As if by Magic, Meet the ‘First Scientists’

Tony Thomas’s recent essay on Indigenous ‘science’ (The Seriously Silly Science of Making Stuff Up) [i]  inspired me to think again about what science actually is all about and how that relates to Aboriginal knowledge.  I thought I would pick up his thread and add some of my own thoughts. Here I am influenced by Professor Sir James George Frazer (author of the ‘Golden Bough’, first published in 1890), who considered, perhaps surprisingly, that modern ‘science’ can be considered an extension of ancient magic and sorcery. Both are attempts to discover and apply the various rules that describe and control nature. This feature, according Frazer, draws a clear distinction that separates both ‘magic’ and ‘science’ from ‘religion.’

In religion, the individual has limited agency.  There is instead the belief in an external agency, an external superior being or beings, and it is only the superior being(s) who have real agency. In magic on the other hand, it is the individual, the sorcerer, who acts and has agency. The magician, the sorcerer, is a just a person who is able to control (or at least claims to be able to control) all manner of natural forces. In a battle between man and evil spirits, the magician believes he has greater power than the spirits and so can vanquish them, or at least nullify their influence. Thus, Frazer asserted, magic is akin to a ‘science.’ Magic is a rule-based system in which, if the magician carries out the same formula correctly, he will always get the same predictable result. This is quite like the laws of science, mathematical laws, the laws of nature.

In religion, an external superior being is unconstrained by any earthly rules, is able to act contrary to any science-based law, any mathematical law, or any natural law and, by inference, He (She or It) can also act contrary to any of the rules that govern magic. Thus, magic and religion are contradictory concepts, but they are both equally incompatible in the same way that science and religion are incompatible. Both the sorcerer and the scientist live within a rule-based system separate from religion, and it is the knowledge of the rules, and the ability to use them, that give them power.  Magic is therefore, according to Frazer, a variant of science, a proto-science perhaps, maybe only a pseudo-science, or even the ‘bastard sister of science’, as Frazer puts it, but a type of ‘science’ none the less. Thus Frazer argued …

Wherever sympathetic magic occurs in its pure unadulterated form, it assumes that in nature one event follows another necessarily and invariably without the intervention of any spiritual or personal agency. Thus its fundamental conception is identical with that of modern science; underlying the whole system is a faith, implicit but real and firm, in the order and uniformity of nature. The magician does not doubt that the same causes will always produce the same effects, that the performance of the proper ceremony, accompanied by the appropriate spell, will inevitably be attended by the desired result, unless, indeed, his incantations should chance to be thwarted and foiled by the more potent charms of another sorcerer. He supplicates no higher power: he sues the favour of no fickle and wayward being: he abases himself before no awful deity. Yet his power, great as he believes it to be, is by no means arbitrary and unlimited. He can wield it only so long as he strictly conforms to the rules of his art, or to what may be called the laws of nature as conceived by him.  …

It is therefore a truism, almost a tautology, to say that all magic is necessarily false and barren; for were it ever to become true and fruitful, it would no longer be magic but science. From the earliest times man has been engaged in a search for general rules whereby to turn the order of natural phenomena to his own advantage, and in the long search he has scraped together a great hoard of such maxims, some of them golden and some of them mere dross. The true or golden rules constitute the body of applied science which we call the arts; the false are magic. [ii]

The true or golden rules constitute the body of applied science which we call the arts; the false are magic.

Frazer considered that just as religion replaced magic, so modern science has superseded religion. Magic predated religion, and the shaman and sorcerer-led societies, such as the creators of the Magdalenian cave art of southern France, or the people of Star Carr in northern England and their stag antler head dresses  [iii], were thus arguably quite distinct from later religious communities. Closer to home, perhaps, a 50,000-year-old hunting scene at a Sulawesi cave art site [iv] probably represents the same thing, and a glimpse of the culture of the people who didn’t quite make it to Australia.

Of interest here then is that Professor Frazer, looking objectively at the Aborigines of Australia, and using his own definitions, suggested that they had magic/sorcery but not religion:

The conclusion which we have thus reached deductively from a consideration of the fundamental ideas of magic and religion is confirmed inductively by the observation that among the aborigines of Australia, the rudest savages as to whom we possess accurate information, magic is universally practised, whereas religion in the sense of a propitiation or conciliation of the higher powers seems to be nearly unknown. Roughly speaking, all men in Australia are magicians, but not one is a priest; everybody fancies he can influence his fellows or the course of nature by sympathetic magic, but nobody dreams of propitiating gods by prayer and sacrifice.  [v]

‘Rudest savages to one side’, (after all, it is the Aborigines themselves who claim their culture is the oldest — and unchanged — over 65,000 years) there does not appear to be any superior being in the religious sense of the word, no higher being to whom Aborigines made/make sacrifices or pled their cases for intervention in the real world.  They did all these things for themselves, by themselves, both in the negative sense of sorcery against neighbours or rivals, or in a positive sense with magic, as in the production of surpluses via the Increase Ceremonies, or for protection against other people’s sorcery.

There were, of course, the sacred totemic ancestors, but, as groups or as individuals, it was the Aborigines themselves who constantly re-enacted the acts of creation previously performed by their totemic ancestors, using the same magic formulae the ancestors had used, to ensure the continual cycles of life. These creative acts no longer relied on any creative superior beings. In fact, the Aborigines believed themselves to be in temporal continuity with their totemic ancestors of the Dreamtime – they believed themselves to be effectively the ‘superior beings’ themselves, re-incarnate. Thus Aborigines would appear to form a society that pre-dates religion, but with magic elevated to its very highest possible form:

There is a feature which characterises Australia more than any other region: it is the vector of sorcery. Australian sorcery is directed towards an enemy. [vi]

Thus said Géza Róheim when describing the Australian Aborigines in the 1930s.  While Aboriginal ‘science’ remained ossified (lithified?) in the Stone Age, Nicholas Rothwell identified, in The Australian in 2010, what he described as a continuing ‘arms race’ in the field of sorcery:

In Cawte’s account, a kind of arms race of traditional medicine was in place across the Yolngu clan realm of North-East Arnhem Land all through the years when he was in the field. Two forces seemed to be contending, and their techniques were always shifting, escalating, in a fluid adaptation to new circumstances. On one side were the ‘good’ doctors, or ‘Marrnggitj’ – figures of seniority, able to comfort and to heal. On the other were the shadowy ‘Galkas’ – malevolent, murderous, responsible for all deaths and sicknesses, sowing terror and anguish in every heart. Some Galka men would use spells, or killing stones, or they would whip up dry, strength-sapping poison winds. Others stole up on their victims secretly, and inserted sharp spines in their bodies. Death would follow, inexplicably, a day, a week or a month later. There were scores of ways for a Galka to kill a man – and just as many methods the Marrnggitj could use in defence.  [vii]

In following up Rothwell’s description of ‘escalating, in a fluid adaptation’ of sorcery techniques, the Aboriginal author Dick Roughsey outlined some of the many different techniques available to the well-rounded sorcerer in North Queensland:

Bulla-bulla is another type of sorcery. For bulla-bulla a man must get some hair from his victim, or anything that has the sweat of a man or woman on it, like a piece of clothing. He puts the hair or clothing between two trees that rub together in the wind. As the hair or material is ground away into a fine powder, so the life of the victim fades away.

In my travels around Cape York I have seen many paintings of men and women that were done for puri-puri (sorcery). Some of the figures are painted upside down, which means they are dead or going to die. There are no caves on Mornington, so our old people scratched the figures or the man or woman they wanted to kill on the smooth bark of a tree. Then they jabbed the figure with a spear and chanted a curse so they would die.

There is a cave in sandstone on the mainland over Booraloola way. It belongs to the Yaryula mob and they have a big figure of a man painted there. The man has his arms raised up and under one armpit there is a hole in the rock. If a man’s hair or sweat is put in this hole and cursed, he will die in a few weeks. There was a big row about this on Mornington a few years ago. Two men said they had sent a shirt of one of my cousins over there to be put in the hole. After a fight the two men said they were only joking and hadn’t sent the shirt, so everything was alright.

Another puri-puri is done by throwing your wind at a man. That is done by tugging your beard with your hand and then throwing your hand at the enemy as you blow through your mouth saying ‘shoo, shoo, shoo’. To make the man sicker still, you find his footprints or his buttock marks where he has sat, and pull your beard again and throw your wind at his tracks. If a man’s footprints are poked with a yamma (digging) stick he’ll get sore feet.

The leg bone of a jabiru is used for bone-pointing, and the beak of a jabiru is also used for puri-puri. The sorcerer chants a song to make the beak poisonous. He then finds the place where the victim has urinated and stabs the wet sand with the beak, chanting all the time. In about two weeks the victim gets bad sores on his penis. An old man called Togo was sung this way; he could not be cured and had to be sent to Palm Island where he died.

You can kill a man by collecting the wet sand where he has urinated, and also some of his faeces. These are put in a bark parcel. Pieces of antbed or stones are then heated in a fire. The bark parcel is put on the hot stones, water is poured round to put out most of the fire and the whole lot is covered with sand until no smoke can be seen. The victim then becomes sick, his bowel operations cease and he soon dies.

The belief in puri-puri remains amongst the old people who haven’t been to school. They think that hardly anybody dies a natural death, and always look for larbarbidee (the practice of sorcery) as the cause behind it. If a person gets struck by lightning they soon remember that he had an argument or fight with someone not long before, and this person will probably get the blame. [viii]

All of these techniques are rule-based, a ‘science’ at least in the eyes of the practitioners, and available to anyone who simply follows the rules.  They are no less valid than, say, astrology, which continues to be practiced into perhaps its fourth millennium from its home in Mesopotamia.

Thus, using examples from across Australia, Aborigines used sorcery to make people ill.  From western South Australia…

Mr. W.R. Thomson states:- ‘….. The idea entertained by the natives themselves is that all illness is caused by the ‘Marrillia’, or native doctors, of the more northern tribes; they believe that the ‘Marrillia’ comes during the night, always from the north, curses the tribe with some sickness, and returns to his own country before morning. The ‘Marrillia’ generally takes the form of an eagle when travelling, and comes from a great distance in a very short time.’   [ix]

From Ann Wells, missionary’s wife at Milingimbi, NT:

Bilinara was a healing medicine man… Much of Bilinara’s healing was done by faith and sleight of hand. Jawa showed my husband one day a tiny, water worn stone that Bilinara had ‘removed’ by massage from his shoulder. It had eased the pain at once Jawa said, in honest simplicity and belief.   [x]

The practice was widespread and continues to be practiced in the APY Lands in NW of S.A. even today. This report, quoting an Aboriginal ‘doctor’, was published in The Australian in 2013:

He (the writer’s father) told me that the way I would have to heal people would be to pull the sickness out of their bodies in the form of pieces of wood, or sticks, or stones, things like that. This is so that people can actually see with their own eyes the sickness that is removed from their bodies. This is the commonly accepted way we ngangkari do our work. It is so that people can see us taking their sickness away from their bodies, which gives them a sense of removal. My father told me I’d have to make sure I showed them what I took out, so they could see it, before I disposed of it.   [xi]

Aborigines used sorcery to kill their enemies  – who hasn’t heard of ‘pointing the bone’? We have seen numerous examples above. The Rev. George Taplin , from the Murray’s mouth in SA, provided this example:

When a man dies they conclude at once that sorcery has been the cause of that mournful event, and that either ngadhungi or millin must have been practised against him. The first night after a man has died his nearest relation sleeps with his head on the corpse, in order that he may be led to dream of who is the sorcerer that caused the death. Next day the corpse is elevated on men’s shoulders on a sort of bier called a ngaratta. The friends of the deceased then gather around, and several names are called out to try if the mention of them produces any effect on the corpse. At last the nearest relative calls out the name of the person of whom he has dreamed, and then an impulse towards him on the part of the dead body is said to be felt by the bearers, which they pretend they cannot resist, and consequently they walk towards him. This impulse is the sign by which it is known that the right name has been called out.  [xii]

They used sorcery to make rain and sorcery to ensure the abundance of food through the Increase Ceremonies.

They used sorcery to make rain and sorcery to ensure the abundance of food through the Increase Ceremonies. Anthropologists Spencer and Gillen provided a list of foods that young boys and girls of Central Australia were forbidden to eat and the expected penalties for transgressing those rules. For boys the forbidden foods included the following:

Kangaroo tail: penalty, premature age and decay.

Wild turkey and its eggs: penalty, premature age.

Female bandicoot: penalty, probably bleed to death at circumcision.

Large lizards: penalty, become Arro-iwama, that is, one with abnormal and diseased

Craving for sexual intercourse: an individual held in much contempt.

Emu fat: penalty abnormal development of the penis

Large quail and its eggs: non-growth of beard and whiskers and general stoppage of growth.

Eagle-hawk (except legs): premature age and leanness; the leg is supposed to impart strength and generally improve the growth of the limb. Boys are often struck on the calf of the leg with the leg bone of an eagle-hawk; as thereby strength passes from the bone into the boy’s leg.

Wild cat: painful and foul smelling eruption on the head and neck. This restriction applies until very old age is reached.

Podargus (frog-mouth bird) and its eggs: an ugly enlargement of the mouth.   [xiii]

Interestingly, there are also food restrictions imposed on relatives which somehow when transgressed can also inflict penalties on the young boys. While the Arrakurta (newly initiated man) is out in the bush the actual mia, that is, his mother, may not eat opossum, large carpet snake, large lizard, and fat of any sort, or else she might retard her son’s recovery (from the circumcision wounds).

This is hardly consistent with a modern ‘scientific’ assessment of food nutrition, but presumably represents knowledge, ‘scientific knowledge’ if you will, accumulated over many generations. In that sense, in my opinion, the Aborigines, as sorcerers, do have a claim to refer to themselves as the first ‘scientists’, but only using a definition of ‘science’ that was valid 65,000 years ago.  Aboriginal science fails the modern definition of ‘science’ in two important respects.   Firstly, falsification. The Aborigines have never subjected their beliefs to the rigorous falsification process required by modern science. Secondly, Revision. Aborigines do not appear to have revised their hypotheses in the light of evidence to the contrary.  Eating a kangaroo tail in all likelihood does not lead to premature aging of young boys, though, to quote from Tony Thomas, ‘Today, this might need scholastic verification financed by an ARC Grant.’  [xiv]

This is not to say that Aborigines did not have excellent observational skills and could not draw correct inferences from them – that is – the very basis of empirical ‘science’, and to a large extent survival in Australia and hunting prowess depended on it. However this type of knowledge was not considered as important in traditional culture as one might imagine. The man most admired (and feared) in Aboriginal society was not the ‘scientist’, but the one who wielded the magic and the sorcery. From Daisy Bates in the Kimberley:

Old men who have lost their hunting prowess, with the cunning of the fox and magpie, make sorcerers of themselves, and by watching and smelling among the naked hunters, are able to discover those who have killed and eaten. With spells and bone-pointing their evil suggestion is fatal, and their living easy.   [xv]

I guess everyone has a vague idea of what ‘science’ actually involves, and therefore it is very easy to cherry-pick some aspects of indigenous knowledge and project them onto the idea of ‘science’ — as long as the starting definition of ‘science’ is kept sufficiently vague and all the proto-science, sorcery, is put to one side. This doubling-down on a vague definition, and then applying it as if they were using the standard rigorous definition, has long been the modus operandi of the Left to fulfill a required agenda.  For example, with a suitably broad definition of the term ‘agriculture,’ suddenly every hunter and gatherer becomes a farmer.  With a suitable definition of ‘woman,’ suddenly ‘every man can have a baby.’  And so here, with a suitable definition of ‘science,’ every Aborigine becomes an Albert Einstein.

The problem is that once you set the bar low with a vague definition of ‘science’ it is surprising who (or what?) can manage to scramble over and have a justifiable claim to being the ‘first scientists’ too.

The problem is that once you set the bar low with a vague definition of ‘science’ it is surprising who (or what?) can manage to scramble over and have a justifiable claim to being the ‘first scientists’ too.  The ants that inhabit the footpath in front of my house appear able to predict the rain at least a well as the Bureau of Meteorology. Does this give them a claim to be the ‘first climatologists’?  There are cockatoos in the Amazon jungles that eat clay to counteract the poisons in the berries they eat.  [xvi]  Does this constitute scientific knowledge of the medicinal properties of kaolin in their diet?  And it is well known that chimpanzees display at least some knowledge of the medicinal qualities of quite a variety of different plants.  [xvii]  Does that not make them scientists too? Perhaps not by my definition of modern science, but why not by theirs’?   Caution forces me to be explicit. Let me be quite clear here that I am not in any way suggesting that there is some equivalence between the mental capacity of climate scientists and ants, or indeed between indigenous knowledge and animal behaviour, I am merely reaching for the absurd in order to demonstrate the need for some sort of rigour in the application of definitions.

The fundamental purpose of ‘science’ is produce advances in knowledge and understanding, so it is not clear to me why the back-writing aspects of Indigenous, hunter and gathering folk-law into broad-acre farming practice will produce any advances in modern agriculture any more than Indigenous knowledge of the science of meteorology will produce advances in modern weather forecasting (… however much advances appear to be needed these days!), or for that matter how Indigenous astronomy will take us closer to understanding the origin of the universe. The purpose behind this new agenda certainly begs some sort of explanation, but seems to fall short of rigourous science.

Basically, just as it serves our understanding of traditional Aborigine culture no useful purpose to project Eurocentric concepts like ‘nations,’ ‘communities’ and ‘agriculture’ on to genuine Aboriginal political structures and culture we should take care not to project too much of our own understanding of empirical scientific method or knowledge onto Aborigines in calling them the ‘first scientists.’   Why not just celebrate the uniqueness of traditional culture as it was, for what it was?   It is a lot more interesting that claiming that they are just a half-hearted version of Western culture.

[i]  Thomas, Tony. 2024 The Seriously Silly Science of Making Stuff Up.  Quadrant Online, 15/8/2024.

https://quadrant.org.au/opinion/science/2024/08/the-seriously-silly-science-of-making-stuff-up/

[ii]   You can read Frazer, The Golden Bough here on-line at … https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3623/3623-h/3623-h.htm

[iii]  ‘The Star Carr Frontlets (also known as the Star Carr Headdresses) are a series of modified deer skulls, probably worn by people, from the Mesolithic site at Star Carr in North Yorkshire.’

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Star_Carr_Frontlets

[iv]  Cave painting in Indonesia is the oldest known ‘picture story.’

 https://news.griffith.edu.au/2024/07/04/cave-painting-in-indonesia-is-the-oldest-known-picture-story/

[v]  Frazer, op. cit.

[vi]   Róheim, Géza, 1932, p169. Psychanalyse et anthropologie.

[vii]  Rothwell, Nicolas, 2010. Magic Island. The Australian, 7/5/2010.

[viii] Roughsey, Dick, 1971, p77-78. Moon and Rainbow. Rigby Books. Reprinted in 1995 with I, the Aboriginal by Seal Books.

[ix]  The Report of Mr W. R. Thomson, South Australian Government Gazette, 6^th April, 1876, p640.

[x]  Wells, Ann E., 1963, p108. Milingimbi : Ten Years in the Crocodile Islands of Arnhem Land. Angus and Robertson.

[xi] Tjilari, Andy. In Kantjuriny, Naomi, Tjilari, Andy and Burton, Maringka, 2013. Super powers of central Australia’s traditional healers. The Weekend Australian, 18/5/2013.

[xii] Taplin, Rev. George, 1879. The Narrinyeri Tribe. In Woods, James D., (Editor). 1879, pp19-20. The Native Tribes of South Australia. Reprinted in facsimile by the State Library of S. A., 2009.

[xiii]  Spencer, Professor Baldwin, and Gillen, Francis, 1899, p289-290. Native Tribes of Central Australia. Reprinted: University of Sydney Library, 2003.  Available online at … https://archive.org/details/nativetribesofce00spenuoft/mode/2up

[xiv] Tony Thomas (op. cit.)

[xv] Bates, Daisy, 2004, p89. My Natives and I. Hesperian Press.

[xvi] Why Do Wild Parrots Eat Dirt In The Amazon?

https://www.forbes.com/sites/grrlscientist/2017/08/09/why-do-wild-parrots-eat-dirt-in-the-amazon

[xvii] Study shows wild chimpanzees seek out medicinal plants to treat illness and injuries.

https://www.ox.ac.uk/news/2024-06-21-study-shows-wild-chimpanzees-seek-out-medicinal-plants-treat-illness-and-injuries