Manufacturing children according to the Nggerikudi
Anje-a originally made by Thunder, is the individual, according to the Pennefather [River] Blacks [Australia], who fashions the piccaninnies out of swamp-mud, and inserts them in the bellies of the women. He is never seen, but can be heard laughing in the depths of the bush, amongst the rocks, down in the lagoons, and along the mangrove swamps; when he is heard, the Blacks say “Anje-a he laugh: he got him piccaninny.” Women do not know when the infants are put inside them-they only feel them subsequently-because they may be placed in position during the day-time, at night, and in the course of a dream. Before actually inserting these mud-babies in the women however, Anje-a makes the boys travel in a round-about way across the bush, their forms being already moulded into shape, whereas he causes the girls to pass over a piece of wood stretched crosswise, at a certain height, over the path he instructs them to travel by: as each girl stretches her legs over the cross-piece, she gets split in the fork and is now completed. For cutting the posterior orifice in both sexes, Anje-a uses a pince of wood from the Acacia Rothii … Sometimes an accident befalls these infants before they get inside their human mothers, e.g., they may catch one of their feet in a log, and so be born with various deformities (club-foot, etc.). When the woman has plenty of room inside, twins are sent.
Thunder, who can also make children out of swamp-mud, manufactures his all left-handed, which can thus be distinguished from Anje-a’s, who are all right-handed. How the vital principle (cbo-i) is obtained, and put into the mud-baby, is explained elsewhere (sect. 68). [83/23]
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[The vital principles] Ngai and Cho-i are not connected with the breath but with the heart and after-birth. This ngai, which the Aboriginals can feel palpitating, talks to them, and tells them when it is hungry or thirsty or wants to rest; it can even talk to them during sleep and thus causes dreams. It has nothing to do with the breath or Wanji (a term also applied to a gust of wind), which leaves the body first. It is only sometime after death that the ngai takes its departure from the corpse, and if a male, passes into his children, both boys and girls, equally. Indeed, not until a person’s father dies, does he or she possess a ngai; if the child dies before its father, it never has one. In the case of a female who might possess one, it passes at her death from sister to sister, and when no more of these relatives are left to receive it, it goes “along mangrove, finish altogether.”
Again, not only does ngai separate from the body after death, but also during fainting-fits (e.g., those produced by collapse, loss of blood, etc.) and other forms of unconsciousness. To cure a fainting-fit, etc., the friends around will start stamping with their feet to get ngai back again, just as they do with similar purpose in the case of a corpse.
On the other hand, from the time when Anje-a puts him or her into the mother’s womb, everybody possesses a cho-i, which occupies the same quarters and has similar subjective sensations as the ngai. It differs, however, from the latter in that a portion of it stays in the after-birth, the remainder leaving the corpse at death to wander about forever in the bush. Freed thus at death from its connection with the body it can be sometimes seen, often heard, and certainly smelt. If interrogated as to the appearance or qualities of a cho-i, the natives will refer to their shadows which, though called by another name, constitute the nearest approach they can get to rendering themselves intelligible.
When the medicine-men go away for a spell in the bush, they are believed to talk to these cho-i, with whose assistance they are supposed to control people’s lives. It should be borne in mind that these wandering cho-i (i.e., those portions of them which were not left in the after-births) are all mischief-makers and evil-doers in that they can make a person sick, or even “cranky.” And though these cho-i usually wander somewhere in the bush, there are certain hollow trees, particular clumps, and others with unusually wide spreading branches, etc., which they are believed more or less specially to haunt. Thus at night, when the leaves are rustling, or the branches crackling, they can be heard.
Furthermore, the presence of a cbo-i can be recognised, day or night, by the nose. During one of my periodic visits to Mapoon, I was afforded a curious illustration of this. A few days after the death of a woman in one of the huts, and after removal of the body, the Rev. N. Hey happened to be dressing with carbolic (in the same apartment) the wounds of a little boy who had suffered some trivial injuries, and in the course of his friendly offices spilt some of the acid on the floor. That same night the occupants were terrorised by the deceased’s cho-i which they knew was present by the smell…
It has been stated that portion of the cho-i which Anje-a originally puts into the baby remains in its after-birth… Now, when the child is born into the world, the grandmother takes the after-birth away, and buries it in the sand, marking the situation by a number of twigs stuck in the ground in more or less of a circle, and tied together at their tops forming a structure resembling in shape a cone. Anje-a comes along, recognises the spot, and taking the cho-i out carries it to one of his haunts where he places it, and where it may remain for years, in a hole in the rocks, in a tree, or in a lagoon. Three or four such haunts are known in the neighbourhood of Mapoon… Now, when Anje-a actually makes the mud-baby, which he inserts in the mother, he puts in it a bit of the cho-i of its father if a boy, but that of its father’s sister if a girl. When he makes the next little brother or sister, he puts another bit in, and so on. And although the parents know whose cho-i their offspring possesses — whether its father’s or its father’s sisters’ — they are as yet ignorant of the particular spot where it has all these years been imprisoned, and whence it was finally released and put in the child’s body by Anje-a.
This information is obtained as follows: when the navel-string is cut by the grandmother (with a kangaroo-tooth, etc.) the different haunts of Anje-a are called out, and the name mentioned at the moment of breaking tells them whence the cho-i was brought. (The navel-string curiously enough has two names here: ailinyi for the portion left on the child, and anombite for that remaining on the after-birth.) The child’s own country, its “home,”’ where it will in the future have the right to hunt and roam, is thus determined, not by the place of actual birth, but by the locality where its cho-i had been held captive — situations which may sometimes be many miles apart… Animals and plants have neither ngai nor cho-i. [68/18]
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ROTH Walter (1903): North Queensland Ethnography. Superstition, Magic, and Medicine. Brisbane
