Spiritual concept

Spitit conception creates an initial link with the ancestral world which is then stregnthened during a person's life. As people grew older they perform in more and more ceremonies and pass through different stages of initiation. At each stage they will have paintings placed on their bodies, be rubbed by sacred objects, see ceremonial sculptures and have songs sung over them.

All these actions associate them with the ancestral beings and result in the accumulation of spiritual power. By the time they have reached old age they are thought increasingly to resemble the ancestral beings themselves; they have absorbed the substance of the ancestral past and are about to move once again into the dimension of the Dreaming.

On a person's death it is necessary both for their own spiritual survival and for the continuity of the Dreaming for their spiritual power to become once again a part of the ancestral dimension. Part of the objective of mortuary rituals is to ensure that the soul returns to the ancestral past to rejoin those reservoirs of spiritual power whence it came. Once its journey has been completed, it becomes a source of spiritual power and many returns as new conception spirits to initiate the birth of a new generation.

Aboriginal conceptions of the spirit world are complex, as in most human societies. Myths and ritual practices represent ways of grasping at the problems posed by death and in their details are of necessity inprecise. As the Yonlngu artist Dundiwuy Wananmbi said to me: "We will only find out when we die." The apparent contradictions that exist in Aboriginal religion-conflicting theories of spiritual existence and the fate of the soul, how the soul of the dead can have more than one destination, how a person may or may not be a reincarnation of another, and how a person may reflect the identity of multiple Dreamtime ancestors or be the product of what might be the case, attempt to create concrete images of processes that only occur on the edges of the imagination and are never fully part of human experience.

-continue from the book 'Art, Religion, and the Dreaming'