MYTH-701 Lessons

Perspiring Seventh Years strip off woolen cloaks and loosen ties, regardless of school regulations, some going so far as to cast Aguamenti to parch their thirst. In the midst of all this, Professor Wessex’s  sparse decorations go largely missed. An enchanted boomerang is the only notable thing, as it is rather difficult to ignore. It zips back and forth, traveling across the expanse of the classroom, causing students to duck or lose their heads. As it completes its path once more, it is suddenly halted by the Slytherin professor’s iron grip as she enters the doorway to take her place at the desk and begin the lecture, the painted boomerang lain gently down beside her.

Introduction
Today we will be discussing the ancient mythology of Australia which, as the more knowledgeable of you will know, means the stories of the Aborigines. This group inhabited Australia tens of thousands of years before anyone else came to the continent. However, despite being seen as one unified people today, they were not then (and are not now). If you further break down the Aborigines, you will get many smaller groups, or tribes. In the past, these tribes numbered something close to 500. Though that number is not so great today, there are remnants of many - whether in story, spirit, or in the flesh. 

However, despite the Aborigine’s continued existence, there are many roadblocks in the way to dissecting and studying Australian mythology. To talk about them, it is necessary to touch on topics from many of Hogwarts’ other classes. As Sixth Years, students of Ancient Runes learned the area of “Australia and Oceania” largely means just Oceania, at least in terms of the written word. As noted, few, if any symbols have ever been recorded to represent language. More than there simply being no runes or scripts to study, this means that there are no written accounts from any point in Aboriginal life, culture, and development until we reach the last century. And, as History of Magic recounted in Year One, European settlers largely dominated that period. What that brief introduction did not mention was the issue of Australian myth. As their stories had not yet been recorded, some Europeans thought to do so. However, much like Herodotus’ well-meant misrepresentation of the Scythian pantheon, these Europeans inevitably recorded a fair bit of cultural bias woven into the Aboriginal accounts they were documenting. Sadly, it is impossible to know to what degree this occurred, and what we would have found if this influence had not permeated the stories.

Finally, we come to the last course that should inform our background of Aboriginal mythology: Ancient Studies. I am sure those of you who took that class have discussed many points of Aboriginal culture, namely  the “Dreamtime,” or the “dreaming.” Now, Professor Morgan’s instruction on this topic was not incorrect, simply brief. As she mentioned, it was up to Mythology to teach you the nuances and details of this practice which is so interwoven with Aboriginal tales. However, this too was pervaded by European influence. As the course notes, the continent was home to hundreds of different cultures, which implies much more variety than could possibly be reconciled with the existence of a single, unifying concept. In fact, the Dreamtime is quite definitely a concept misunderstood by European settlers, explorers, and researchers. What is more likely is that Europeans were presented with many different accounts, sought a way to make sense of them all, and attempted to generalize them to make their understanding easier. Because of shared themes among many different Aboriginal stories, Europeans dreamed up the idea of a universal “Dreamtime” as something consistent across all of the hundreds of tribes’ histories. Romantic? Yes. Accurate? Not entirely. 

Now, mark me well. That is not to say that the Dreamtime is a European invention. This concept belongs to the Aborigines without a doubt. However, the standardization of this term (and misconception of its unilateral presence in all Aboriginal mythologies) is. However, just as with other areas of European influence, we do not know what predated it. We have only what has been recorded and passed on (and sadly, oral tradition can be irreparably influenced in even one generation of meddling), so we will tell these stories as we know them now. But it is good that you know to take some of these concepts with a grain of salt. Just as Australia is not all sweltering outback and desert sands, like the temperature in this classroom represents, so are the Aborigines not all one unified group. 

Still, briefly, I will describe the Dreamtime, with you keeping in mind that trying to nail down a singular definition is as pointless as trying to count the stars. The Dreamtime can be a place, a time, or a plane of existence that is, all at once, separate from ours and overlapping with ours. Other traditions describe that the Dreamtime “was, is, and will be.” It is all time periods at once, or, if you prefer, time has no meaning there. In other cases, the Dreamtime is used to refer to the period before human creation.

First, There Was Darkness
But enough qualifications and clarifications. On to myth. The first myth, or rather myths, we will be discussing is the creation myth of Australia. However, as you will see, there are many, many versions of it. Likely, at one point, there were even more creation myths than there were tribes. For the purposes of this lesson, however, we will only be examining three. 

Ka-Ro-Ra
All was darkness in the time before time. The dark land was called Il-ba-lint-ja and it had nothing, save an endlessly tall pole coming out of the ground. It stretched from the barren land to the top of the heavens above. At the base of the pole, Ka-ro-ra lay in the thick night, asleep. Though all around him was deep blackness, his dreams were as bright and colorful as the word we know today. He dreamt of all the animals of the land, and as he slept, those creatures began coming out of his navel, mouth, armpits, and nose. Then, dawn rose for the first time and the land was flooded with light. Ka-ro-ra rose from where he had been sleeping, hungry from his long sleep. He grabbed two bandicoots and cooked them in the hot sun. After he had eaten, he realized he was lonely. The sun covered itself with necklaces and disappeared, and so Ka-ro-ra slept again. This night, he dreamed of a bull-roarer, a sacred instrument, which appeared from his armpit. When he awoke again, Ka-ro-ra sang the bull-roarer to life, and it transformed into a boy. The pair went hunting for bandicoots by day and slept by night. Ka-ro-ra dreamed another son into existence every night, and soon there were many of them, far too many to feed off the animals of the earth. Still, they continued hunting until there were no more, and the sons grew desperate. In the darkness of one morning, they saw a shape and attempted to hunt it, but found it was one of their brothers, T-jen-ter-ama. In their attack, they lamed him, and thus the first kangaroo was born.

That evening, Ka-ro-ra’s sons all gathered around him. From where Ka-ro-ra slept, there suddenly came a flood of honey, which covered all the land. The honey swept everything -- the sons and the kangaroos -- away deep underground, until all that was left was Ka-ro-ra once more. When he woke, Ka-ro-ra was standing by the pole all alone. On seeing this, Ka-ro-ra went back to sleep to dream again.

The Rainbow Serpent 
In the old days in the dreamtime, there were only people, and they roamed a flat world. But one day, the rainbow serpent, Goorrialla woke up and went in search of his tribe. On his way there, his movements created the landscape of mountains and hills. The other people followed Goorrialla, and very soon he found his tribe. There was great celebration and dancing, and when night eventually came, he slept in his tent. Two boys came to Goorrrialla looking for a place to sleep and he invited them to sleep in his mouth.1 After, the Goorrialla snuck off for fear that his deed would be discovered. When the tribe awoke the next morning, they were worried and then angry, and went in search of the serpent. They found Goorrialla asleep, and stealthily cut the boys out of his stomach, who had transformed into parakeets and immediately flew far away.

When Goorrialla woke to find what had been done to him, he became enraged. He shook the nearby mountains, and rocks tumbled down and flew towards the people. As they tried to escape, the people turned into birds, trees, and animals to find safety. Eventually, Goorrialla tired of all this and slipped into the sea, leaving people with our brothers, the trees and the animals to look after.

The Coming of Yhi 
In the beginning, the world lay quiet in total darkness. There were neither trees nor grasses. The world was nothing. It was not dead, but it was asleep. Then, the great spirit called Baiame manifested and whispered to the sun goddess, Yhi. Like the rest of the universe, Yhi was asleep. But when she heard the great spirit’s voice, she awoke, and just as she opened her eyes, the darkness was swept aside by her brilliant light. She floated down to the earth, leaping around in jubilation. Wherever her feet touched the ground, trees, shrubs, brushes, and grasses sprang up. Seeing this, the great spirit told the sun goddess to go into the cold, dark, gloomy caves. When she did, her warmth turned the dim forms there into animals, birds, and insects. They happily followed her outside to the trees and grasses. Baiame, the great spirit, told the sun goddess to go to the hills and valleys and into caves on ice-covered mountains. As she did, the ice melted and formed rivers, while the shapes in the waters turned into fish and reptiles. That was how the rivers, seas, and all the water creatures came to be. 

Seeing the world start to come alive, Baiame smiled, saying, “This is good, my world is now alive.” Yhi then told all the creatures she had brought to life that they were in the land of the great spirit, and that it was theirs to enjoy forever. She promised she would send the changing of days and seasons, but could not live with them, and that she would soon leave to go and live in the sky where she belonged, and that when the living died, their spirits would go up and live with her. As soon as she finished saying this, Yhi rose back into the sky, became a ball of light, and sank behind the western hills. The world became dark again, and all the living things were sad and afraid. Many hours passed, then suddenly, birds started twittering. The sun goddess appeared again and filled the place with light on the first morning. All living things then knew that day would always follow night. The river and lake spirits still longed for the sun goddess’ warmth, though, and rose into the sky trying to reach her. She smiled as they dissolved into drops of water and fell back to the earth as rain and dew.

Realizing that all the creatures had been afraid on the first night, Yhi sent the morning star to light the night sky and remind them that she would be returning. However, she felt sorry for the star because she would be lonely, and so made the Moon, called Bahloo, to be her husband, and everyone was happy. 

Discussion
As you can see, these three tales are about as different as they can be. Each story has a different protagonist, explains different phenomena, and treats the creation of humans differently (or not at all). While I will continue to follow the trend of leaving proper myth dissecting up to you, I will take the time here to note one singular unique thing (of many) from each of these tales. 

Firstly, looking at the creation story of the Arrernte people about Ka-Ro-Ra, the thing that piques my interest, and may also stir the curiosity of some of the more observant of you that also took Ancient Studies, is in the title of the myth itself. That is, the name of the first man is what interests me here. As you may have learned from Ancient Studies, names of the deceased were not frequently used by Aborigines. Again, much like the Dreamtime, this is a bit of an overgeneralization, and surely some of the 500 tribes did not wholly abide by this practice, but it certainly is a rarity among these myths, as very few other persons are named apart from gods or mystical creatures. As you will see in our next (and last) myth, if a singular person must be differentiated, they are more commonly given a title by which to refer to them. While the presence of the name Ka-ro-ra does not mean anything particular about the tribes’ history by itself, it is certainly a fact of potential import. 

Next, we come to the story of the rainbow serpent. Later on in the lesson, we will come to a point where we discuss some of the Aborigines’ more popular mythical and magical creatures. The rainbow serpent, also occasionally called the rainbow sea serpent, is one such mythical creature. Like many civilizations before and after them, Aborigines too had stories of great snakes. Seemingly, each tribe had a different name for the creature -- or possibly, the many kinds of similar creatures -- as Goorrialla is by no means a standardized name.² The serpent is also called Wonungar, Tulloun, Borlung, and many, many others. Indeed, it is sometimes male, female, a hermaphrodite, or even genderless. By Merlin, sometimes it is not even really a serpent, instead replaced by or turning into, other animals.³ In this one character alone, we can see the many differences between tribes.

Finally, there is the story of the sun goddess Yhi and the great spirit Baiame, attributed to the Wonnarua tribe. To myself, who has studied a fair amount of Aboriginal mythology, the presence of a goddess is quite interesting. As you can see from the other tales (and as you will see from our final myth), humans of myth do not rely on gods or goddesses to create or cause things. Ka-ro-ra was a man himself who created other people and animals. These humans pre-existed the world serpent and turned themselves into the rest of the flora and fauna of the continent, and this is not unusual to this tribe’s mythology. While this story certainly does not have as many players as those of Greek pantheons, it certainly has more than the typical Aboriginal myth, which may speak to the individual practices of this tribe.

The Rainmaker
Finally, it is time to hear the story of The Rainmaker, the final myth that I have alluded to. This particular myth is attributed to the Narran tribe, though it is important to note that they do not hold the monopoly on “rainmakers.” However, before we go on to speak of this particular rainmaker,  I have talked my throat quite dry as it is, so I will allow you time to read it to yourselves. As the professor speaks, parchments unfurl in front of the students. This time, it is not just words that appear on its surface, though, but also images that move and change. 

Dissecting 
Anyone with a trained eye can see many things of potential interest to the magical scholar. I will break down as many as possible in this short amount of time, starting with the most obvious first: weather magic. 

The control of weather via magic is a quite obvious theme in this story. The Rainmaker possessed a well-known ability to affect the weather (notably to bring rain) in a big way, as well as to change it in very specific areas. He also seems to be able to control the wilder aspects of storms, such as thunder and lightning. We know in the present day that controlling the weather on such a scale is quite difficult. Taking, for example, the Grande Seca or recent history (at least, in comparison), this feat sounds very similar to what was attempted and accomplished in South America in the late 1870s. However, the sheer number of witches and wizards involved in that feat boggles the mind, whereas the Rainmaker caused the majority of the feats described in this story by himself or, at most, with one other person. This potentially leads to a few assumptions: a) the Australian Aborigines, or at least those from this tribe, had shockingly good control over the weather,  b) they may have had a specific profession revolving around manipulating the weather with magic, or c) all of the above. Whatever the case, it was certainly a great feat of magic, even if it did not happen exactly as the tale said. 

Secondly, there is the matter of the Rainmaker’s staff. Our minds will immediately jump to wands, and although it can be agreed that this staff was surely a foci, it may not have been a wand as we think of it. Indeed, it is very possible that the staff included in this story is an Aboriginal rain stick. We know less than we would like about the crafting and exact components of traditional rainsticks, but there is some speculation that there are specific components (woods, cores, gemstones), that made them work better for controlling the weather. Remembering back to the story, this makes the mention of the two large clear stones and the cockatoo feathers very important. While it is difficult to be sure exactly what these stones were, or if these feathers were, in fact, from a cockatoo, it is a promising lead and snippet of information.

There is also the puzzling mention of the Rainmaker pulling charcoal from the young boy’s heads. While scholars are split on this, and there is no way to be sure this long after the story has been passed down, the majority of people think this is a reference to either potion-making or alchemy. In the first camp, theorists point out that the heat and presence of water may have served as a cauldron, and the Rainmaker may have been extracting various fluids or other bits and pieces from the tribe members in order to complete some sort of growth potion to allow for the rapid growth of flora after the rains, or perhaps to cause the rains in the first place. Others believe this is a clear reference to the existence of Aboriginal alchemy in some way, as the theme of purifying a person or for having an unexpected substance appear out of nowhere is found heavily in alchemical manuscripts. Unfortunately, there is not enough detail here to be sure of anything.

There are numerous other avenues to explore as well, and many conclusions that could be reached. For example, there is a clear respect for elders, as the young people are frequently depicted doing what the elders say without hesitation. We notice mentions of ritual initiation and coming of age ceremonies, we hear about fish that appear from nowhere, and the idea that there may be multiple-person rituals that perhaps even Muggles could participate in (as the whole tribe comes into the water and unknowingly participates in the Rainmaker’s ritual). But if I hope to have any more time to discuss creatures with you, I will have to stop there for today.

Things Which Stroll, Soar, and Swim
Stories are not the only thing that have many variations in Aboriginal mythology. Creatures and even gods (or god-like beings) are not immune either, as we saw in the example of the rainbow serpent. While we have little time left together this lesson, I will endeavor to cover a few creatures of interest.

Bunyip
The first, possibly predictably, is the bunyip. Also called by many other names in various tribes, Bunyip is the name that is recognized by most witches and wizards worldwide. It has been widely known in the Australian community, particularly among Aborigines, but has only recently become classified by the British Ministry of Magic, a fact that rankles English magizoologists for the delay. For those curious, it has achieved a rating of XXX: competent wizards should cope. 

The creature’s elusive  nature is owed to the fact that it can easily slip into the billabongs and marshes to which they are native and, effectively, disappear. There is little danger in running afoul of a bunyip, unless a small child encounters one during a dry season with little prey. In these cases, disappearances have been known to occur. It still does not live up to its mythical representation, however, of a terrifying killer. Whether this reputation was an accidental mixup between two creatures or simply a way to frighten children into behaving is unclear. 

Many different tribes have different descriptions of the bunyip (or even different names), ranging from water jaguars to big-headed skeletal creepers, to yellow-eyed dogs. However, most myths accurately portray the creature we call the bunyip today, which closely resembles a shaggy, sharp-toothed seal, and is a magical marsupial.

Garkain
Another real (and currently existing) creature is the garkain. This creature lives in trees and is an excellent climber. Rated XX, the creature poses no real threat -- apart from those who are prickly about their height -- which is at odds with its description in mythology as a bloodsucking killer. While it does like to use its long tongue to lick the sweat from people when they are not looking, the only negative reaction you’ll have is potentially shrinking a millimeter or two. The same is true of water a garkain has recently drank from, as Garkaini saliva has strong shrinking properties. 

Whowie
We will close this brief creature section with a discussion of the whowie. This fear-inspiring creature of myth is a truly enormous, six-legged frog (or lizard, depending on the tradition). It moved ponderously slowly because of its bulk, but was an unstoppable juggernaut that would have taken at least a dozen people to overwhelm it. These creatures are mythically documented as being highly carnivorous, with humans as their prey of choice, typically arriving at a village in the night and silently dropping its jaw and using its tongue to swallow its prey whole. It is unknown exactly what this creature was -- perhaps a misrepresented megafauna or even a relative of dragons -- but the people of Australia are certainly glad not to have another killer creature to contend with.

Closing
That is not only the sound of the clock tolling, but also the sound of the door closing on the intriguing land down under, if not forever, then at least for today. Next time we meet, we will move onto our last geographic topic for the year, focusing on the “Oceania” portion of “Australia and Oceania.” As any of you who have taken Ancient Studies or Ancient Runes know, there is much to be discovered about this area of the world. Indeed, what you have already studied in these classes has only scratched the surface. To keep your brains busy in the meantime, there is an assortment of assignments including a quiz, a comparison essay, and two extra credit assignments. One, a dissection of one of the creation myths, the other an review of the many pantheons we have covered over the years. 

Footnotes:

1. Anyone who’s been around in Mythology for this long can easily predict how well this went for them.
2. This name, Goorrialla, was used by the Lardil tribe.
3. I dearly hope that the grain of salt you were given at the beginning of the lesson has not dissolved. There is also the possibility that European retellings have accidentally influenced these tales (or simply wrongly assumed things), creating associations to the rainbow serpent where indeed there were none.

Original lesson written by Professor Venita Wessex
Myth information partially from these sources: one, two, three
Image credits here, here, here, here, here, and here