Abstract
For the past decade, I have been studying pilgrimage in all its dimensions in what my colleagues and I have been calling a kaleidoscopic inquiry (McIntosh et al., 2024). In my current investigations, I have been exploring the journey of the soul upon the death of its host. My focus in this working paper is the myths and traditions of the Yolngu Indigenous peoples of northeast Arnhemland in remote northern Australia with whom I lived and worked in the 1980s and 90s. The Yolngu go to great lengths to prepare the dying for their ultimate journey, painting the body with sacred patterns and singing songs relating to the totemic emblems which will help the soul find its way to the appropriate destination. A most curious thing about Yolngu mythology is that the people acknowledge the existence of many sacred beliefs about the soul, and there is no absolute truth pertaining to such matters as its fate. Over the vastness of time—Aboriginal people have been on the continent of Australia for at least 50,000 years—a multitude of new understandings on the soul and its destiny have emerged and rather than simply displacing older narratives, they appear to coexist in the minds of the storytellers with each variation influencing the others in myriad ways. The study of the soul in Aboriginal Australia is an immense topic, but I have a very specific focus. My speculations are based on a hypothesis that these many myth variations represent, for the most part, innovations emerging from contact between Aboriginal peoples and others going back thousands of years. In other words, by studying Yolngu ideas of the soul, we are presented with a window into deep history. And in that timeframe, there have been some extraordinary transitions. Specifically, I will explain the transition in Yolngu cosmology from the idea of Yolngu possessing an external soul associated with their totems, to a belief system in which the soul is encased in a human body, but which departs elsewhere – to a totemic well, a paradise, the heavens above etc. upon death. As one can imagine, these were revolutionary changes in Yolngu perceptions of the world. In a case study drawn from my research among the Warramiri clan of the Yolngu collective, I will show that one of these transitions—to a paradise to the north of Australia—was the result of contact between the Yolngu, in particular peoples of the whale totem, and Indigenous Asian whale hunters, for whom that totem was also sacred. This ‘tryst with destiny’ would lead the Warramiri soul on a pilgrimage of epic proportions to lands well distant from their homelands to what we might now say is Indonesia or Papua New Guinea. Even today, this idea of a paradise on earth still inspires a sense of wonder for Yolngu that not even the introduction of Islam (through contact with Macassan fishermen in the 1700s), and Christianity (through contact with Methodist missionaries in the early 1900s) has displaced.
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Recommended Citation
McIntosh, Ian S.
(2026)
"The Journey of the Soul in Aboriginal Australia,"
International Journal of Religious Tourism and Pilgrimage:
Vol. 14:
Iss.
1, Article 15.
Available at:
https://arrow.tudublin.ie/ijrtp/vol14/iss1/15