Aboriginal Religions Analysis
Aboriginal people believe that the dreaming stories give meaning to life. It is through their dreamings that Aboriginal people experience wholeness and the holiness of all aspects of life. Aboriginals are born into the dreaming and learn through initiation rituals what life means to them. The dreamtime is about the stories of their past and how everything in their lives has been tied together. Traditional aboriginals believe that the sky always existed and the earth was the home of their mythical ancestors; they believe the earth was covered in eternal darkness because the sun and moon were sleeping underneath the earth’s crust with the mythical ancestors. They believe time began when their mythical ancestors awoke
…show more content…
Rules of behaviour, handed down from the spirits, often called their law. A variety of specialists in healing, spiritual harming and rituals include some of the beliefs. Aboriginals believe that it is morally wrong to take more than you need. Instead of believing in one God which they can’t see, aboriginals believe in many gods or deities that are in a recognizable form such as a landscape feature, an image in a rock or plant or animal form
Popular and well known sacred stories are the dreamtime stories, which are the equivalent of the Christian creation story which tells us how aboriginal people believe the universe was created. The dreamtime stories give purpose to life and these stories offer everyday guidance to aboriginal’s belief in many gods which are in the forms of land and animal features.
There are no set sacred symbols in the aboriginal religion, however, these are some of the many symbols that represent the aboriginal
…show more content…
This is of enormous value in the kinship system as it structures people’s relationships, obligations and behaviours towards each other and in future this can help people decide who looks after the children when their parents die.
The main religious rituals for aboriginals include: Rites of passage, rituals celebrating the ancestral spirit-beings, rituals of reconciliation and healing and harming rituals. Burial practices are also major rituals which differ from one aboriginal tribe to another. A well-known burial ritual is when the dead body is wrapped in wood and left to rot, the clan of the dead person dance and sing to help the spirit leave the person so that later it can be reborn. Once the flesh has rotted off the body, a relative will carry some of the bones with them for about a year to show their sorrow.
Harming and healing is one of the religious experiences for aboriginals. The harming is usually performed for the good of the community and punishment of wrongdoers, rather than as an isolated act of malice. Aboriginal spirituality is linked to the belief that the land owns the people, and that the people have to respect the
Aboriginal spirituality is directly linked to dreaming. The dreaming is the term which refers to the past, future and present of Aboriginal spirituality. The dreaming grasps the Aboriginal ideas of creation. It is the foundation on which the Aboriginal religion is built upon. The impacts of dispossession on Aboriginal spiritualties concerning separation from the land, the stolen generation and separation from kinship group is discussed. Departure from the land started with the European settlement. It removed the sense of belonging and sense of spiritual identity. One of the first forms of dispossession even date back to when the first fleet arrived in 1778. The removal of Aboriginal people from their land had a detrimental effect on their spirituality
‘The Dreaming’ is an important part of Aboriginal’s spirituality. It refers to past, present and future, and, like other religions, it explains how the land came to be and connects the Aboriginals to their ancestors. The Dreaming is foundation for Aboriginal culture and features transcendent and immanent world views. The term ‘Transcendent world views’ refers to a person’s belief in a higher dimension and/or a higher power than themselves. There are many examples of transcendent world views in The Dreaming.
To better understand Aboriginals as a Dream Culture I want to give more insight into Aboriginal Australians general culture and their conceptions of “Dream Time.” In his discussion of religion, Mircea Eliade describes a concept of Cosmos vs Chaos (Eliade 1957). In this notion an unordered world is chaotic only until is it transposed during a sacred time: “By occupying it and, above all, by settling in it, man symbolically transforms it into a cosmos though a ritual repetition of the cosmogony” (Eliade 1957:31). In other words until a land is tamed or created it is considered unordered. This can be applied to Aboriginal’s understanding of the world prior to their current presence. Aboriginals believe that in a time before the Dreamings, the land and world was a featureless earth. It was not until the dreamtime, or time of creation: “where there is contact with appearances from both realms of inside the earth itself as from ill-defined upper region” that the earth began to have its composed landscapes (Cowan 1992:26). The Dream Time is not only a period but more of a dimension where ancestral beings moved across the earth and created not only land, but every aspect of the earth including animals, plants, and man. It is important to realize that the ancestors created the natural earth and that is why Aboriginals live a particular lifestyle. Most Aboriginals living in this cosmogony are hunter-gatherer tribes. This aspect of their life can be traced to stem from the idea of
For the Aborigines their spiritually involves everyday objects such as plants and animals which are connected to their ancestors. Their spirituality and beliefs are kept alive by passing on their knowledge through ceremonies and “Dreamtime” stories. The “Dreamtime” stories are how the Aborigines explain the beginning of the Earth and the foundation of their core beliefs. In most of the stories, ancestral spirits came to the Earth and as they moved along they created the plants, animals and even rocks. One the spirits did their job, they morphed into stars, watering holes and other objects. An example of these “Dreamtime” stories is the “Rainbow serpent” which is about a serpent who “pushed out the land to make mountains, she spilled water over the land to make rivers, lakes and billabongs. She also made the sun and fire, and all colours of the rainbow.”
Indigenous spirituality primarily focuses on the sense of connectedness to the land, family, beliefs and traditional culture. Mudrooroo is an Aboriginal writer who explains that spirituality is a “oneness and an interconnectedness with all that lives and breathes, even with all that does not live or breathe.” This sense of oneness with the world is also known as Kanyini, which involves 4 key elements, connection to land, spirituality, beliefs (values) and family (Lai, 2013). A connectedness with land plays a crucial role in Indigenous spirituality. The land is often spoken of and referred to as “Mother Earth”, which all living things “have
Some Aboriginal signs that can be compared to symbols used in Christianity are, smoke, which can be compared to the incense used in Christian ceremonies. Fire, which can be compared to when the holy spirit was sent down to the disciples and when God spoke to Moses through fire. Water, which is a symbol of baptism in Christian society and Blossoms which can be related to the sacraments. Both Aboriginals and Christians believe that God or Gods can still be seen in
Firstly, Indigenous people regard their customary law as inherent; law is derived from their ancestral being (superior being) and not made by men. Aboriginal people oppose the positivism understanding that 'law is what human declare it to be’. Nevertheless, approbate
Spirituality often can be classified to an ultimate or immaterial reality or inner path enabling a person to discover the essence of their being; or the deepest values and meanings by which people live. This can be true for the aboriginal people, whose concept of spirituality is derived from the concept of the Dreaming, where the roots lie in a variety of stories, ceremonies, values and structures. In the beginning many people held on to what ever they could, holding on to their idea of themselves a connection to the families that they left behind. However, in order to wipe away any thought or lingering feelings “many masks, regalia. And ritual artifacts were confiscated and burned as pagan works of the devil- or simply held and later sold for profit.”[7] This was devastating as many lost whatever connection they had to the outside world, their families and their spirituality. While in residential schools “Children were taught that the beliefs of their
A few key beliefs of Aboriginal culture hold that the Earth is eternal, and the beings that created it are still accessible through rituals. These ancestors made the Earth during a period called Dreamtime, and that realm can be visited by humans through altered consciousness or dreams. 8 One Aboriginal man explained it thus: ‘By Dreaming we mean the belief that long ago these creatures started human society, they made all natural things and put them in a special
The Dreaming is the way the Aboriginal understand about the world through the great creative stories. These stories are passed on lore, culture and belief system to the next generations. Aboriginal people believe that the Ancestors Spirits in human form created animals, plants, rocks and other forms of land. Then they changed into trees, starts, water holes and other subjects that are the sacred places of Aboriginal culture. (Australia.gov.au, 2017)
Aboriginals or indigenous Australians are the native people of Australia. Aboriginals were nomadic people who came to Australia about 40,000 – 60,000 years ago from Southeast Asia. Religion is a great part of Aboriginal culture. The essay answers these questions: What do Aboriginals belief? What is a Kinship system? What is Dreaming and Dreamtime? What rituals does Aboriginals have?
Aboriginal culture is based on respect, for the and for their elders. Not showing respect is one of the biggest mistakes non-Aboriginal people do when interacting with Aboriginal culture. Elders bridge the past and the present and provide guidance for the future. They teach important traditions and pass on their skills, knowledge and personal experiences. It is for these reasons that in Indigenous societies elders are treated with respect.
The aboriginal tribes were the first prehistoric religion that we studied; prehistoric religions provided us with insight on how older religions understood the world around them. Their religion is broken down into three separate parts; the first part are the “Creation Beings, many are involved with the creation of people, the landscape, and aspects of the environment, such as the creation of red, yellow or white pigments, so can be called “Creation Figures” or “Creation Beings” (Religion and Ceremony). This first beings are the being that are given credit
In the south-west of Western Australia lay over a dozen tribes of the Noongar people. The aboriginal Noongar tribe is one of the largest Aboriginal cultural blocks in Australia, and their names stems from the meaning of the “original inhabitants of the south-west of Western Australia.” The Noongar people are deeply, spiritually connected to the earth, nature, and their ancestral past through what they call “the dreaming”, or “dreamtime”. For Aboriginals, the Dreamtime is how their cultural knowledge is formed and how they understand the creation of the world, passed down traditionally through oral telling and stories. The Dreamtime is the world of their ancestors and how the spirits were born out of darkness. One of the most well-known deities/spirits and its corresponding origin story is that of the Waugal, or the Rainbow Serpent.
The form and expression of spirituality for the Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islanders People is similar given that both exist within a Dreaming worldview. Both have a profound spiritual connection to the land and environment in which they live with law and spirituality intertwined with the land, the people and creation, and this is the basis upon the view that the land owns the people it is their mother and they have been charged with the responsibility to care for it. The difference in spirituality that exists for the aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander People is within the interpretation of the Dreaming. Aboriginal spirituality is