Mircea Eliade Mystery and Spiritual Regeneration in Extra-European Religions

i. Australian Cosmology and Mythology

The mysteries of the Karadjeri—that is to say, their secret initiation ceremonies—
are bound up with cosmogony, as is indeed the entire ritual life
of this people.

In the burari times (“dream times”), when the world was
created and human societies were established in the form that they have
retained down to our time, the rites were also inaugurated; and since then
they have been repeated unchanged, with the utmost care.

As in other
archaic societies, history, in the eyes of the Karadjeri, is reduced to a few
events that took place in mythical Time, in Ulo tempore: to the acts of the
divine beings and the culture heroes.

Men do not believe themselves entitled
to intervene in history, to make a history of their own, an “original” history;
in general, they lay no claim to originality; they repeat the exemplary deeds
that were enacted at the dawn of time.

But since these exemplary deeds were
the work of gods and divine beings, their periodic and implacable repetition
reveals archaic man’s desire to remain within the sacred atmosphere of the
cosmogony. His rejection of originality is actually a rejection of the profane
world, a lack of interest in human history.

Archaic man’s existence consists
ultimately in an eternal repetition of the exemplary models revealed at the
beginning of Time. The purpose of the mysteries, as we shall see in a moment,
is a periodic reactualization of these primordial revelations.

This is what the Karadjeri know. In the “dream times,”2 two brothers
named Bagadjimbiri emerged from the ground in the form of dingoes; they
later became two human giants, so tall that their heads touched the sky.

Before the appearance of the Bagadjimbiri nothing existed—neither trees, nor
animals, nor human beings.

They issued from the ground just before the
dawn of the “first day.”

A few moments later they heard the cry of a little
bird (duru) that always sings at dawn, and they knew that it was dawn.

Before that the Bagadjimbiri knew nothing.

Then the two brothers saw
animals and plants, and gave them names, and from that moment on,
because they had names, the plants and animals began really to exist.

One
of the Bagadjimbiri stopped to urinate; his brother, curious, also stopped
and imitated him.

That is why the Karadjeri stop and take a special position
when they wish to urinate: they imitate the primordial gesture.

Then the Bagadjimbiri headed northward. They saw a star and the moon,
and gave them the names of “star” and “moon.”

They met men and women:
their relations of kinship, their divisions into clans were defective, and the
Bagadjimbiri organized them into the system that is still in force.

These
human beings were imperfect, they had no genital organs: the two Bagadjimbiri
took two kinds of mushroom and so gave them the organs that are
still theirs today.

The brothers stopped and ate a certain kind of raw grain,
but at once they burst out laughing, for they knew that it should not be
eaten in this way; it had to be cooked, and since then men have imitated
them in cooking this grain.

The Bagadjimbiri cast a pirmal (a kind of thick
stick or ritual pole) at an animal and killed it—and human beings have
done so ever since.

A great number of myths relate how the Bagadjimbiri
brothers established all the customs and even all types of behavior.

Finally
they introduced the ceremonies of initiation, for the first time utilizing the
mystery instruments that have become sacred: the stone knife, the bullroarer,
and the pirmal.

But a man, Ngariman, killed the brothers with a
lance.

Their mother Dilga (for other myths relate that they had a mother,
though their gestation was extrauterine), who was not far off, caught the
smell of corpses in the wind.

The milk began to surge from her breasts, fell
to the ground, and flowed like an underground stream toward the place
where the two dead heroes lay; there it sprang up like a torrent, resuscitated
the two brothers, and drowned the murderer.

Later the Bagadjimbiri
turned into water snakes and their spirits rose to heaven and became what
Europeans call the Magellanic Clouds. ~Mircea Eliade, Man and  Transformation, Page 3-4

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