Each Murngin man and woman has two souls. One is looked upon as fundamental and real, and
is felt to be the true soul, the soul from the heart, while the other is considered a trickster, of
little value, and only in a vague way associated with the 'true man.'. . . .
The first is the birimbir or warro, and the second is the mokoi or shadow soul. The warro is the
totemic well spirit. it can be seen reflected in the water when one looks in it. It comes to one during
good dreams. The waffo, when a man dies, becomes 'all the same as a fish.' It lives with and in the
totemic emblems. . . .
The trickster soul is called shadow soul before death and mokoi when it leaves the body and goes into the jungle and bush country. 'Our old people reckon that the shadow soul is all the same as a bad spirit. It's that thing that makes me bad. My shadow always comes with me. The shadows of other things and creatures [besides man] are not souls but only shadows.' The mokoi soul is supposed to live more or less all over the body. It is a kind of vague duplicate of it. Sometimes one is told that only the head of a man is made into a mokoi at his death and that mokoi has no body. In the pictures drawn of it and the representations made in the dances, the mokoi is always possessed Of a body, but it is distorted and made to appear ugly and unpleasant.
The warro is constantly undergoing change of status. It originates in the totem well, comes to its
human father in a dream under miraculous circumstances where it is directed to its mother's womb,
lodges there, is born in a normal number of months, and then lives in the heart of the new human
organism during the period of the organism's life of the flesh unless it is stolen by a black sorcerer.
After death there is a period of some indecision between the land of the living and the land of the
dead, but it finally returns to the totemic well whence it came. It is in the symbol of the soul and
its relations to the sacred and profane elements in Murngin civilization that we find mirrored the
structure and values of the society. The soul supplies the eternal element to the cultural life of an
individual Murngin. It lifts man from the simple profane animal level and allows him to participate
fully in the sacred eternal values of the civilization that was, is, and will be. It finally and eternally
ties the man whose heart it occupies to his totem, the symbol of all clan unity in Murngin culture,
since the soul at death is one of the prominent elements in the configuration of associated items
found in the clan's totemic water, the water which is the essence of life. Here live the great totemic
ancestors who existed in the time of the Wawilak creator sisters when the Wongar totems walked
the earth, and whose sacred names are used by the profane living only when these living have been
purified by the great rituals, when they are part of the sacred and eternal elements in the culture
when man and his totems participate as one in the totemic rituals. Here, too, in the well, lie the
totemic ancestors who died at the beginning of time, and the more recently dead whose emotional
bonds with the living are still strong. The more recent ancestors who have gone through the long
purifying mortuary ritual which removed au the profane elements of the personality (whose mokoi
spirit has gone into the bush with his other evil comrades) are, in their nature, of such sacredness
that they can be absorbed into the body of the totem itself. And when the totemic essence of the
totem animals is induced into the emblem, they also enter and participate in the spiritual life of the
Murngin during the great rituals and then return to the sacred water hole. After the ritual, the
emblem is buried beneath the mud of the totem well and allowed to rot, and the ancestor spirits and
the totemic spirit return to the subterranean depths. Man goes through exactly the same cycle of
existence as the totemic spirit. The totemic spirit enters into the sacred water hole, goes through
the ordinary water at the top of the well into the subterranean depths, and finally into the totem
water beneath, where the Wongar ancestors live, becoming a part of the sacred configuration. The
soul exactly the same thing.
The soul, the totemic spirit, the Wongar or totemic ancestors, are all expressions of the fundamental sacred essence, the ultimate symbol of which is the totemic well, which is the repository of all the individual items which have been or will be incarnate in man or his religious objects.
