There is following something I wrote for a North American based yahoo user group, which focusses on applying theology to science and integrating theology with astrology:
I have been writing recently about why it is that Australian Aboriginal culture sustains an overt teaching for the external self expression, about the human types and archetypes, in which we can learn to know ourself by following the right story.
Most cultures, and indeed most mainstream religious contexts, keep the knowledge of which archetype is each individuals real story, a secret. I is a secret which each individual needs to find for themself so as to validate it.
What does not happen in Aboriginal culture, is for any person to be told exactly which story is their own real perfect archetype. Yet each person is given a name at birth which correlates their whole living situation into the set of sisters or brothers whom also all have the same name, and whom ideally, if every marriage has been made perfectly according to kinship rules and laws, will be the all the same archetype.
Sometimes it happens that a person just naturally notices very young what their own story is. In other instances people live their whole life according only to that story which is being socially provided them, if they are not born adjusted into the right archetype because of their parents marriage variety. Aboriginal culture is much more restrictive than most cultures in respect of what forms of marriage are enabled. Either it is perfect, or to a person whose archetype belongs to a grandparent’s generation. There is no intermarriage of persons of the same archetype ever allowed, and any instances of such are ostracised from culture altogether. In remote hunter gatherer cultures, that ostracism basically amounts to the individuals concerned being left to die in one another’s company. Also, in some tribes, but not all, marriage between a son-in-law and mother-in-law, or between the archetypes in which that relationship ideally occurs, is also forbidden and carries a death penalty. Sort of like a mercy killing, but that is among the communities who rely on the desert environment, while where there is more water, that form of social relationship is recognised, but always recognised as rape. The severity of social sanctions for marital relations and all intimate relations, is the necessary accompaniment to enabling that even children are able to form open mental associations with the stories of ancestors (like cult and/or lodge stories) in which their own life is taking shape.
There is one other aspect of our indigenous culture which enables this. It is that all our lodges, or patrilineal clans, as well as the matrilineal kinship name given at birth which is more akin to a cult identification, have animal totems, and in the ancestral and religious traditions, it is believed that even the most honourable figures and holiest men, manifested a transformation into an animal form. The basic belief is that if even one person in any community, enacts even one criminal behaviour, then that act effects the possibilities of the future for every other person in that community, and so every person accepts some small portion of the culpability, equitable with the extent to which they could not help but notice the consequences of crime.
What eventually socially manifests is a conscious conviction of belief that every one among us is wrong to be letting any criminal get away with crime. There is no viable method of sustaining a healthy culture without causing it to be isolated fully from every other culture, which is perhaps why Australia is as it is, in that our culture was socially isolated from the rest of the planet for many thousands of years, even giving rise to a whole array of new species. The arising of marsipials and eucalypts is believed to have been caused by the fact of the best and most innocent Souls coming to rest within the form of flora and fauna. In fact, our native flora and fauna is unique in its capacity to live in extremely arid regions, and particularly with a high level of salt in the subterranean water table. Also the eucalyptus family is very neatly discriminatory as to which plant typically corresponds to which archetype of human association.
This week, on Wednesday at 8.55 am Australian eastern standard time, the new Labor Prime Minister is going to be making an apology for the past government policies existing between 1901 and 1967, in which all children known to be of the Aboriginal race were made wards of the state.
It is about time. Many of those whom were removed from their mothers are among the best and brightest of the Australian intelligensia, and many other of the most intelligent among Australians are of mixed racial blood and have grown up in families who feigned having no Aboriginal ancestry in order to protect our children. Notably also the British sent here the best adept of their convicts, yet thus it is that our indigenous culture has predominantly been able to relate to the invading culture through the criminal world, since I can not say the same for the figures of authority whom were also sent to Australia. Perhaps it is fortuatous for the British that they invaded a country in which our Animist belief is so very inculcated into the pattern of detecting and exposing criminality.
In these few days before the new Prime Minister, Kevin Rudd, provides an active statement of apology, in saying sorry, it seems appropriate to be attending also to the fact that the Australian constitution still awards the land the status of having been Terra Nullius in 1788. That legally defines Australian territory as having had no human inhabitants prior to 1788. In 1988 prior ownership of Australian territory was however acknowledged. Does this mean that Aboriginal Australians today are still not being awarded basic human rights? The answer in general is yes, and that also that status is embodied in the nuances of various aspects of contemporary and recently formed legislation.
What the statement of sorry is all about, needs to be regarded as an apology for having branded our Animist faith as tantamount to being unable to provide safety within which children can grown up into a human outlook upon their adulthood.
Our culture is such that we can not really fault anybody for blaming us about our animal identifications, we can merely assert that not every animal identification is caused by criminal behaviour, and so it is overtly wrong to perpetrate the psychological abuse of projecting upon us any imaginative concepts of what sort of behaviour has caused us to identify with the flora and fauna. That we are an honest and hardworking culture, race, and ethnicity, by nature, is proven in the strength of many aspects of today’s modern Australian culture, and the worth of our scientists and our environmentalists, our school teachers and nurses, and our family and social stability patterns generally.
Today I want to say thankyou to every person anywhere whom has joined with any of the prayers around the world which are enabling of this statement of sorry from the Prime Minister of Australia, to all individuals whose lives have been immediately detrimentally effected by Australian Government policies in respect of the removal of Aboriginal children from family safety and integrity.
Within that thanks, I want to add for the American context, a thanks to all those whom have taken up the ropes of finding the way through science to begin to have amassed the scientific data within which using Kinship regulation by name, as a basis for culture, will one day be proven. Particularly in the fields of immuno-genetics and cognative neuorolgy, and in the hope and faith that one day those efforts will be combined, and be able to provide scientific backing for what is essentially a strong surviving cultural embodiment of forgiveness, in which Jesus example is never lost.
Rivaq Copas nungarrayi
