Tempe Downs churinga ilkinia

Churinga ilkinia; churinga irula (the bullroarer)

Source term: bull-roarer

churinga ilkinia: churinga is an Arrernte term for something sacred or secret, applied both to an object and to the quality it possesses; ilkinia are the sacred designs emblematic of the different totems.

Churinga names a thing and a quality at once: something sacred, something secret. The ilkinia are the design series that belong to a totem, so the name points at the marking as much as at the board. Among the Arrernte such boards were kept out of the camp in an ertnatulunga, a storehouse no woman dared pry into at risk of death. One of them lay beside the only gap through the ranges south of Alice Springs, and rather than walk through it a woman climbed the steep declivities well to one side. Spencer and Gillen wrote down what the roar meant at Tempe Downs, on the Arrernte-Luritja margin: the women believed it the voice of Twanyirika, the spirit who took the boy from them into the bush after the operation and let him return only as an initiated man. Their own word for the whirled board was churinga irula; ilkinia they reserved for the sacred designs.

Particulars

Object

Red-ochred wooden board of the Kangaroo totem, 44 × 7 cm, terminally perforated and etched on both faces.

Function

Sounded at circumcision as the voice of the spirit Twanyirika; kept between rites in the sacred storehouse.