Themis, a study of the social origins of Greek ... - Warburg Institute

272 Daimon and Hero [ch.
Plato ; to understand this reincarnation we must go back to our
savages.
'The theory of conception as a reincarnation of the dead,'
writes Dr Frazer 1
,
is universally held by all the Central Australian tribes which have been
investigated by Messrs Spencer and Gillen ; every man, woman and child
is supposed by them to be a reembodiment of an ancestral spirit.
Messrs Spencer and Gillen, in the preface to their volume, the
Northern Tribes of Central Australia, themselves write 2 :
Perhaps the most interesting result of our work is the demonstration
of the fact that, in the whole of this wide area, the belief that every living
member of the tribe is the reincarnation of a spirit ancestor is universal.
This belief is just as firmly held by the Urabunna people, who count descent
in the female line, as it is by the Arunta and Warramunga, who count
descent in the male line.
And again 3 :
The natives one and all in these tribes believe that the child is the direct
result of the entrance into the mother of an ancestral spirit individual.
How the Central Australian came to believe in reincarnation
we cannot certainly say, but it is not hard to imagine how such a
faith might arise. New young emus, new young kangaroos are
born ; the savage has no notion of creation, no theory of pro-
creation ; he sees the young kangaroo come from the body of its
mother, the emu from the emu's egg', the old kangaroos, the old
emus, are born back again, there has been a 7ra\iy