Mother Right

Méte's splinter

Gunnar Landtman, a Finnish ethnographer, took down Méte's story at Mawata on the coast of the Fly River delta, in what is now Papua New Guinea, around 1910. The teller, Namai, told it in the Pidgin English of the Torres Strait, and Landtman kept his words:

An old Bóigu woman named Méte was once cutting up an ofóro tree into firewood. Suddenly a large splinter whirled up into the air with a whizzing sound, “Bigu-bigu-bigu,” and fell down close to the woman, one end sticking into the ground. The woman picked it up and on her return home said to her husband, “That thing here, I been hit him along firewood. That piece he been fly, he make noise all same drum, ‘Buuu-bigu-bigu-bigu’. He come down, close up hit me.” “You keep him,” the man said … At sunset the woman was made “lazy”, and soon she fell into a heavy sleep. The splinter of wood came to her and said, “Mother, that me, that my name bóigu (or bígu, for it called out its own name when whirling round). … That time you plant him umamu (yam), you spit him out medicine along garden. … That me make altogether garden move, make him grow. … You learn (teach) him people, you stow away along (from) woman, by-and-by no more kaikai.”

In the morning … The woman told her husband her dream, and they prepared the bull-roarer as she had been taught, and attached a string to it. The woman swung it round first, and it produced such a sound that the man nearly ran away in terror. Next he swung the bull-roarer, and the ground moved, and the noise resounded like thunder from one end of the island to the other.

Landtman, The Folk-Tales of the Kiwai Papuans (1917), tale 261, p. 316

The husband called the men together and sent the women and children away. He passed on the splinter's law: “What thing I show you fellow, no good you show woman, no good you show boy … that belong me altogether man.” When the women heard the roar in the bush they asked each other what it was, and said they were frightened. Méte knew what it was. “Oh, man belong me he make him people savy now,” she thought, but she too “pretended to be frightened” (p. 317).

In a second version, from Budji up the coast, the woman finds the splinter in the same way, and the one who comes to her in the dream and teaches her to swing it, to “wake him up ground” before the yams are planted, is Mäigidübu, the snake-man.

Méte's story has three beats. The women had the roarer first. The men took it. The women are kept from it now, and play along. Versions of these beats are told about the bullroarer, the sacred flutes and trumpets and the men's masks in New Guinea, Australia, South America and West Africa.

One story, many costumes

Yuri Berezkin's world catalogue of folklore motifs files these tales under F38, “women and secret knowledge.” Those tales, with the stories told of the atlas's own bullroarers, are plotted below for 116 peoples. Each colour is a version of the story, defined by how the instrument first came into the women's hands and how it left them. The plain theft is told wherever the story is. The more particular versions keep to their own regions: the firewood chip to the Melanesian arc, the roarer torn from a woman's body to the Trans-Fly, the flutes hidden inside the women to the Vaupés. The same catalogue holds tales that women once ruled with no instrument at all. They are the faint grey dots, scattered over every continent, and they never gather into regional versions; the instrument tales do. Symbols with a heavy rim are the atlas’s own bullroarers. The two boxes are enlarged beneath the main map: New Guinea with northern Australia, and northern South America.

Found in the firewood

Méte's splinter is the first of a long run. From the Fly delta east along the coast of New Guinea and out through the islands to Bougainville, the bullroarer is found by a woman cutting wood. What changes as the story moves east is what she pays for it. On the map it is the red run along the coast and out through the islands in box A.

On the Huon Gulf, on the northeast coast of New Guinea, the roarer is the voice of balum, the monster that swallows the boys at initiation. Here the woman who found it is killed. Among the Kai, in the mountains behind the Huon Gulf, a woman chopping firewood sent a stick whirring through the air; her brother took it, and on her own advice killed her so that she could never tell. Among the Bukaua and Yabim on the coast below them, her husband let the men kill her in return for a new wife. At Busama she bored the chip and strung it herself and frightened the men with it, until the men of the club-house speared her and told the other women an ogre had eaten her. In another Busama telling, one woman refused to believe the roar was a spirit, because she knew it was a chip of wood; she was killed and burned.

Across the strait, at the western end of New Britain, the single death becomes a massacre. Naomi McPherson recorded the Bariai story of Tibuda, the Bullroarer:

One day, women were chopping firewood from a mangrove tree called Taltalnga when a piece of wood flew off making a whirring noise. The surprised women exclaimed, ‘Oh, how wonderful!’ and made it sing again. Later, they took it back to the village and hid it from the men. One day the women prepared a huge feast of taro pudding. They designated one person, called Ola, to send the men from the village so they wouldn't see the Bullroarer. When the women were ready to ‘pull’ the Bullroarer, Ola put on ceremonial finery and sent the men away. While they were gone, Bullroarer entered the village plaza to sing and eat pork and roasted taro with the women. … The old man conspired against the women. He sent lengths of shell-money attached to pieces of women's grass skirts to every men's house. On the prescribed day, all the men's house groups joined against the women. From the oldest grandmother to the littlest girls, they were all killed. The only females spared were infant girls who still suckled. The men captured the Bullroarer and now no woman knows how to make it sing because the memory was killed. Since that time, the Bullroarer has belonged to men and women flee its fearsome presence.

McPherson, “Black and Blue,” in Engendering Violence in Papua New Guinea (2012), p. 52

The infants were spared, McPherson writes, “only because they have no capacity for speech, and hence, no way of knowing. These infants grew up to become wives with no memory of the origin of Bullroarer or the gender war” (p. 53).

At the other end of New Britain the Baining tell that a woman splitting firewood made a bullroarer from a whirring splinter and frightened the men, until a man saw through the trick and killed her. On Buka, at the north end of the Solomons chain, the woman's splinter hummed and her husband made it the voice of the spirit Luahan; the elders killed her and ate her.

On Bougainville, across the narrow passage from Buka, the Kurtachi told Beatrice Blackwood that a woman chopping firewood found the roarer, and the men killed every woman but the very small girls, and kept it.

In the firewood version the woman's discovery is an accident. The instrument chose her. It flew out of the wood, it spoke to her in a dream, it called her Mother, and it taught her the rite. The men's part is to take it, and then to keep the women from knowing that it was ever taken.

Born from a body

West of the Fly, among the Keraki and their Gambadi neighbours of the Trans-Fly in southern New Guinea, the bullroarer does not fly out of a tree. It grows in a woman. Engu carries it inside her, and her husband Tiv'r, mad with curiosity, sends the birds to get it. The little bird Serekute succeeds. F. E. Williams, the government anthropologist of Papua, gives the end of the tale: the “point of the bull-roarer is protruding when Serekute swoops down and snatches it from her vagina,” and her blood flows, “her first menstrual blood,” while Serekute carries the bullroarer to his master (Williams 1936, p. 308). The first bullroarer and the first menstruation come out of the woman together.

East along the Gulf of Papua, among the Elema, Williams heard of a sea monster named Oa Birukapu, killed and cut up on the beach. The women of the west carried his entrails home up the Purari River:

For the western women took the entrails home with them to the Upper Purari, washed them, cut them up, and found inside them the bull-roarer. It was in this way (according to the present myth) that the women first became acquainted with this secret object which they used thenceforward to hoax the men until the latter seized it from them and reversed the position.

Williams, Drama of Orokolo (1940), p. 179

Other Elema tellers gave the women more. Some said the women found the great hevehe masks and the kovave masks in the same entrails. At Orokolo the first bullroarer was made by an old woman, Uravu, who heard two branches of a tree rubbing together in the wind and took the sound for a spirit's voice. “She herself, he says, made the first bull-roarer under the inspiration of the noise; but she also is the bull-roarer, and the bull-roarer is Oro Uravu” (p. 203 n. 2). The masks went the same way. “According to an Iari story the first ataimunu was fished out of the Purari River in one of its upper reaches by a woman named Oie. The women wore the masks until they were stolen from them by a man named Kaiva” (p. 393 n. 1). On the map the Elema stand with the masked women of Tierra del Fuego.

West of the Trans-Fly, across the border in what is now Indonesian Papua, the Marind-anim keep the roarer as the voice of their great cult beings. On the upper Bian River the first ezam was a set of buzzing chips struck from a tree by Ndiwa, and the women held the rite until the men forced their way in and stole it. On the coast, Paul Wirz was told that the men discovered the women's secret dances, and made the roar of Sosom to drive them off for good (van Baal, Dema, 1966, pp. 272, 587).

“We took these things from the women”

South across the Arafura Sea, in northern Australia, the men say it in their own voices. Baldwin Spencer heard the Mungarai story on the Roper River in 1911–12. In the Mungarai country the bullroarers are called kunapippi, and the women and children think their sound is the voice of a spirit:

Not far from a water pool, called Crescent Lagoon, there is a range of hills rising somewhat abruptly from the Roper Plains over which, at one place, the water pours in torrents during the rain season. Here, in the far past times, there arose a woman of the Ngapalieri sub-class and kunapippi totem. She carried a netted string bag and, in this, her kunapippi wrapped up in paper bark. From Miram-mi-idji, where she left many spirit children, she walked underground and came out at a place called Winjerri, where there is a big hill and water hole, close by a cattle station now called Hodgson Downs. Here she left more spirit children and, coming out above ground, walked along, swinging her bull-roarer as she did so.

At Kunjerri she met a number of other kunapippi women who were making corrobborees and joined in with them. A man, named Kumkum, a Ngapalieri man of the fish-hawk totem, who, like all of these old ancestors, was supposed to have arisen “by himself,” came up to them, wearing a forehead band. The women had finished their corrobboree before they discovered that he had been watching them. They at once hid their kunapippi in the ground, wrapped in paper bark. Kumkum, of course, had seen what they were doing, but he asked them what they had hidden. They replied that they had hidden some things belonging to them. Then he came right up into their camp and unearthed the kunapippi, saying, “What have you got here? They are good ones; I will take them.” He did so and went away leaving the women at Kunjerri where, finally, they went into the ground. Since that day no lubra has ever possessed a kunapippi.

Spencer, Native Tribes of the Northern Territory of Australia (1914), pp. 217–18

In northeast Arnhem Land the Yolngu tell two great cycles, and the women own the sacred things in both. The two Djanggawul sisters came over the sea carrying the sun and the rangga, the sacred emblems, in their dilly bags. W. Lloyd Warner, who lived among the Yolngu he called the Murngin in the late 1920s, took down the theft:

Those two Djunkgao sisters hid their dilly bags with ranga string in them inside some bushes. They went out to look for shellfish in the mangrove jungles. Some of these old Wongar yolnos stole their dilly bags with the ranga string. … The men who had stolen the ranga talked to each other. They said, “It is a good thing we took this ranga from those women, because now they can get food for us.” In the old times men used to get food for women and the women sat down on the inside and looked after the rangas.

Warner, A Black Civilization (1937), pp. 339–40

In the second cycle the two Wawilak sisters are swallowed by the great python Yurlunggur, and come back to the men as spirits in a dream to teach them the songs, the dances and the rites. The Yurlunggur trumpet is cut from the ridgepole of the sisters' own house. The sisters charge the men: “You must never forget these things we have told you tonight” (pp. 258–59). Warner saw that the two cycles were one:

In the third and final element of both myths the ritual and mysteries are obtained by the men from the women and the latter admit their subordination: the Wawilak women tell the men how to conduct their rituals and give them up to the men; the Djunkgao lose their totems and therefore their rituals are stolen by the men. These two myths with their essential identity of plot have superficially elaborated their rituals into quite different patterns; fundamentally they are the same.

Warner, A Black Civilization (1937), p. 399

The bullroarer of these rites is the python's voice. “Throughout the Gunabibi ceremony, the sound of the bull roarer is the voice of the snake coming from the men's ground to the women's,” Warner wrote, and when the women in the camp call back, they are the Wawilak sisters crying out to the snake (p. 293). Ronald Berndt, writing on the same Kunapipi cult in 1951, heard the men put the whole matter plainly:

But really we have been stealing what belongs to them (the women), for it is mostly all woman's business; and since it concerns them it belongs to them. Men have nothing to do really, except copulate, it belongs to the women. All that belonging to those Wauwalak, the baby, the blood, the yelling, their dancing, all that concerns the women; but every time we have to trick them. Women can't see what men are doing, although it really is their own business, but we can see their side. This is because all the Dreaming business came out of women—everything; only men take ‘picture’ for that Julunggul. In the beginning we had nothing, because men had been doing nothing; we took these things from the women.

Berndt, Kunapipi (1951), p. 55

Of the Djanggawul the men told Berndt the same: “Then we had nothing: no sacred objects, no sacred ceremonies, the women had everything” (p. 8). The roar the women hear from the bush is Julunggul's: “the deep-throated sound of Julunggul is heard by all in the camp,” and the women cry out “just like those two Wauwalak, for Julunggul is sneaking towards the camp” (p. 40).

Hidden in their bodies

On the other side of the Pacific, along the Vaupés River on the border of Colombia and Brazil, the men's secret is a set of long flutes and trumpets, the Yurupari, which women must never see. They are kept under water in the rivers and brought out at night for the rites. The peoples of the river say that the women had them first.

The Makuna told Kaj Århem that at first the Yurupari belonged to the women, and the men had only small whistles. The men stole the instruments from Romi Kumu, Woman Shaman, and since then they are forbidden to women; when the men play, Romi Kumu is angry and dangerous. One of the women hid a Yurupari in her vagina as the men took them, and since then women menstruate. The Letuama tell that the brothers could not play the flutes and the women could, until the brothers attacked them and took the flutes. One woman hid a flute inside her body, the only flute left to women, and since then women menstruate. The holes of the Letuama flutes are measured from the body of the brothers' aunt.

The Tatuyo tell of a daughter who hid the instruments in her own body and went upriver, held the rites with the women, and made the men do women's work. Her father caught her and, as her punishment, opened her vagina; since then women menstruate and men own the sacred instruments. She is Romi Kumu, and she is now the Pleiades. The Barasana told Torres Laborde that the father of the He instruments was He-Hino, the He Anaconda, their mother was Romi Kumu, and she was the first to play them. In Stephen Hugh-Jones's Barasana telling, when Romi Kumu held the He “the men became like women: they became the cultivators of manioc and they began to menstruate,” until the men took the instruments back (The Palm and the Pleiades, 1979, pp. 126–27). The bleeding goes wherever the instruments go. See also The Palm and the Pleiades.

South of the Amazon, on the upper Xingu in central Brazil, the Kamaiurá tell that the women were the first flute players. The twins Sun and Moon drove them off by whirling the first bullroarers, the parapara, and in the women's flight the men took the flutes. The Mundurucu of the Tapajós, a southern tributary of the Amazon, say that three women netted fish that turned into trumpets, and played them, until the men drove them from the men's house and kept the trumpets for themselves. On the map the Xingu peoples take the teal of the bullroarer that drives the women off, the colour they share with the Sepik, the Eastern Highlands and the Kimberley.

The Dogon woman in the fibres

On the cliffs of Bandiagara in Mali, in West Africa, the men's society of the masks speaks through an iron bullroarer, and women must never see it. At the village of Yougo Dogorou, Michel Leiris was told how the masks and the roarer came to people:

Long ago, he says, the population of Yougo Dogolou numbered thirty men; a woman who was in the bush met a male and a female andumbulu and threw earth at them: they fled into their cave, leaving behind their costume of red fibre, and the bullroarer as well; the woman gave these objects to her husband …

Leiris, “Rhombes dogon et dogon pignari” (1934), p. 10 n. 14 (translated from the French)

The andumbulu are the little people of the first age, who once lived in the caves of the cliff. Marcel Griaule, collecting the same story four years later, tells that two women heard drums and dancing and “the roar of a bullroarer,” drove the andumbulu off, and found what they left behind: skirts, hoods, bracelets, anklets, “an iron bullroarer and the wooden mask.” One of the women put on the fibres: “Having dressed in the fibres, the woman went back to the village; all the men, all the women, all the children fled. Her frightened husband fled” (Griaule, Masques dogons, 1938, pp. 59–60, translated). The masks passed to the men. “Formerly the women came to the square to watch the masks dance,” a Dogon text in Griaule records (p. 67 n. 2). Now the bullroarer's task is “to spread terror among the women and children, to keep them away from the masks' appearances” (p. 254).

The women's lodge in Tierra del Fuego

At the far southern tip of South America, the Selk'nam men of Tierra del Fuego held the Hain, a men's lodge where they painted and masked themselves as spirits and came out to terrify the women. Lucas Bridges, who grew up among them in the 1880s and 1890s, set down what the men said of its beginning:

In the days when all the forest was evergreen, before Kerrhprrh the parakeet painted the autumn leaves red with the colour from his breast, before the giants Kwonyipe and Chashkilchesh wandered through the woods with their heads above the tree-tops; in the days when Krren (the sun) and Kreeh (the moon) walked the earth as man and wife, and many of the great sleeping mountains were human beings: in those far-off days witchcraft was known only by the women of Ona-land. They kept their own particular Lodge, which no man dared approach. The girls, as they neared womanhood, were instructed in the magic arts, learning how to bring sickness and even death to all those who displeased them.

The men lived in abject fear and subjection. Certainly they had bows and arrows with which to supply the camp with meat, yet, they asked, what use were such weapons against witchcraft and sickness? This tyranny of the women grew from bad to worse until it occurred to the men that a dead witch was less dangerous than a live one. They conspired together to kill off all the women; and there ensued a great massacre, from which not one woman escaped in human form.

Even the young girls only just beginning their studies in witchcraft were killed with the rest, so the men now found themselves without wives. For these they must wait until the little girls grew into women. Meanwhile the great question arose: How could men keep the upper hand now they had got it? One day, when these girl children reached maturity, they might band together and regain their old ascendancy. To forestall this, the men inaugurated a secret society of their own and banished for ever the women's Lodge in which so many wicked plots had been hatched against them. No woman was allowed to come near the Hain, under penalty of death.

Bridges, Uttermost Part of the Earth (1948), pp. 412–13

Anne Chapman, who worked with the last Selk'nam who had known the Hain, heard it told with the spirits themselves at the centre. The women had played the spirits first, “the very same spirits with which the women had deceived and terrorized the men when they controlled the Hain.” When the men found out, Sun roared, “Strike down the women!” Of the female sex, “only the innocent little girls and babies remained, ignorant of the perfidy of their mothers and sisters” (p. 70). Moon, Sun's wife, who had led the women, fled, and Sun pursues her still; “every month Moon relives her terrible defeat” (Chapman, Drama and Power in a Hunting Society, 1982).

Across the Beagle Channel, on the islands south of Tierra del Fuego, the Yamana kept the Kina, their own men's lodge of masked spirits. Their elder Masemikens told Martin Gusinde: “We men long ago took the kina away from the women.” The women had acted the spirits to fool the men, until Lém, the sun-man, caught on:

But the men looked out from under their covers and distinctly recognized their women who were painted and masked. … In the general fray all the women who had performed the Kina were turned into animals, into land animals, birds, and marine animals. … Since then the men rule in the Kina hut and no woman may approach unauthorized, much less enter the meeting.

Gusinde, Die Yamana (1937), pp. 1343–45, HRAF English translation

Gusinde noted “the surprisingly complete agreement between the basic ideas of the origin myth and those underlying the secret men's ceremonies of the Selk'nam …, Yamana, and Halakwulup,” the three peoples of the Fuegian archipelago. Wilhelm Koppers heard the Yamana version end as the Selk'nam and Bariai ones do: the men “killed all the women but spared the little girls in order to provide for the survival of the tribe. When the little girls grew to be women, they knew nothing of all these events” (Koppers, p. 45). On the map a small white dot marks the spared girls, and it falls at both ends of the Pacific.

Bachofen's ages of the world

The idea that women once ruled entered European thought from Basel. In 1861 Johann Jakob Bachofen, a jurist and student of Roman law, published Das Mutterrecht, “Mother Right.” Bachofen built his history the way Hegel built his: as a dialectic of world-ages, each born from the conflict of the one before, each keeping something of what it overcomes and carrying humanity a stage higher. His ages were ages of the sexes. First came a time of unregulated promiscuity. Then came mother right, which he named for Demeter, the grain goddess of the mysteries at Eleusis, and which he made the synthesis of what came before it and what would come after:

As the rule of paternity follows the period of mother-right, so a time of unregulated hetaerism precedes it. Demetrian, ordered gynaecocracy thereby takes the middle position, as humanity's point of passage from the lowest stage of existence to the highest. With the first it shares the material-maternal standpoint, with the second the exclusiveness of marriage.

Bachofen, Das Mutterrecht (1861), p. XVIII (translated from the German)

For Bachofen the rule of mothers and the mystery religions were one thing seen from two sides. “Wherever we meet gynaecocracy, the mystery of chthonic religion is joined to it,” he wrote. Mother right and the mystery “are twin siblings, always joined,” and the scholars who thought the mysteries a late decadence of Greek religion had it backwards: “the maternal mystery is the old thing, Hellenism a later stage of religious development” (p. XV). Under Demeter the earthly mother became the goddess's priestess and, “as hierophant, the keeper of her mystery” (p. XIV).

The first great assault on mother right he gave to Dionysus. “Dionysus appears at the head of the great combatants of mother-right,” and his religion brought “a new turn” to the struggle between the old promiscuity and Demeter's ordered rule (pp. XXII–XXIII). Bachofen's Dionysus faces both ways. He is “in the fullest sense of the word the women's god”: women first recognised him, spread his cult and carried it to victory. Yet he is also “the founder of paternity,” the god under whom fatherhood was first raised above the mother. Only with Apollo did the father break free of the woman altogether: “Motherless, his paternity is a spiritual one” (pp. XXIX–XXX). Bachofen marked the turn in the language of the philosophers of history: “A world-age goes down, and a new one rises on its ruins, the Apollonian” (p. XXVII). The Orphic secret doctrine, Bachofen wrote, built on the old female primacy in the mysteries even as it exalted the male principle.

The Greek mysteries of Dionysus kept a bullroarer. Clement of Alexandria, a Christian writing against them about AD 200, tells that the Titans lured the infant Dionysus away with toys and tore him to pieces, and he quotes the Orphic verse that lists the toys: “Top, wheel and jointed dolls, with beauteous fruit / Of gold from the clear-voiced Hesperides.” Then he lists the “worthless symbols” of the rite itself: “the knuckle-bone, the ball, the spinning-top, apples, wheel, mirror, fleece!” (Protrepticus 2.17–18, trans. Butterworth). The word the translator rendered “wheel” is rhombos, the Greek name for the bullroarer. Andrew Lang matched it with the Australian instrument in 1884. The god Bachofen set at the head of the combatants of mother right was lured to his death with a bullroarer, and the bullroarer was among the symbols of his mystery.

A century after Bachofen, anthropologists who had given up his age of mothers kept meeting its stories in the men's houses. Joan Bamberger's essay “The Myth of Matriarchy” (1974) took its evidence from the Fuegian lodges and the sacred trumpets of the Amazon. Deborah Gewertz's collection Myths of Matriarchy Reconsidered (1988) returned to the sacred flutes of New Guinea, which, the myths say, the men took from the women. Looking for the lost rule of women outside Europe, they found it in the men's houses, attached to the men's secret instruments.

What travels together

The myth of matriarchy keeps strange company. In New Guinea, Australia, the Amazon, West Africa and Tierra del Fuego, the story that women once held power is told about the same few things: the bullroarer, the sacred flutes and the masks that men keep hidden and reveal to boys at initiation. Bachofen’s Mother Right, the European theory of a first age of women, was tied from the start to the Greek mysteries, and the mysteries of Dionysus kept a bullroarer too.

The myth is not loose folklore. It belongs to a particular institution: an instrument or a mask that the men hide in a lodge, sound in the bush so that the women take it for a spirit, and reveal to boys at initiation, with death for any woman who sees it. Where that institution is found, the story of the women’s first possession is often told beside it, and the men say it in the plainest words they have. “We stole this from the women,” Warner’s Yolngu tellers said. “We took these things from the women,” Berndt’s said. “We men long ago took the kina away from the women,” Masemikens told Gusinde. Bridges, who knew both the Selk’nam and the Yamana, wrote that “this legend of leadership being wrested from the women, either by force or coercion, is too widely spread throughout the world to be lightly ignored” (p. 166).

Men who keep a secret might reach for the same excuse anywhere. The details say more than that. The chip that flies whirring out of a woman’s firewood is told along one run of coast and islands, from the Fly to Bougainville. The instrument that leaves a woman’s body with her first menstrual blood is told in the Trans-Fly, and the flute hidden inside a woman, with menstruation as the price, on the Vaupés. The massacre that spares only the girls too young to know is told on New Britain and Bougainville, and again in Tierra del Fuego. Stories passed from neighbour to neighbour cluster this way. The atlas follows the instruments themselves in Always From the North and Identical Forms, and the whole bundle of roarer, flute, mask and women-first myth in What Travels When the Bullroarer Doesn’t? Vectors of Mind asks why male initiation rites diffused, and snakecult.net traces the idea of a primordial matriarchy and Bachofen’s mother right through its later readers.

Bachofen came to the same pairing from the other side of the world. He found his age of mothers in Greek myth and law, set it beside the mysteries, and gave its overthrow to Dionysus, whose mystery kept the bullroarer among its symbols. The atlas follows Dionysus, the women who nursed and taught him, and the whirled rhombos in The Women Who Taught the God, one of five essays in The Stolen Voice, which follows the women’s instrument from Arnhem Land and the Sepik to the Amazon and Greece.

Spencer ended the Mungarai story with the line the men of the Roper had given him. The woman of the kunapippi totem had walked the country swinging her bullroarer. Kumkum dug the women’s bullroarers out of the ground where they had hidden them, and took them. “Since that day no lubra has ever possessed a kunapippi.”