Or the rule that he must not enter a hut, if women were within, would be circumvented by simply removing from the dwelling the three emblems of womanhood, the pounder, the sieve, and the sweeper; whereupon his "face was saved." Now wherefore all this lack of earnestness?
Dr.Rivers thinks that too much ritual was the reason.
I agree; but would venture to add, "too much negative ritual." A religion that is all dodging must produce a sneaking kind of worshipper.
Now let us turn another type of primitive religion that is equally identified with the food-quest, but allied to its positive and active functions, which it seeks to help out.Messrs.Spencer and Gillen have given us a most minute account of certain ceremonies of the Arunta, a people of central Australia.

These ceremonies they have named _Intichiuma_, and the name will probably stick, though there is reason to believe that the native word for them is really something different.
Their purpose is to make the food-animals and food-plants multiply and prosper.

Each animal or plant is attended to by the group that has it for a totem.

(Totemism amongst this very remarkable people has nothing to do either with exogamy or with lineage; but that is a subject into which it is impossible to go here.) The rites vary considerably from totem to totem, but a typical case or two may be cited.
The witchetty-grub men, for instance, want the grubs to multiply, that there may be plenty for their fellows to eat.

So they wend their way along a certain path which tradition declares to have been traversed by the great leader of the witchetty-grubs of the days of long ago.
(These were grubs transformed into men, who became by reincarnation ancestors of the present totemites.) The path brings them to a place in the hills where there is a big stone surrounded by many small stones.
The big stone is the adult animal, the little stones are its eggs.
So first they tap the big stone, chanting an invitation to it to lay eggs.