Kulin Initiation- Aboriginal Australian EventEvent
Description
The ceremonies through which Kulin boys became men. Days of seclusion, singing, and ordeal at sacred grounds where elders revealed the Dreamtime acts of Bunjil and Waang. Initiates received a possum-skin cloak marked with their totem and emerged knowing their obligations to kin, land, and the moiety law Bunjil established.
Mythology & Lore
The Gathering
When Kulin boys were ready to cross into manhood, the peoples of the nation converged at designated sacred grounds. A.W. Howitt and R. Brough Smyth recorded how the ceremonies began: women opened the rites with singing, keeping time by beating on rugs folded in their laps and striking digging sticks against the ground. Then the young men were taken from their families and led into seclusion.
The Making
In the days that followed, elders told the initiates the Dreamtime narratives they had not been permitted to hear: how Bunjil the eagle hawk created the land, the people, and the laws, and how Waang the crow established the other half of the world. Physical ordeals accompanied instruction. In some Kulin groups, an upper front tooth was removed, a permanent mark that the young man had passed through the ceremonies. At the end, the initiate received a possum-skin cloak marked with his totem.
Bunjil made the ceremonies. The Kulin understood them not as human inventions but as part of the Dreamtime itself, the means by which each generation would learn its responsibilities to the land and to kin. To undergo initiation was to take one's place in the world the creator had built.
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