The Whirlwind

Three things sit in the record, and they have never been set in one line. First, the bull-roarer is a real, widespread weather engine — swung to make wind, on the explicit native theory that it raises wind because it sounds like wind. Second, in several parts of the world the small travelling wind-vortex is held to be a spirit, a vehicle for the souls of the unborn and the dead. Third, where a single cosmology holds both beliefs at once, they fuse, and the roarer becomes a soul-engine. This page assembles the wind-making cluster, sets the whirlwind-soul belief beside it, and shows the two joining at two documented places on two continents — with the physical fact, missed by the ethnographers, that a swung roarer genuinely is a miniature whirlwind supplying the reason the join is not arbitrary.

The instrument that makes wind

Begin with the plain function, because it is broad and it is consistent. In the eastern Torres Strait the Meriam of Murray Island swung the bull-roarer they called bigo to raise a wind and, in dead air, to break a calm; on Moa and on Mabuiag the same bigu served the winds and the turtle-hunt. Far to the north, the Ainu of Hokkaido swung theirs to obtain a favourable wind for hunting deer; they called it the rera-suyep — literally the wind-swinger, from rera, wind, and suye, to swing. The name simply is the function.

The densest band runs across the Siberian Arctic. The Mansi of the Ob kept a “wind-calling flying board,” a shaman’s tool spun to summon or turn the wind; the Enets and the Nganasan did likewise, and the Nganasan word carries the meaning in its root — biakhery, from bia, wind. The Nenets named theirs for the noise of wind itself. The belief reaches Europe: on the Norwegian coast the fjord fishermen swung a slat as a charm against the dangerous local winds. And it saturates the American West, where the Arapaho and their Gros Ventre kin, the Northern Paiute, the Ute, and the Eastern Apache all whirled the roarer to breed wind or bring the rain.

What lifts this above a coincidence list is that the peoples tell you why, and the answer is the same. It is not an arbitrary symbol; it is an observation about sound. Loeb reports that the Arapaho held the roarer “to produce wind because it sounded like wind.” Kroeber recorded the neighbouring Gros Ventre calling it nakaantan, “making cold” — the very word they used for a thermometer — and traced the name to “the widespread Indian idea that the bull-roarer breeds wind.” The Ainu name says wind outright; the Nenets name says the noise of wind. This is sympathetic magic in the strict sense — like produces like — but it is built on a real acoustic likeness, not a fancied one. The roarer is not said to be windy the way a red stone is said to be the sun; it genuinely sounds like a rising gale, and everyone who swings it says so.

The strongest signal that this is a single travelling belief, and not a scatter of local inventions, is the prohibition that rides along with it. On three continents children are forbidden to swing the thing, for exactly one reason. Ainu children were kept from lashing spatulas through the air lest they raise a storm. Northern Paiute children were told the roarer would “call the wind”; Eastern Apache parents scolded them because it “brought the wind”; Gros Ventre children were warned off it on the same ground. A shared danger is a stronger fingerprint than a shared use: it is the belief, not merely the object, that has spread. (This is the roarer at its most utilitarian, the weather-charm end of a spectrum whose other end — the roarer that fell all the way to a schoolyard toy — the atlas follows elsewhere.)

A whirlwind in the hand

The native theory — it makes wind because it sounds like wind — is usually filed by outsiders as charming error. It is closer to correct than that. When a modern aeroacoustic analysis took the instrument apart, it found that the roar is radiated by an oscillating, rotating dipole across the slat: the airfoil-shaped board autorotates about its own long axis as it is dragged through the air, and this autorotation locks in like the shedding of vortices from a wing (Roger & Aubert, “Aeroacoustics of the Bullroarer,” 2006). Put plainly, the swung slat is a small rotating aerofoil trailing a helical wake — it stirs and sheds a spinning parcel of air behind it. The mechanism that makes the scream is the same mechanism that makes the wind.

So a people who watch dust-devils spin up off the plain, and then watch a swung slat throw off its own spinning roar, are not making a wild leap. They are doing rough field aerodynamics, and getting it broadly right. The bull-roarer is a portable, controllable whirlwind. That single fact turns the whole cluster from “magical thinking” into “native acoustics” — and it is what makes the next step possible. For if the roarer really is a little whirlwind, then in any culture that already knows what a whirlwind is, the roarer inherits that meaning whole.

It was held to produce wind because it sounded like wind.— Edwin Loeb on the Arapaho bull-roarer, 1929

The whirlwind carries the dead

Set beside the wind-makers a second belief, recorded independently and just as widely: that the small travelling wind-vortex is alive — a spirit, or a body the dead and the unborn ride in.

In Central Australia the whirlwind is a nursery of souls. Spencer and Gillen found that Arunta women feared the willy-willy because “spirit children travel about in them, and that if they should happen to be caught in one the children would enter their bodies” (Northern Tribes of Central Australia, 1904, pp. 631–632). The whirlwind here is a means of conception: it carries the incoming soul and installs it. The same book records a whirlwind totem with its own increase ceremonies, and a myth in which the ancestor Unkura “met with a whirlwind which took him away up into the sky.” Across Aboriginal Australia the willy-willy is a spirit form, and children are warned that something will step out of the spinning dust.

In the Navajo country the whirlwind reads as the dead. The ch'íídii — the ghost-residue a person leaves behind — appears as the dust-devil, and its spin is read like a pulse: turning sunwise it is harmless; turning against the sun it is the dead walking. And in the same cosmology wind is not merely a spirit but the animating principle. Navajo philosophy makes Níłch'i, the Holy Wind, the breath that enters a person at birth and stands within them — the source of life, thought, speech, and motion (McNeley, Holy Wind in Navajo Philosophy, 1981). Wind is the soul; the whirlwind is the wandering dead.

That the wind-making roarer and the whirlwind-soul both cluster in Central Australia, and both cluster again in the American Southwest, is the hinge. In two places the belief that the roarer makes wind and the belief that wind is soul are held by the same people at the same time. In two places, therefore, they meet.

“Made by the whirlwind”

The first meeting is on the western Gulf of Carpentaria. Among the Anula, a young man newly through the knife was handed a bull-roarer, the mura-mura, and told the thing plainly: it had been made, in the first instance, by the whirlwind. It was buried in a hole said to represent one of the mungai spots of the whirlwind; the whole business was “the whirlwind ceremonies.” The women and children, hearing the roar, took it for the voice of a being who swallowed the boy and afterward brought him up again a man.

Now recall what the whirlwind does three hundred pages later in the very same book. Caught by a woman, it puts a spirit-child inside her. So one wind-vortex stands at both ends of a Central Australian life: it ensouls the child at conception, and it manufactures the roarer that opens the rite in which the boy is unmade and remade. Spencer and Gillen felt the pull of this — they wrote that “the relationship between the whirlwind and the bull-roarer used at initiation is very suggestive” — but they left the remark hanging and never carried it back to their own conception passage. Put the two together and the roarer is revealed as a soul-carrying technology, deployed twice in a lifetime: once to bring the soul in, once to bring the man out. (The soul-installation reading of Central Australia — the churinga named as the initiand’s own second body — is the deeper argument this whirlwind belongs inside; here it is only the wind we are following.)

The mimic storm

The second meeting is the one no one seems to have named, and it is the richer of the two. In the Navajo Mountain Chant — a nine-day healing ceremony recorded by the army surgeon Washington Matthews in 1887 — a dancer leads the third-night procession carrying a whizzer, which “he constantly whirled, producing a sound like that of a rain storm.” Matthews calls it making “his mimic storm.” The instrument is the tsin-di'ni', the “groaning stick,” and the chanters say the sacred one may be cut only from “the wood of a pine tree which has been struck by lightning.” A storm-scarred tree, swung to sound like storm.

The rite re-enacts a myth, and the myth turns on a whirlwind. The hero, exhausted and pursued, finds the Wind God at his side:

“And Niltci brought a great dark whirlwind, which roared a moment beside them and then buried its point in the ground and dug a deep hole there; it dug a cavern with four chambers. … Niltci … told the Navajo to descend into the retreat which the whirlwind had formed. He went down and rested secure, while he heard overhead great peals of thunder, the loud rushing of the tempest, and the heavy pattering of enormous hailstones.”

— Washington Matthews, The Mountain Chant (1887), par. 39

The storm dies, and the Wind God calls him back up out of the ground, his enemies scattered. It is a descent into the whirlwind and a return from it — a small death and rebirth inside the wind-vortex, worked not by a swallowing monster but by the wind itself. So within one ceremony three things stand together: a roarer whose whole job is to be the storm-wind; the Wind God Níłch'i, who is also the animating soul of every Navajo, cast as the rescuer; and a going-down-and-coming-back that is the deep grammar of initiation everywhere. The elements are all in Matthews and McNeley; they have simply never been laid side by side. (The Lightning god the travellers reach next in the same journey is “bald, like the Great Serpent” — a serpent standing, as so often, just at the edge of the roarer’s world.)

The whirlwind complex

Lay the strata one on another and a single figure comes clear. There is an instrument-class whose sound is wind, used across continents that never met to make wind, on a native theory that is really rough acoustics — and the acoustics are right, because the swung slat is a rotating aerofoil that sheds a helical vortex, a whirlwind you can carry. There is an independent, equally wide belief that the whirlwind is animate: the willy-willy that ferries spirit-children into women, the dust-devil that is the walking dead. And in the two places where one people holds both at once, the beliefs fuse and the roarer becomes a soul-engine: made by the whirlwind at Anula, and roared as a “mimic storm” inside the Wind God’s whirlwind-cave in the Navajo desert.

The join is not universal — the Siberian, Ainu, and Norwegian roarers are weather-tools and nothing more, and the essay claims no world-law. But the near-misses are everywhere, as if the two halves were always drifting toward each other. The Even roarer sits among instruments “said to mimic the wind … the work of spirits”; the Enets name their wind-whirler in one breath with the bell rung to address the soul of the dead. Wind-tool and soul-tool keep turning up in the same sound-world, one word away from being called the same thing.

The standard treatments keep the two drawers shut. The wind-making function is catalogued in one place; the roarer’s ghost-associations in another; and where a survey holds both, it notes that its sources “don’t specifically connect spirits to wind phenomena.” They do — through the whirlwind, which is at once the shape of the wind and the shape of the soul, and which the roarer, spun on its cord, manufactures out of thin air. What the bull-roarer makes, wherever it is swung, is a wind. What that wind carries depends on who is listening. Sometimes it is only weather. Sometimes it is a storm called down to heal. And sometimes it is a soul, going in or coming out.