I happened to read this yesterday in
Land of the Rainbow Snake, a collection of Australian aboriginal stories collected and translated by Catherine Berndt. A boy has been taken captive by a bad namarudu.
Next day the bad namarudu went out hunting by himself. He left the boy in the cave with the others. As soon as he had gone, the good namarudu came along. 'Open the door for me!' he called. 'I want to come in.'
They opened the door of the cave for him, and at once he ran in and picked up the child. He took him quickly home to his parents' place. As they came near the camp, the good namarudu called out to let them know who he was. 'Listen to me, you who live down there on the ground!' he cried. 'I've brought back this little boy who was stolen from you! And so later on you listen to us, my brother and me, when we fight together.'
The child's father and mother were very happy. 'Oh,' they said, 'how kind you are to bring him back to us! Oh, we do like you!'
In a brief afterword, the translator explains what a namarudu is.
Namarudu spirits are really meteors, or falling stars, or thunder-and-lightning spirits, although they may take other shapes. They dance about a person's spirit after death, and the sound they make is like thunder. They are not always hostile, but people are apt to be afraid of them because of their strange lights and noise. They live among the rocks and travel about the sky, but in many ways they behave just like human beings do.
I was a bit surprised to run into the "open the door" motif in the oral traditions of hunter-gatherers. I had wrongly supposed that doors would not really be part of their world.
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| Namarudu illustration by Djoki Yunupingu |
Note added: I believe this is the first time I have ever posted anything about Australian aborigines. Checking Synlogos today, I find that Rev. Matt also posted about Australian aborigines today. The timestamp on my post is 2:18 p.m., and his is 2:48 p.m. -- a difference of exactly half an hour, unless he's in a part of Australia that's in a different time zone from Taiwan.
