Next day the bad namarudu went out hunting by himself. He left the boy in the cave with the others. As soon as he had gone, the good namarudu came along. 'Open the door for me!' he called. 'I want to come in.'They opened the door of the cave for him, and at once he ran in and picked up the child. He took him quickly home to his parents' place. As they came near the camp, the good namarudu called out to let them know who he was. 'Listen to me, you who live down there on the ground!' he cried. 'I've brought back this little boy who was stolen from you! And so later on you listen to us, my brother and me, when we fight together.'The child's father and mother were very happy. 'Oh,' they said, 'how kind you are to bring him back to us! Oh, we do like you!'
In a brief afterword, the translator explains what a namarudu is.
Namarudu spirits are really meteors, or falling stars, or thunder-and-lightning spirits, although they may take other shapes. They dance about a person's spirit after death, and the sound they make is like thunder. They are not always hostile, but people are apt to be afraid of them because of their strange lights and noise. They live among the rocks and travel about the sky, but in many ways they behave just like human beings do.
I was a bit surprised to run into the "open the door" motif in the oral traditions of hunter-gatherers. I had wrongly supposed that doors would not really be part of their world.
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| Namarudu illustration by Djoki Yunupingu |
Note added: I believe this is the first time I have ever posted anything about Australian aborigines. Checking Synlogos today, I find that Rev. Matt also posted about Australian aborigines today. The timestamp on my post is 2:18 p.m., and his is 2:48 p.m. -- a difference of exactly half an hour, unless he's in a part of Australia that's in a different time zone from Taiwan.
4 comments:
@Wm
When I commented recently about the odd syncs I had regarding my deceased mission friend, I reread the series of 4 posts on The Magician's Table mentioned in my comment.
https://narrowdesert.blogspot.com/2023/01/another-old-post-is-suddenly-relevant.html?showComment=1674466874016#c1340555691304519805
Temperance, the Hermit, and the hourglass: https://magicianstable.blogspot.com/2022/03/temperance-hermit-and-hourglass.html
What is the “House of God”?: https://magicianstable.blogspot.com/2022/03/what-is-house-of-god.html
Lightning from the Sun?: https://magicianstable.blogspot.com/2022/03/lightning-from-sun.html
Lightning and falling rocks: https://magicianstable.blogspot.com/2022/03/lightning-and-falling-rocks.html.
So they were fresh in my mind when I read this post. Berndt's description of namarudu above syncs STRONGLY with baetyls AKA "thunder stones" or "lightning stones" as discussed in "What is the “House of God”?".
Of course the "Lightning from the Sun?" and "Lightning and falling rocks" posts follow from that one and likewise are chock with namarudu syncs.
The illustration above of a namarudu even bears a resemblance to early versions of the Tower, what with the person, the tree(s), and the falling stone/lightning bolt entity. My comment on "Lightning and falling rocks" also connected Joseph Smith's 27 Nov 1832 letter to William Phelps (D&C 85): "...while that man, who was called of God and appointed, that putteth forth his hand to steady the ark of God, shall fall by the shaft of death, like as a tree that is smitten by the vivid shaft of lightning."
That D&C 85 comment of mine also pointed out connections to the Hermit, which was analyzed in "Temperance, the Hermit, and the hourglass". I had some persistent syncs to that card on Sunday night, which I recorded that night.
"Tonight I was reading stories ... out of Walt Disney's Classic Storybook. One of them was Peter Pan. One image shows Tinker Bell trapped in a lantern, and it called to mind the lantern of the Rider-Waite Hermit, the IXth Trump. Thinking of William's focus on the hexagram in the lantern and its relationship to the hourglass that at some point was replaced by the lantern, I recalled that the animated Tinker Bell's design is known for its "hourglass figure."
Image: https://imgur.com/a/xzC4ySb
"Two pages later, Tinker Bell is shown escaping the knocked-over lantern, next to which an actual hourglass is visible on the table!
Image: https://imgur.com/a/78Jc5MX
"A few minutes later I came out to the living room and a cityscape screen saver was on the TV with occasional billboards suggesting actual programs available to watch. When I glanced at the screen a billboard was promoting the Johnny Depp film Finding Neverland, which is about James Barrie, the author of Peter Pan.
"The design of the hourglass looks like an invalid Roman numeral IXI. Hermit is IX trump. XI trump is Justice, about which I know very little [despite flipping through The Pictorial Key to the Tarot and reading what I could that night]."
One more thing this post brought up: Randy Stonehill's 1983 song "Shut De Dó", which I happened to sight read in a choir last week:
Shut the door, keep out the devil.
Shut the door, keep the devil in the night.
Shut the door, keep out the devil.
Light the candle, everything's alright.
I also came across this page about bark paintings of a lightning spirit named Namarrkon by Kunwinjku artists. They are from roughly the same area Catherine Berndt's stories came from, and the name is close enough, that this Namarrkon may be cognate to namarudu.
https://www.aboriginal-bark-paintings.com/namarrkon-2/
@BP
Some very interesting syncs.
David Talbott would definitely have something to say about the shape of those Namarrkon pictures.
Re Tinker Bell, see here:
https://narrowdesert.blogspot.com/2021/04/tintin-st-george-and-uh-lots-of-other.html
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