and the features of the landscape. The feathered string that connected her to Bralgu stretched behind her, a luminous rope tethering the Morning Star to the island of the dead, preventing her from rising too far above the horizon. This is why Venus appears at dawn and vanishes as the sun climbs: Barnumbirr is still tethered.

The Morning Star Ceremony

That same feathered string serves the dead. When a person dies, Barnumbirr sends the string down to catch the departing spirit and carry it back to Bralgu. The Morning Star ceremony, a Dhuwa moiety mortuary rite, enacts this passage. It begins at dusk and continues through the night, building toward the climax of Barnumbirr's rising in the pre-dawn sky.

The central ritual object is the morning star pole, a tall staff decorated with feathered strings and sacred designs that replicate Barnumbirr's light stretching across the heavens. Long white feather tassels hang from the pole like the cosmic string itself. The pole is danced through the night, and when Barnumbirr rises trailing her rope of light, the spirits of the recently deceased are released to Wangarr, carried home along the string to Bralgu, back to the place from which all life once came.