Their ceremonies are very prolonged: in Messrs.
Spencer and Gillen's experience, rites lasted for four months during a great tribal gathering.

That the Arunta could provide supplies for so prolonged and large an assembly, argues high organisation, or a region well found in natural edible objects.

Yet the region is arid and barren, so the organisation is very high.

For all these reasons, even if we do not regard paternal descent of the totem as a step in progress from maternal descent, the Arunta seem greatly advanced in social conditions.
Yet they are said to lack entirely that belief in a moral and kindly 'All Father,' such as Byamee, which Mrs.Parker describes as potent among the less advanced Euahlayi, and which Mr.Howitt has found among non-coastal tribes of the south-east, with female descent of the totem, but without matrimonial classes--that is, among the most primitive tribes of all.
Here occurs a remarkable difficulty.

Mr.Howitt asserts, with Mr.
Frazer's concurrence, that (in Mr.Frazer's words) 'the same regions in which the germs of religion begin to appear have also made some progress towards a higher form of social and family life.'['The Beginnings of Religion and Totemism among the Australian Aborigines,' Fortnightly Review, September 1905, p.