Dreamtime- Aboriginal Australian ConceptConcept"Time of Creation"

The Ancestors Rise

Before the creation, the world lay flat and dark. No rivers, no mountains, no living things. Then the ancestral beings stirred beneath the surface.

In Arrernte tradition, Karora lay sleeping underground at the sacred site of Ilbalintja. Bandicoots burst from his navel and armpits. He woke, seized one, and cooked it in the heat of the first sunrise. His sons emerged from the ground around him, one after another, born from the earth as he had been.

Where the Rainbow Serpent traveled, the flat ground split open into river valleys and gorges. Where Bunjil the Eagle rested, mountains rose. Each ancestor carved the land by moving through it, and every feature of the Australian continent records a specific journey by a specific being.

The Songlines

The paths the ancestors traveled became songlines: routes crossing the continent, each recording a creation journey as a song cycle. Each verse describes a landmark the ancestor created. Sung in order, the verses are a map. A knowledgeable person can navigate hundreds of kilometers by melody alone.

A single songline passes through the territories of dozens of language groups. Where it crosses a linguistic boundary, the words change but the melody holds. Each group maintains its portion of the song, so the full narrative exists only in the collective knowledge of every people along the track. No one person knows the whole of any line.

The Ancestors Become the Land

When the ancestral beings completed their journeys, they did not leave. Each transformed into a permanent feature of the world. The Wanjina lay down in rock shelters in the Kimberley and became the great painted faces that still stare from the stone, wide-eyed and mouthless. The Kungkarangkalpa, seven sisters fleeing a pursuer across the desert, climbed into the sky and became the Pleiades.

The sacred sites where these transformations occurred are not memorials. A waterhole is the ancestor, still present in transformed form. The Wanjina paintings are repainted in ceremony to renew their rain-bringing power, because the spirit in the rock is still alive.

The First Death

Purukupali of the Tiwi Islands had an infant son, Jinani. His wife Bima was supposed to watch the child, but she left him sleeping in the shade to meet her lover, Japara the Moon Man. The shade moved. The sun found Jinani. He died.

Purukupali took the body in his arms and declared that because his son had died, all living things must die. Japara offered to restore the child if Purukupali would give him the body for three days. Purukupali refused. He fought Japara, scarring his face (the marks are still visible on the moon), then walked backward into the sea holding his dead son. The water closed over them both.

Death became permanent. Japara the Moon still dies and returns each month, but for every other living thing, Purukupali's decree holds. The Pukumani funeral ceremonies of the Tiwi people trace their origin to this first death.

Spirit Children

Across the continent, human birth requires the Dreamtime's intervention. Spirit children dwell at sacred sites and in waterholes, placed there by ancestral beings. When a child is to be born, a spirit child enters the mother near a sacred site, or the father encounters it in a dream.

In Arrernte country, women visit the Erathipa stone to receive the spirit that will animate their child. The ancestral being Nogomain distributed the first spirit children by throwing them into the waters. Every person carries a connection to a specific sacred site and a specific dreaming track. Each new life comes from the Dreamtime and returns to it at death.

The Living Dreaming

The Dreamtime did not end. It is always happening. Every ceremony performed, every sacred site visited, is an entry into the creation, not a memory of it.

Through ritual song and dance, participants enter the Dreaming and repeat the acts of the ancestors. The bullroarer's deep pulsing roar is the voice of the ancestral beings. The Wanjina repainting ceremonies renew the spirits in the rock shelter walls; when the paintings are refreshed, the rain returns.

When a person dies, their spirit travels back to the sacred site from which it came. In Yolngu tradition, the Morning Star Barnumbirr guides the dead along the path she first traveled during the creation. The spirit returns to its source, ready to be sent out again as a spirit child. The cycle has no beginning and no end.