( Background source: Wikipedia ) (Illustrations: Eddie Yip, Pinterest)
Luz turns to the tribe’s shaman, Yoka Sutu, trying to find out more about the precious and enchanting iris stone. During a ritual Venga session, Yoka puts Luz in a trance, and summons up a wizened Aboriginal ancestor to answer Luz’s pointed question: does the nearby Erebus volcano harbor more of the iris stone? Yoka urges caution, but Luz is already plotting a risky exploration up the mountain with her newfound geologist friend Keltyn Sparrowhawk.
Luz turns to the tribe’s shaman, Yoka Sutu, trying to find out more about the precious and enchanting iris stone. During a ritual Venga session, Yoka puts Luz in a trance, and summons up a wizened Aboriginal ancestor to answer Luz’s pointed question: does the nearby Erebus volcano harbor more of the iris stone? Yoka urges caution, but Luz is already plotting a risky exploration up the mountain with her newfound geologist friend Keltyn Sparrowhawk.
In the chapter described above, I wanted to give the reader a flavor of how the Venga ceremony mirrors the Aboriginal construct of The Dreaming, and how a belief system sways a non-literate society like the Onwei.
The Dreaming provides rules for living, a moral code, and how to interact with the natural environment, i.e. it outlines patterns of life for the Aboriginal people. It embraces past, present and future, and includes the relationship between people, plants, animals and the physical features of the land, the knowledge of how these relationships came to be, what they mean and how they need to be maintained in daily life and in ceremony.
In the Dreaming, an individual’s entire ancestry exists as one, culminating in the idea that all worldly knowledge is accumulated through one’s ancestors. Many Aboriginal Australians also refer to the world-creation time as Dreamtime. Creation is believed to be the work of culture heroes who travelled across a formless land, creating sacred sites and significant places of interest. The dreaming and travelling trails of these heroic spirit beings are called songlines. They contain geographical, mythological, and ancestral information, stories about the creation of the land and the lessons embedded in it.
In the accompanying photograph of stars above Uluru Rock in central Australia, the Milky Way can be seen as a river connected to the dwelling of a Creator Deity.