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Tjurunga are highly sacred, in fact, they are considered so sacred that only a few are able to see them and likewise it is considered sacrilegious to publish a picture of them. Durkheim suggests that the name "churinga" is normally a noun, but can also be used as an adjective.
The term 'tjurunga' was translated by Carl Strehlow to mean something similar to secret and personal. Tju means "hidden" or "secret", and runga means "that which is personal to me".[2] Kempe argued against this translation and suggested that Tju means "great", "powerful", or "sacred" and that runga did not translate into personal ownership.
Tjuringas are extremely sacred and in their cultural context and in customary law women or uninitiated boys could only see them on penalty of death or blinding by fire stick. According to Aboriginal customary belief if a woman falls pregnant then an Alcheringa spirit has entered her body. It is the Alcheringa that has caused the pregnancy. She will know which Alcheringa impregnated her. She knows which Alcheringa made her pregnant because she knows which of the sacred sites she was near when she fell pregnant.
Sacred tjuringa/churingas have the same designs as found in early the paintings on canvas that were produced in desert communities such as Papunya Tula ‘Art movement’ that had its beginnings in 1971. However tjuringa designs were not painted but incised into flat oval-shaped pieces of wood or stone.
Tjuringas were not, indeed are not ‘art ‘in the sense that the painting were not, and are nor ‘art’. Rather they were sacred spiritual objects. The ownership of sacred tjurunga amongst the Arrernte groups was determined largely by "the conception site" of every individual member of a patrilineal totemic clan. Because these relics are considered sacred, their availability is limited to a small number of people.
During the early 20th century and before, only initiated males were able to see or touch these sacred objects. Women and uninitiated males were not allowed to touch them or see them, except from a far distance. The tjurunga were kept separately from the rest of the clan in a sacred location that was also unavailable to the uninitiated and women.
While some theorists, such as Ted Strehlow – 1908 – 3 October 1978 – have suggested these relics are amongst the very few forms of property which may be owned legitimately by individual persons in Central Australia, Durkheim and Kempe contend that the tjurunga cannot be owned by an individual. For example, Durkheim writes, "As concerns the meaning of the word runga, that seems very doubtful. The ceremonies of the Emu belong to all the members of the Emu clan; all can participate in them; they are not the personal property of any member."
Customary belief is that when a woman gives birth to a child that the child’s tjuringa will be dropped by the Alcheringa spirit. The Alcheringa spirit will drop the tjuringa at the place of the mother’s conception. The mother will tell her elder brother or father at which sacred spot she thinks the spirit entered her body. Father or brother can then return to that sacred site and “find” the child’s tjuringa.
A tjuringa dropped by the Alcheringa spirit is a part of that child and the tjuringa will be placed in a sacred keeping place. The place contains the tjuringa of all the people who have ever been conceived by that Alcheringa. It is a very sacred hidden place where the tjuringa of both the living and deceased are kept.
In Aboriginal customary law, initiation is all to do with gaining knowledge. It isn’t until initiation that an Aboriginal man will ever see his own tjuringa. The initiates tjuringa represents the Alcheringa spirit that resides in the place of his own conception. The individual, the Alcheringa spirit and sacred place are intrinsically linked by the tjuringa.
During the initiation, the initiate will learn the story of the travels of the ancestral being who bought him into existence. These travels are represented by the designs on the sacred tjuringa and are learned through song. The travels of the Alcheringa are often called a dreaming or a 'songline'.
In the acquisition of knowledge the old men would carefully note a young man's conduct. He had to be respectful towards his elders and he had to be attentive to their advice in all things. He would know the value of silence in ceremonial matters and no account of his past experiences could be spoken within the hearing of women and children. His own marriage had to conform to the laws of the group. One day the old men, sitting in a circle, would call him in to sit down in their midst. They would begin to chant. One man told Strehlow:
"Nowadays we make a great concession to the young men in our group. We no longer tear off their finger-nails. The price is too high; we give the tjurunga to them at a much lower cost. Besides, the young men of the present generation are no longer hardy enough to endure such pain”
In many myths the ancestors themselves are said to have used tjuinga and stored them away as their most treasured possessions. Such myths emphasise the life-holding magical properties of these tjuingas. The ancestor regarded his tjuinga as portions of his own being; and is always worried that strangers might come and rob him of the very essence of his life.
Accordingly, legends abound with stories of theft and robbery, and the very fierce vengeance exacted. Tjuringa were thought to have magical properties. They would be rubbed on the body to confer sacredness onto the subject and to do things such as heal wounds. While tjuringa was useful to the individual, the clan's collective fate was also considered to be tied up with the items. After all, it was the totemic image that provided representation for the group on the tjuringa.
The acquisition of sufficient knowledge leading to possession of personal tjurunga was long, difficult and sometimes extremely painful. Practices differed amongst the various groups. Ted Strehlow describes how the men from the Northern, Southern and Western Arrernte groups were put on probation for several years after their last initiations.
The initiate will also learn the ceremony associated with that Alcheringa. Many of these ceremonies involve Aboriginal sand paintings which have the same designs and story as tjuinga.
Using wood or stone, the Aboriginal people used the tjuinga to relate current people to their ancestors and to those mythical beings from 'Dream Time' who were both human and animal. These mythical 'Dream Time beings' shaped the land as they moved across it. They were, so to speak, writing the land, bringing the land into being.
Ovoid green-gray schist stone appears in tjuinga and the ‘incisions’ with red ochre pigment in the incisions. Schist (pronounced /ʃɪst/ SHIST) is a medium-grade metamorphic rock formed from mudstone or shale.[1] It does not take much imagination to begin to respect the technical prowess visible in these objects considering the MATTERrealities that are very much to do with ‘place and placedness’ and the imperative of belonging to places and all that is invested within them along with the impacts upon life and culture. It is always a muse as to whether or not place makes/determines culture or that is culture that determines ‘place’.
Tjuringa, along with the ‘story lines’ are very much to do with ‘place’ and the spirituality invested in places. While being ‘things’ tjuringa are a kind of ‘tie-to-place’ – commonly spoken of as ‘country’ in contemporary understandings of Aboriginal ‘placedness’. In cross cultural contexts in a decolonising world there are slippages at work where the acronym WHMM (Western (White?) Histories Matter Most) is under intensifying critical review.
In Central Desert Aboriginal ‘culture’ every adult male owned his personal tjuringa and they are among the most sacred of objects that embody, and that are invested with, the totemic spirit of its owner as well as those of the creator beings.
Typically, they are decorated with geometric incised designs, motifs that were used to represent many different things — beings, myths, parts of the heavens or the landscape, plants and animals and their tracks. Hence, the meaning of a single tjuringa is impossible to interpret without information from its owner. Imaging this ‘mark making’ as ‘literature’ is gaining currency as ‘cultural realities’ are increasingly interrogated in cross cultural and anthropological contexts.
There is a certain arrogance in regarding such ‘cultural realities’ as exotic and/or ‘other’. Here there is a kind of subliminal ‘cultural ranking’ at work that in the end diminishes ‘the things’ that are absorbed in ‘the living’ and the MATTERrealities that are an integral part of all that.
We can think of writing and the land in other, but related, ways. In The Spell of the Sensuous, David Abram says that the land is filled with “suggestive scrawls and traces, from the sinuous calligraphy of rivers winding across the land, inscribing arroyos and canyons into the parched earth of the desert.” He goes on: “The swooping flight of birds is a kind of cursive script written on the wind. . . . Leaf-miner insects make strange hieroglyphic tabloids of the leaves.” And this: “These letters I print across the page, the scratches and scrawls you now focus upon, trailing off across the white surface, are hardly different from the footprints of prey left in the snow.”
He says that in this movement backward he has been sketchily tracing “from a pencil putting graphite on paper, [mark making] to stylus incising clay, to insect borer lacing patterns into a red maple leaf, to a lost wolf pressing quick prints across a snowy field as he searches for his family — writing is physical and very much in the world.”
Albeit that ‘the computer’ inspires thoughts about impermanence and the sudden loss of written ideas, even incised stone will fade – eventually. The ephemerality of a leaf or a foot print in the sand cannot be more obvious in their ephemerality will be omnipresent in memories and musing. It all goes so very fast and yet it lingers and time takes on another perspective.
‘Cyclons’ are rocks that have certain powers when used in the correct way. They can have both positive and negative effects on people around them. Also, message rocks and ‘sticks’ can, as their name suggests, deliver information to the user and people working with Aboriginal people can personally attest to these mystical powers. Anthropologists and others, who, with the permission of Original Elders, have investigate sacred sites in Australia and they report that people can sense these energies with their bodies.
Amongst the Central Desert Aboriginal people there is no such thing as a belief in natural death. Likewise, this is rather common among the pacific, and for example in the Sepik, nobody is dying from disease, but from attack of a witch/sorcerer, a Sanguma. People are dying from Magic. In ‘ART OF THE FIRST AUSTRALIANS’, Camperdown Australia, 1970, John Carrick relates that, Aboriginal sorcerers were universally feared that they could cause death or injury to a victim by projecting an evil spirit into him with a 'pointing bone'. Bone pointing was practised by many groups. Among the Aranda of central Australia, the bone was cursed and pointed secretly at the victim with chants. Unless some medicine man could remove the evil magic, the boned person would die. Often the dying man will whisper in the ear of a medicine man, a Railtchawa, the name of the man whose magic is killing him. Then, there will be a way to revenge... by the mean of a Kurdaitcha party. The man who is going to play this part is chosen by elders, and wearing shoes made of a thick pad of emu feathers matted together with human blood drawn from the arm of some young men. He will go through very painful and serious initiation, and will kill the victim, without leaving traces... Pointing the bone, revenge by Kurdaitcha party, other kind of magic... Recently a bone has been pointed at the prime minister John Howard, within a different framework, since from a politically correct point of view it was interpretated as: Mr Clark said in the Prime Minister's case the ceremony had two purposes - to lift 'the cloud of misery' occupying his mind or to enlighten him about the future of the country and Aboriginal affairs. (April 2004). Maybe since exceptionally the bone has been pointed by a woman, who was not face to face with the victim, it did not have its full magical power. _•_ LINKS
NB**** http://www.duckdigital.net/FOD/FOD1063.html http://www.duckdigital.net/FOD/FOD1051.html [888] The Flight of Ducks is currently being transferred and updated. Please email simonpockley@gmail.com if you need to make contact. Aboriginal Churinga and aboriginal art meaning.... https://www.aboriginal-bark-paintings.com/aboriginal-art-meaning/ |
Warning:This link leads to culturally sensitive images
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