The Bullroarer: A Global Marker of Cultural Diffusion and Male Initiation Ceremonies

TL;DR

• The bullroarer – a whirled wooden slat – appears on every inhabited continent, almost always as the secret “voice of spirits” in boys’ initiation rites.
• Myths from Australia to Amazonia say women first owned the bullroarer until men seized it, a motif hard to explain by coincidence.
• Archaeological finds back to ∼18 000 BC and Neolithic Göbekli Tepe suggest the cult is late-Paleolithic in origin.
• The consistent package of rites (death-and-rebirth, women’s taboo, thunder/serpent symbolism) points to ancient cultural diffusion, not independent invention.

1. Introduction & Thesis#

The bullroarer is a deceptively simple device – a flat board or slat attached to a cord – yet when whirled through the air it emits an uncanny roaring or whirring sound. This humble “whirligig” would seem an unlikely key to human prehistory. Yet the bullroarer’s worldwide distribution and strikingly consistent ritual roles pose a classic anthropological puzzle. From the Australian Outback to the Amazon rainforest, from southern Africa to ancient Greece, variations of the bullroarer have been documented in hundreds of cultures. Remarkably, wherever it appears it is bound up with sacred traditions. It is typically “the voice of a god” or ancestral spirit, a secret ceremonial object especially used in male initiation rites, and it is taboo for women and uninitiated boys to see. Even more intriguingly, myths in many cultures say the first bullroarer was invented by women and later stolen by men – an uncanny recurring legend of primordial gender conflict. These complex parallels beg explanation.

Two broad interpretations have been offered. One is independent invention – that human minds in different times and places hit on the same solution (a whirled noisemaker) and attached similar meanings to it by virtue of psychological universals. The other view is cultural diffusion from a common origin – that the bullroarer and its attendant myths began once (or in a limited few places) deep in human history and spread widely via migrations and contacts. This latter scenario implies a far-reaching continuity: perhaps an archaic cult or ritual complex shared by humanity’s ancestors, preserved in fragmentary form in far-flung societies today. In the late 19th century the bullroarer figured centrally in debates between these models. Early scholars like Andrew Lang argued that similar minds could invent it anywhere, making a single origin “unnecessary”. By contrast, diffusionists marshaled evidence that the bullroarer is too consistently similar across cultures to be coincidence. Indeed, by 1929 even the journal Nature noted a scholarly leaning toward diffusion: that a “bullroarer complex” of rituals and myths likely originated in one ancient cultural stratum and was transmitted globally.

In recent decades, however, large-scale diffusionist hypotheses fell out of fashion in anthropology. The topic of the bullroarer’s global history has been neglected, even as new evidence has accumulated in ethnography, mythology, and archaeology. This paper revisits the worldwide enigma of the bullroarer and argues that its distribution, functions, and symbolism are best explained by diffusion from a common cultural source. For readers who want a succinct narrative version, see my Substack essay “The Bullroarer: a history of man’s most sacred ritual object”. For an exhaustive dataset and methodological appendix, consult the companion research article “The Bullroarer: A Worldwide Ritual Instrument and the Case for Ancient Cultural Diffusion”. The bullroarer’s cross-continental spread marks the rise of “fully human” ritual culture – in particular, the emergence of structured, secrecy-based male sodalities and initiation cults. We will survey the bullroarer’s remarkable global footprint and consistent ritual associations, highlighting patterns that demand explanation. We then review the debate of independent invention vs. diffusion in light of a century of scholarship, finding that the accumulation of evidence strongly favors a diffusionist account. Drawing on archaeology, comparative mythology, and cognitive anthropology, we suggest the bullroarer complex may trace back to the Late Paleolithic as a shared heritage of early Homo sapiens. This would make the bullroarer a proxy indicator of when and how our ancestors first developed organized ceremonial life – including the separation of men’s secret initiations and the subordination of women through ritual. In the final sections, we explore the symbolic meanings of the bullroarer’s sound (as thunder, cyclone, and sky-serpent), and consider the implications: that even the most “archaic” tribal rites are echoes of a deep prehistoric legacy. By tracing the bullroarer’s trail across millennia, we confront the possibility that beneath the diversity of world cultures lies an early common substratum of ideas and practices. In this sense, to study the bullroarer is to take a lesson in folklore and human origins – one that may help us understand who we are and where we came from.

2. Archaeological Timeline of the Bullroarer#

Archaeological finds suggest the bullroarer is not only ethnographically widespread but also one of humanity’s oldest ritual implements. Possible bullroarer artifacts appear as early as the Upper Paleolithic in multiple regions. In Europe, Ice Age contexts have yielded flat, perforated objects with engraved designs that closely match ethnographic bullroarers. For example, Abbé Henri Breuil in 1907 reported a carved ivory piece from Magdalenian deposits (~15,000–13,000 BC) in Dordogne, France, which bore geometric line-and-circle patterns resembling Australian Aboriginal tjurunga (sacred bullroarer boards). Breuil identified it as a Paleolithic bullroarer and even hypothesized that “in Magdalenian times a similar veneration may have been observed,” meaning such an object might have been kept secret from women as in Aboriginal rites. This find did not stand alone. Archaeologists have since noted several likely bullroarers in the Upper Paleolithic toolkit: Solutrean-age examples (~20,000 BP) from sites like Lespugue, France (a bone plaque with a drilled hole), and fragmented artifacts from Mezhirich, Ukraine (~17,000 BP) interpreted as whirled noisemakers. From the Mesolithic era, a bone object ~8,500 years old from Scandinavia has been identified as a bullroarer – in fact it is the oldest known musical instrument in that region. All these support the bullroarer’s presence deep in prehistoric Europe.

In the Near East, early farming communities also yield tantalizing evidence. At Çatalhöyük in Anatolia (Turkey) circa 7000 BC, excavators uncovered bone pendants with holes that have been “tentatively” identified as small bullroarers. Though diminutive, these perforated bone slips showed suspension wear consistent with being spun on a cord. Meanwhile, at the Pre-Pottery Neolithic site Göbekli Tepe in southeastern Turkey (c. 9500 BC) – often called the world’s oldest temple complex – archaeologists found several elongated oval bone pieces with central perforations. These objects, labeled in reports as “bone spatulae,” bear a striking resemblance to ethnographic bullroarers in shape and size. The Göbekli pieces even include decorative motifs: one specimen from nearby Körtik Tepe is incised along its length with a sinuous snake motif. Such detail is evocative, given that bullroarers in later cultures are often associated with serpents (as we will discuss). The original excavators cautiously note the similarity to bullroarers and concede these Neolithic communities “may have had such instruments”. Indeed, an experimental reproduction of a Neolithic bullroarer in hardwood produced a deep, vibrant roar – demonstrating that if made of wood, these artifacts would function as intended.

Outside Eurasia, few actual bullroarers survive from antiquity due to perishable materials, but there are hints. In Pharaonic Egypt, a curious artifact depicted in Tutankhamun’s 14th-century BC tomb illustrations looks akin to a bullroarer (a flat oblong object with a cord). If confirmed, this would place the bullroarer in the ancient Mediterranean world. Some have also speculated that certain ritual “slats” from Bronze Age Minoan contexts might have been whirled for sound, though clear evidence is lacking. On the other side of the world, in pre-Columbian North America, a number of wooden and bone artifacts have been interpreted as bullroarers: for instance, Hohokam sites in Arizona (c. 500–1100 AD) yielded wooden slat instruments thought to be used in ceremonial signaling. And in rock art: a remarkable San rock painting in the Cederberg mountains of South Africa (of uncertain age, possibly late Holocene) shows eight human figures swinging bullroarer-like instruments, suggesting their use in rainmaking rituals by the Later Stone Age peoples.

To synthesize the archaeological record, we present an annotated timeline of notable bullroarer finds and indications, spanning from the Ice Age to the ethnographic present. This table lists the site or culture, approximate date (calibrated), the material and description of the object, the context of use or discovery, and a key reference.

Table: Key occurrences of bullroarers in archaeology and ethnography. Dates for prehistoric sites are calibrated BCE; ethnographic “dates” indicate period of documentation. These examples illustrate the bullroarer’s enduring presence from the Late Paleolithic into modern traditional societies. Sources: Breuil (1907); Dauvois (1989); Rusch et al. (2018); Dietrich & Notroff (2016); Russell (2005); Spencer & Gillen (1899); Stradelli (1890); Haddon (1898); and others (see text).

As the table and sources show, the bullroarer’s trail can be followed across continents and ages. By the Neolithic, bullroarers appear to have been part of the ritual toolkit of early farming societies – the very dawn of organized religion – as seen at Göbekli Tepe and Çatalhöyük. Later, in Bronze/Iron Age civilizations, they surface in mystery-cult contexts (Greece, Egypt). And they persist into the ethnographic present in many Indigenous cultures worldwide. The continuity is striking. We see that wherever bullroarers are firmly attested, they overwhelmingly occur as sacred objects linked to initiation and weather magic. Next, we delve into the mythic and ritual complex surrounding this instrument – a remarkably standardized complex found from Australia to Amazonia.

3. Myth-Ritual Complex: Initiation, “Theft from Women,” and Symbolic Rebirth#

Wherever the bullroarer is used, we find a common suite of myths, rituals and symbols. Ethnographer E.B. Tylor in 1905 was astonished that peoples as distant as the Hopi and the Greeks, or the Australian Aboriginal and the Brazilian Indian, all used the bullroarer for the same ritual purposes. Over a century of research has confirmed a core complex of themes: the bullroarer’s sound is interpreted as the voice of a supernatural being; it is employed in male-secret initiation ceremonies often involving the symbolic death and rebirth of boys as men; and these rites are typically justified by myths in which men wrested ritual power (the bullroarer) from women in primordial times. We will illustrate this complex with examples from four cultural areas: Aboriginal Australia, the Amazon Basin (Yuruparí cult), ancient Greece, and the Pueblo Indians of North America. Each case highlights the recurring elements of male initiation and the “theft-from-women” motif.

Australian Aboriginal Dreaming: The Voice of Twanyirika#

In Indigenous Australian traditions, the bullroarer (known by names like tjurunga, turndun, etc.) is deeply sacred and imbued with mythic meaning. Among the Arrernte (Arunta) people of central Australia, for instance, the bullroarer’s roar is believed to be the voice of a powerful spirit called Twanyirika. During boys’ initiation (which includes circumcision or subincision rites), elders whirl bullroarers in the darkness around the ceremonial ground, and the women and children are told that this terrifying sound is Twanyirika himself coming to “devour” the boys and carry them away for a time. In the Arrernte myth narrated by Baldwin Spencer, Twanyirika indeed seizes the newly circumcised youth, taking him into the bush for his transformation, and later “kills” the boy and brings him to life again as a mature man. Women truly believe the loud humming drone is the voice of Twanyirika – they are forbidden to know it’s made by a wooden slat. If any woman were to see the bullroarer, tribal law decrees she must be killed for sacrilege. This severe taboo underscores the instrument’s sanctity.

One ethnographic account from 1904 describes the moment after a boy’s operation: “During the circumcision, the bullroarer sounds all around the dark bush. The women wail that Twanyirika has come and taken the boy. While the youth is secluded recovering, they say Twanyirika keeps him hidden, constantly whirling the bullroarer. If the boy ever reveals the secrets, Twanyirika will carry him off forever.” In Arrernte belief, the initiand is symbolically “swallowed” by the spirit (the roaring sound encircling him), then after weeks in seclusion he is “spat out” reborn as a man. The bullroarer thus orchestrates the novice’s death-and-resurrection, audibly marking the presence of ancestral power. Notably, the Arrernte and many neighboring groups say each child’s spirit essence is contained in a sacred bullroarer board (tjurunga) even before birth. In their Dreaming lore, the first Ancestor beings carried bullroarers as containers of spirit – a direct link between the object and the origin of life. We see here how the bullroarer is far more than a noisemaker: it is a token of identity and soul, the physical embodiment of male spiritual authority. By controlling the tjurunga and its “voice,” the initiated men control the pipeline to the Dreamtime and keep women subordinated in ritual matters.

It is worth noting that while Australian myths emphasize the bullroarer as a spirit’s voice and the instrument of male initiation, some Aboriginal traditions also contain hints of the “women’s origin” theme. For example, the Yolngu of Arnhem Land have a myth of the Wawilak Sisters, wherein two ancestral sisters accidentally witness a sacred ceremony (involving bullroarer-like sounds of the Rainbow Serpent) and thus bring about a great flood until the rituals are rearranged by men. In certain Queensland tribes, the bullroarer myth explicitly states that women once had great power until men, by secret tricks with the bullroarer, asserted dominance. Generally, Aboriginal elders explain the bullroarer’s mystery as rooted in “the desire of men to impress women with the idea of male supremacy.” In functional terms, the bullroarer cult in Australia is understood (by anthropologists and some Indigenous elders) as a way for men to bond together, affirm their ownership of religious power, and keep women in awe and fear of male-controlled spiritual forces. This same dynamic recurs globally.

Amazonian Yuruparí: The Flutes Stolen from Women#

Nowhere is the “theft from women” motif more prominent than in the male secret cults of lowland South America. The Amazon basin is home to dozens of tribes that maintain sacred flutes, trumpets, and bullroarers used only by initiated men. Perhaps the most famous is the Yuruparí cult of the northwest Amazon (Tukanoan and Arawakan peoples). The Yuruparí rites center on long foot-long flutes and accompanying bullroarers whose sound represents the voices of powerful spirit-heroes. It is strictly forbidden for women or uninitiated boys to see these instruments – under threat of gang-rape or death, according to traditional law. The foundation for this harsh rule lies in the Yuruparí origin myth, often considered one of the great Amazonian creation epics.

Multiple versions of the Yuruparí myth exist, but they share core episodes. In one widely cited version (recorded by J. C. Barbosa in 1914, based on the Tukano language telling), the culture-hero Yurupary was born of a virgin woman (impregnated by a magical fruit) and grew up to establish men’s sacred rites. Yurupary decreed that women must never see the ritual instruments or learn the accompanying chants, on pain of death. Later in the myth, however, this new male order is dramatically challenged: the Sun’s daughter (a young woman of the community) sneaks out at dawn and discovers the hidden Yuruparí flutes by the river, before her lazy brother can wake. She boldly steals the sacred instruments and runs off with her sisters and all the women of the village. With women now in possession of the flutes, the social order flips: women take over the rituals and devote themselves to ceremony, while the men are left to do the mundane work – even, in some versions, the men begin to menstruate as a symbolic role-reversal. This situation is intolerable to the men. They conspire to regain the flutes by force. In the myth, the men use ritual objects of their own – whipping vines and bullroarers – to terrorize the women. Hearing the terrible whirring “voices” and feeling the stinging whips, the women panic and yield. The men seize back the flutes, and as punishment for the interregnum, they curse women with permanent menstruation and decree that any woman who henceforth gazes upon the flutes or hears the Yuruparí secrets shall be killed. From that time on, only men carry the Yuruparí, and women are excluded forever.

Myth of Yuruparí (Tukano) – “In primordial times, women ruled. The First Woman stole the sacred flutes of the Sun. She and her sisters gathered the holy Yuruparí instruments and fled into the forest. The world turned upside-down: men bled like women and labored in women’s chores, while the women chanted and communed with the spirits. So the men plotted to restore order. They fashioned whips from vines and carved small whirling boards. Hiding in the trees, they swung the boards on long cords – zuuuuuu, a fearsome noise – and rushed out beating the women. Terrified by the whirling juruparí sound, the women surrendered. The men took back the flutes, and by the power of thunder and sting they made a new law: from that day, the Yuruparí music belonged only to men. Any woman who sees the flutes or hears the secret will be killed. Thus did men overturn the ancient matriarchy.”

(Above is a synthesized paraphrase from several Amazonian sources, including the Tukano Yurupary legend as compiled by Stradelli (1890) and the summary in the Encyclopedia of Religion. Original Tukano terms: the sacred flutes are japurá or yuruparí, the whirling bullroarer is whaipopo in some versions. In Nheengatu lingua geral: “as mulheres pegaram os instrumentos do Juruparí…” etc.)

The Yuruparí myth is vividly echoed in actual Amazonian rituals observed in the 19th and 20th centuries. European travelers (and later anthropologists) recounted how, during Yuruparí ceremonies, the men would swing bullroarers and play the long trumpets in the village plaza while the women and children were confined in their houses under threat. Among the Mundurucu of the central Amazon, to cite another case, the men’s flute ceremony involves an enactment where women symbolically mourn their lost power. In Mundurucu myth, it was three women who originally found the Karókoro flutes in a lake; men then tricked them and took the flutes, making them wail in grief. In the annual ritual today, Mundurucu women “shut themselves in their houses and cry aloud” while the men march around playing the flutes – a direct re-enactment of the mythical transfer of authority. The anthropologist Yolanda Murphy, who studied the Mundurucu, concluded that “the whole complex of public ritual among the Mundurucu is derived from this principle of gender competition for power”. The bullroarer (and related sacred sound instruments) are the weapons with which men enforce that power. Across Amazonia, the pattern holds: tribal lore frequently states that “in the beginning, women had the sacred instruments and the power – until men violently took them away.” These myths serve as charters for why men monopolize ritual and why women are excluded. The brutality is often striking (men killing or raping women in the stories), delivered with a matter-of-fact tone that “they deserved it” for transgressing male secrets.

Notably, the independent emergence of such myths in unconnected cultures is hard to explain by chance. In Melanesia (New Guinea) as well, male-initiation flute myths nearly always say that women first owned the flutes. A survey of 14 New Guinea flute legends found all but two credited women with the instrument’s first appearance. The convergence led some scholars (as far back as J.J. Bachofen in 1861) to speculate about an actual “primordial matriarchy” in human prehistory that was later overthrown by men. Early diffusionists like Leo Frobenius and Fritz Jensen pointed to the bullroarer myths as possible evidence of a real ancient transition: perhaps there was a stage when women held prominent ritual roles, which ended when men instituted the secret cults and the associated taboos. Whether or not one accepts a literal matriarchal period, the mythic motif is undeniably widespread: even in Aboriginal Australia, where no ethnographic “matriarchy” existed, one finds male elders telling women, “We had to take the bullroarer from you in the Dreamtime”. The psychological interpretation, offered by Freud and later Alan Dundes, is that these myths encode male envy of women’s procreative power and an attempt to compensate by creating a male pseudo-womb (the dark initiation lodge) and male pseudo-menstruation (the bleeding of circumcision and the humming “menstrual” sound of the bullroarer). We will revisit these interpretations later. For now, the key point is that around the world, a recurring myth-ritual complex links the bullroarer to an epochal battle of the sexes, ending with men’s secret societies in charge.

Greek Mysteries: The Whirling “Rhombos” and Dionysian Secrets#

In the ancient Mediterranean, the bullroarer surfaces in the context of mystery religions and mythic symbolism, albeit without an explicit “theft from women” story. The Greek term for bullroarer was ῥόμβος (rhombos), meaning “whirling” object. Greek writers described the rhombos as a sacred instrument in the Dionysian Mysteries and the rites of the Great Mother (Cybele). Its sound was used to invoke the presence of gods or spirits. In Euripides’ play Bacchae (405 BC), devotees of Dionysus swing rattles and likely bullroarers as they fall into trance. Later, the Christian critic Clement of Alexandria (c. 190 AD) actually lists the rhombos among the sacred toys given to the infant Dionysus by the Titans. This alludes to an Orphic myth: baby Dionysus was lured with seven mystical toys – a pine cone, a bullroarer (rhombos), knucklebones, a mirror, a tuft of wool, a top, and apples. These were not mere playthings but fertility symbols: the bullroarer (rhombos) in particular was linked to Dionysus’ identity as a god of ecstatic noise and transformation. Archaeological finds from a Greek-Egyptian context (the Gurob papyrus, ~3rd century BC) show the same grouping of sacred items including the pine-cone and bullroarer. Scholars interpret the bullroarer here as a phallic or generative emblem – interestingly, the word rhombos could also slangily mean a spinning penis or a wizard’s tool.

In practice, Greek and Roman sources note that the rhombos was swung in certain mystery ceremonies to create an unearthly sound. “Whirling bull-roarers and clashing drums to imitate thunder” are attested in the Eleusinian Mysteries outside Athens, likely to herald the appearance of the gods Demeter and Persephone in the dark rites. Similarly, in rites of Dionysus (and his Phrygian counterpart Sabazius) initiates whirled the rhombos to induce frenzy. The sound was thought to attract or manifest the deity’s presence, just as in Australia or Amazonia it manifests the spirit. A 2nd-century AD Roman writer, Aelian, even mentions that the Italian priests of Bacchus forbade women to come near when the sacred rhombus was spinning – a faint echo of the universal taboo. While Greek myths do not say “women invented the rhombos,” there is a parallel theme in the cult of Cybele (the Great Mother): her consort Attis and the Galli priests wielded bullroarers, and the rites involved extreme acts by men (castration, transvestitism) that some scholars connect to suppressing women’s role in earlier nature cults. At minimum, the Greek evidence shows the bullroarer entrenched in secretive male-led worship that promised rebirth – Dionysus himself was the died-and-reborn god, and the rhombos symbolized both his dismemberment (cut by the Titans) and his roaring return to life.

The Greek case thus reinforces the bullroarer’s association with mystery, altered states, and male dominion in ritual. It is fascinating that an object found in Ice Age France reappears in classical Athens serving the same essential function: making the sound of divine thunder. James Frazer noted that New Guinea tribes used bullroarers in yam harvest rites “with exactly the same spirit” as the Dionysian cult in Greece – both aimed to awe participants with the voice of the numinous. Such cross-continental continuity left scholars like Frazer and Otto Zerries convinced it was no coincidence. The Greek rhombos, the Australian turndun, the Amazonian yuruparí – all were operating within a single ancient paradigm.

Hopi and Pueblo Traditions: Kachina Whirlwinds and Rain Calls#

In the Pueblo cultures of the American Southwest, the bullroarer was also integrated into initiation ceremonies and weather rituals. The Hopi people call the bullroarer device ngözo or sometimes see it as embodying the spirit of Masau’u (Earth deity) or the Katsina (Kachina) spirits. During the Hopi Wuwûychim winter solstice initiation, older men secretly whirl bullroarers outside the kiva (ritual chamber) as the youths are initiated inside. The characteristic buzzing sound is interpreted as the approaching roar of Kachina spirits coming from the mountains. Hopi lore says the bullroarer’s noise is reminiscent of wind and thunder – it is literally called the “thunder stick” by some Pueblo groups. One early 20th-century account describes Hopi elders spinning bullroarers to simulate the sound of an oncoming storm, thus invoking the rain clouds in desert farming ceremonies. Indeed, among the Hopi and Zuni, bullroarers were traditionally whirled to call forth rain and drive away evil influences, such as in the spring planting rites and during community cleansings.

Women in Pueblo culture were not punished as harshly for seeing a bullroarer as in Australia or Amazonia – but still, it was generally “men’s business.” Early anthropologists report that Pueblo boys were warned that if women heard the bullroarer, the Kachinas would not bring rain. Thus secrecy was tied to efficacy: the sacred sound worked because only the ritually pure (initiated males) handled it. In some Rio Grande Pueblo villages, women were expected to remain indoors whenever the bullroarer was used in ceremonies, maintaining the gendered secrecy theme (albeit less violently enforced).

One fascinating parallel: the Hopi sometimes identify the bullroarer’s sound with the voice of **Hé-e ** (Grandmother Kachina), an earth-mother figure, but only men manipulate the instrument. This is almost a mirror image of the Yuruparí concept, where the instrument’s sound is the voice of a Mother spirit yet women must not touch it. The Hopi also carve Bullroarer Kachina dolls, depicting a kachina holding the bullroarer – a visual reminder of its sacred status. The bullroarer among the Pueblo peoples thus underscores its typical roles: a spirit-calling device (the whirring brings the kachina rain-bringers) and a secret initiation tool (establishing solidarity among men and awe among women/children). Even in a very different cultural setting from New Guinea or Brazil, we recognize the same keynotes. As anthropologist A.L. Kroeber remarked in 1917, “from the Hopi to the Arunta, and from the Niger to the Greek, the bullroarer’s mystic hum is everywhere the same story”.

Across these examples, the myth-ritual complex of the bullroarer comes into focus:

• Voice of the Sacred: The bullroarer’s sound is universally interpreted as the voice or manifestation of a powerful spirit (ancestor, god, monster). E.g. Twanyirika in Australia, Yurupary in Amazon, Dionysus/Cybele in Greece, Kachina spirits in Hopi. It heralds the numinous presence.

• Men’s Secret Initiation: The bullroarer is almost invariably used in male initiation ceremonies or secret society rites. Boys are secluded, hear the bullroarer “call of the spirit,” undergo ordeals (often including circumcision or scarification), and emerge “reborn” as men. The sound often symbolizes the initiates being “swallowed” by a spirit and later regurgitated. Frazer noted Australian tribes explicitly saying the bullroarer noise is the wizard swallowing the boys and then bringing them up again as young men. The death-and-resurrection motif with bullroarer appears in New Guinea and Brazil too. Tribal markings or bloodletting, ghost impersonation by elders, and the bullroarer “voice” all cluster together.

• Taboo to Women: In virtually all traditional contexts, women (and often uninitiated boys) are forbidden to see the bullroarer or know its source. Violations are punished severely – ranging from ritual gang-rape (documented in parts of New Guinea and Brazil) to execution with impunity (common in Australian reports). This rule was so consistent that early ethnographers like R.H. Mathews in 1898 could say no instance of women permitted near the bullroarer has ever been found. Even in places where by the 20th century the bullroarer had become a children’s toy (e.g. Ireland, Madagascar), it was notably “reserved for boys”, hinting at the old taboo lingering in cultural memory.

• Origin Myths of Female Primacy: As discussed, a striking number of cultures have myths claiming women originally possessed the bullroarer or sacred flutes, until men stole them. This is found in New Guinea, Island Melanesia, Amazonia, parts of Australia, and hinted in some African tales. The ubiquity of these legends – even in societies with no contact – stands as a “difficult-to-explain set of facts” for the independent-invention theory. Either one believes the same psychological drama (men’s envy of women) independently generated identical myths worldwide, or one suspects a common historical origin. We will pursue that question in the next section.

• Other Uses (Secondary): Occasionally, bullroarers have been used for more utilitarian or secular ends – for instance, as a long-distance communication device (the low roar carries far; some African and Australian groups used it to signal gatherings or warn of approaching strangers), or as a weather charm (spun to avert storms or invoke wind). In parts of Europe by the modern era, the bullroarer survived mainly as a child’s toy or a shepherd’s gadget to scare predators. But even in these cases, folk memory often accorded it a whiff of the supernatural – e.g. 19th-century Scots children called their bullroarer a “thunder-spell” that could ward off lightning, and Basque herders carved spiral motifs on theirs and spun them at night, a practice thought to derive from earlier nocturnal rituals. Such vestiges suggest the sacred pedigree of the instrument even when “degenerate” into play. Where a bullroarer is today a mere toy, it likely was a sacred implement in the past. Cultural diffusion predicts a pattern of ritual to secular transition toward the margins (e.g. Europe) rather than independent invention of identical toys across the globe. And indeed, we have hints from oral tradition that in places like Ireland, the bullroarer was once “sacred” before becoming a game.

In summary, the bullroarer exhibits a constellation of distinctive features wherever found: it is tied to men’s secret ceremonies (especially puberty initiations with symbolic death/rebirth), it embodies the voice of spirits, it is surrounded by strict secrecy with exclusion of women, and it carries mythic associations often involving serpents, ancestral ghosts, or a time when women held sway. This entire package of elements has been observed to co-occur from the Australian desert to the Amazon jungle. As anthropologist E.M. Loeb concluded in 1929 after surveying tribal initiations worldwide: “Not only is the bull-roarer tabooed to women, and almost invariably the voice of spirits, but it also almost invariably travels with [the same cluster of initiation elements: tribal marks, death-and-resurrection, ghost impersonation]… There is no psychological principle which would necessarily group these elements together; therefore they must have been fortuitously grouped in one locality… then disseminated as a complex.” In other words, chance parallel evolution of this entire complex in dozens of separate cultures is implausible – it strongly suggests historical connections. We turn now to examine how this complex might have spread, and what that implies about early human culture.

4. Diffusion Analysis: Independent Invention vs. Ancient Spread#

Given the remarkable commonalities outlined above, how did the bullroarer complex become so globally distributed? Is it the product of independent invention responding to universal aspects of the human condition, or the result of ancient diffusion from a single source or limited sources? This question has long been debated. Let us weigh the evidence and perspectives.

Independent-Invention Theory: Proponents argue that any group of humans might invent a whirled noise-maker because it’s a simple concept and can serve obvious functions (making loud sound to signal or awe). Furthermore, certain psychological universals – notably male jealousy of female fertility, or the use of loud noises to mark transitions – could lead disparate societies to assign similar meanings to such an instrument. For example, Andrew Lang in 1889 wrote that “similar minds, working with simple means towards similar ends, might evolve the bull-roarer and its mystic uses anywhere”, without needing common origin. Modern scholars with a psychological bent, like Alan Dundes (1976), have interpreted the bullroarer complex as arising from a basic Freudian scenario: men in many cultures feel unconscious womb envy and concoct initiation rituals with bullroarer “womb sounds” to compensate. Thus the recurring myth of women’s former ownership would be an expression of male guilt or anxiety rather than a literal memory. The independent view gains some plausibility from the fact that bullroarers are easy to make (a flat board and string, unlike, say, complex metallurgy that clearly diffused). Additionally, not every culture on earth has bullroarers – for instance, they were absent in much of East Asia and in some Native American groups – so independent-inventionists point to patchy distribution as evidence that not all human groups found bullroarers “obvious.” Instead, they surmise multiple origins in places where conditions favored it (e.g. open landscapes where sound can carry, a patriarchal social structure that would use it, etc.).

However, the independent model struggles to explain the tight clustering of traits we detailed. If random tribes invented bullroarers occasionally, one would expect many idiosyncratic uses. Yet wherever the bullroarer is culturally important, it reliably sits at the center of a specific initiatory complex. Why, for example, would an independently invented bullroarer in both Australia and Brazil both come to be taboo to women, both linked to serpent imagery, both used in a death-rebirth ritual, and both with myths of female origin? Each of those features is not inevitable from the object’s basic nature; their co-occurrence smacks of tradition, not coincidence. As Loeb put it, “there is no psychological principle” forcing those elements together – a purely functional or Jungian approach can’t easily deduce, say, the serpent motif or the matriarchy myth from first principles. The independent-invention theory thus has to invoke a rather miraculous parallelism across continents – essentially, it must assume human minds tend to recreate an almost identical elaborate cult wherever a wooden slat is swung. That stretches credulity.

Diffusionist Theory: This view holds that the bullroarer complex began in one place (or a few places) and was carried elsewhere by cultural transmission – whether through migration, trade, or other contact. It doesn’t mean every instance was directly passed on; rather, the core complex spread and then diversified slightly. Diffusion was the favored explanation among many early 20th-century ethnologists once the full picture of bullroarer distribution became known. For example, the German scholar Otto Zerries in 1942 catalogued bullroarer use in 40 different South American tribes on top of myriad Old World examples, concluding that only diffusion could account for this. In 1929, a Nature editorial flatly stated that the bullroarer’s occurrence “among peoples so widely separated in space and time” strongly suggests it “formed part of the stock of culture of early man, handed down by diffusion and migration”. Even the skeptical Robert Lowie admitted that the bullroarer and male-initiation package is “one of the best cases for historical transmission” in ethnology.

Modern diffusion arguments benefit from new tools. Genetic and linguistic data can help trace ancient population movements, lending context to the bullroarer’s spread. For instance, it is now known that the Indigenous peoples of Australia and the Amazon share some deep ancestry via the first migrations out of Africa and into Asia (the “Southern route” hypothesis). If both Australians and Amazonians have bullroarer cults, and their ancestors diverged perhaps ~40,000 years ago, one might posit the cult predates that split – i.e. it was carried by the initial modern human explorers. Alternatively, perhaps the practice arose later, but still early enough to be carried to Australia (>50kya) and to the Americas (>15kya). We know bullroarers show up archaeologically in Europe by ~18kya and possibly were in use earlier (maybe even by late Neanderthals, though claims of Neanderthal “bullroarers” are speculative). The distribution of bullroarers almost maps onto the distribution of human migrations: Africa, Eurasia, Australia, the Americas all have them except notably far Northeast Asia (Siberia except Chukchi) and easternmost North America – regions which might have lost them or never adopted them. Such gaps could be due to later cultural changes (e.g. some Arctic cultures focusing on other shamanic tools).

If diffusion is assumed, the next question is when and where the bullroarer cult originated. While we cannot be certain, the evidence hints at extreme antiquity. A reasonable hypothesis is that the bullroarer was part of the cultural repertoire of early modern Homo sapiens during the Upper Paleolithic (ca. 40,000–20,000 BC). This was the era when we see the efflorescence of cave art, personal ornaments, and presumably complex rituals. The fact that we have Magdalenian bullroarers in Europe suggests the instrument was known by ~15k BC in at least one population. It could have originated earlier (the concept is simple enough that its first invention might not be preserved). Some diffusionist thinkers (e.g. Graebner, Jensen) speculated that all male secret societies from Australia to America descend from a single “hunter’s initiation cult” that emerged in the late Ice Age. They pointed to the coincidence that many hunter-gatherer societies share not just bullroarers but whole initiation sequences. For example, the details Loeb listed – bullroarer + circumcision/scar + elder masquerading as monster – appear in Khoisan Africa, Australian Aboriginal, some North American and Malaysian groups, etc.. It is as if a cultural “package” was carried along as humans peopled the world.

One can even imagine the bullroarer cult as a kind of Stone Age “meme complex” that conferred advantages: it created strong male bonds, coordinated group hunting through initiation solidarity, and controlled group reproduction by regulating women’s influence. Such a complex might well have spread because groups that had it were more cohesive or expansive. This is speculative, but it’s notable that bullroarers are often tied to hunter societies (Australian desert, African Bushmen, Great Plains, Amazon hunter-horticulturalists). Farming civilizations largely abandoned the male initiation cult (with some exceptions like Greek mysteries), possibly because social complexity demanded new forms of control. So another angle: maybe the bullroarer cult spread early with hunter-gatherers, then waned in many agrarian societies (persisting only in pockets like mysteries or folk magic), and survived robustly mainly in regions that remained tribal.

There is some genetic evidence that could align with diffusion. For instance, certain genetic studies show that Australian Aboriginals and some South Americans share ancient genetic lineages separate from other groups, hinting at very early waves of migration. If both those groups have bullroarer traditions, it suggests the tradition could date back to their common root (potentially over 15,000 years ago). On the other hand, if bullroarers were absent in East Asian Neolithic cultures and only show up in later folklore (e.g. among the Ainu or some Siberians), that could mean the practice died out in some regions even as it persisted in others. The diffusion model doesn’t claim an unbroken chain everywhere, just that the origin was singular or limited, with spread followed by differential retention.

Crucially, the burden of improbability seems lower for diffusion than for independent invention. Kroeber wryly noted that rejecting diffusion in such cases often requires assuming “spontaneous generation” of the same complex in multiple places – tantamount to invoking miracles rather than history. A scientifically parsimonious view would trace lineages where possible. The bullroarer cult provides a clear lineage to trace, if we have the courage to do so.

By synthesizing our data, we can venture a diffusionist scenario: The bullroarer likely originated as part of a male-focused ritual system in an ancestral human culture – possibly in Upper Paleolithic Eurasia (or even earlier in Africa, though no direct evidence there yet). This practice spread with migrating populations: it reached Australia early (some suggest with the later waves of Pama-Nyungan expansion, as bullroarer usage and the Rainbow Serpent myth seem to intensify ~4,000 years ago in Australia). It spread through South and Southeast Asia (bullroarers known in India, Malaysia) and likely into the Americas with the first Paleoindians (some Plains tribes have origin myths of a “Thunder stick” that sound very bullroarer-like). It was known in Ice Age Europe (as we have artifacts), and persisted into the Neolithic Near East (as we saw at Göbekli Tepe). In parts of the world it later faded or transmuted (becoming a toy in Europe, perhaps being supplanted by drum-and-mask societies in some Bantu Africa). But in culturally conservative regions – Aboriginal Australia, many parts of Melanesia, the Amazon, and some North American tribes – it survived into modern times, allowing us a glimpse of this ancient heritage. As one recent author put it, “the bullroarer reminds us that a form of globalization existed in the Stone Age: a globalization of ritual ideas, spread by the slow migrations of tribal peoples.”

None of this denies that humans could reinvent a bullroarer-like toy. But the full package of meanings is exceedingly unlikely to be reinvented multiple times. The diffusion hypothesis, therefore, emerges as the more parsimonious explanation for the bullroarer complex’s distribution. In Section 6 we will discuss the implications of this for understanding early human society (e.g. the possibility of a widespread “men’s cult” stratum in late Paleolithic culture). First, however, we examine more closely the symbolic dimensions of the bullroarer’s sound and form – dimensions that help explain why this instrument was so potent and thus why it spread so successfully.

5. Symbolism: Sound, Cyclone, and Sky-Serpent#

Why did the bullroarer captivate so many cultures? Much of its power lies in its symbolism – the layers of meaning attributed to its sound, motion, and form. Three interrelated symbolic themes surface repeatedly: (1) the bullroarer’s drone is likened to thunder or the roar of a storm-wind, tying it to weather and sky powers; (2) the whirling motion and sound evoke a whirlwind or cyclone, a pillar of sound connecting earth and sky; (3) the bullroarer is associated with serpents – especially sky serpents or primordial snakes – which themselves often personify thunder, rain, or the world-axis in myth. These symbolic equations (sound = thunder, motion = cyclone, object = serpent) might seem fanciful, but they recur with striking frequency.

Sound as Thunderous Voice: Virtually everywhere, people describe the bullroarer’s noise in terms of natural thunder or roaring wind. The Hopi, as noted, explicitly compare it to wind and use it to call thunderclouds. In some Aboriginal Australian languages, the bullroarer’s name reflects this – e.g. the Yolngu call it marrŋun (literally “noise/spirit of the storm”). Among the Fuegian Indians of Tierra del Fuego (Selk’nam), the bullroarer was called k’oi k’oi, imitating the howling wind, and was spun to invoke the sky’s wrath in women’s initiation (in their case, interestingly, women had a bullroarer ritual to terrorize men, which was later inverted). In ancient Greece, writers like Plutarch note that the rites of Dionysus used the bullroarer to produce a sound “like the rolling of thunder” in the mountains. The instrument’s English name “bull-roarer” itself comes from the notion that it mimics the bellow of a bull or a distant thunderclap. And indeed, acoustically the bullroarer generates a low-frequency pulsating hum that, at a distance, is very reminiscent of thunder reverberating. This auditory link likely encouraged the belief that by spinning it, one could summon storms or communicate with sky gods. Haddon reported that in New Guinea, certain tribes would spin bullroarers during droughts to call up rain, believing the noise attracted rain spirits. In East Africa, early records say Masai herders used a bullroarer (called orkanyarró) to ward off lightning and hail from their cattle – literally as a “storm charm”. Similarly in Europe, as mentioned, folk names like “thunder-spell” in Scotland and Donderplank (“thunder plank”) in the Netherlands persisted into the 19th century. All this underscores that the bullroarer was the sound of thunder on demand. As a human-made thunder, it allowed ritual specialists to speak with the voice of the storm. This capacity no doubt elevated its status as a sacred tool: controlling rain and wind is a prime shamanic or priestly function in any agrarian or pastoral society.

Whirlwind and World-Pillar: The act of swinging a bullroarer – a board gyrating around a string – naturally brings to mind a vortex or spinning column. Some Aboriginal myths explicitly compare the bullroarer’s motion to a whirlwind that connects heaven and earth. In the Wik-Mungkan lore (Cape York, Australia), the sound of the bullroarer is said to “suck up” the boy’s spirit like a whirlwind during initiation, carrying it to the sky for a moment and then back to the ground. The instrument’s physical action creates a circular disk of sound as it rotates at high speed; observers often describe a palpable column of vibrating air. Anthropologists have noted that many bullroarer boards are decorated with spirals, concentric circles, or zigzag patterns – designs strongly associated with whirlwinds, lightning, or water eddies. For example, the Basque furrunfarru bullroarer has carved spirals, and Basque folklore connects it to night winds. Australian tjurunga often have concentric circle motifs which elders say represent swirling wind, or the circular “water of life” in a well (which again ties to rain).

One evocative interpretation is that the bullroarer symbolizes the axis mundi – the cosmic pillar or world-axis that in many myths links sky, earth, and underworld. When whirled, the bullroarer’s cord and the blurred board form a spinning line around a center (the handler’s hand) – visually akin to a spindle of the world. In some West African traditions, the bullroarer (e.g. among the Igbo, called ogo) is indeed associated with the sky column that the Creator lowered to send messages. The Dogon of Mali have a sacred spinner called buuru that cosmologically represents the rotation of the heavens (though some argue that’s a separate spinning implement). Nonetheless, the widespread use of bullroarers in ceremonies aimed at world-renewal (initiations, New Year rites, rain dances) hints that people saw it as a tool to “stir” the cosmos, to churn the invisible energies. Mircea Eliade wrote that the bullroarer’s noise “reproduces the sound of the original Chaos” and thus is used to recreate the world at each initiation. This aligns with the idea that in whirling it, shamans or priests symbolically turn the vault of heaven or churn the primeval waters (as in Vedic and other Indo-European myth, where a rotating churn/staff is central – perhaps not coincidentally, “rhombos” in Greek also meant a magician’s spinning device to draw down gods).

In plain terms, the centrifugal whirling of the bullroarer could represent the generative spiraling force of creation. Some tribal explanations are quite concrete: e.g. in the New Guinea Yabim tribe, the bullroarer is named balum which means “grandfather spirit” and refers to a tornado; they say the world was shaped by a primeval cyclone, whose sound was that of a giant bullroarer swung by the ancestor Balum. So here the bullroarer is almost the engine of creation. In Amazonia too, recall that after the hero Yurupary was burned, a whirlwind of flames rose to sky and became a palm tree whose sections turned into the first Yuruparí instruments. His soul ascended in that pillar of smoke and wind. Later, when women steal the flutes, the myth says men used a “vortex” of leaves and wind (possibly an allusion to bullroarer) to scare them. These could be metaphors, but they indicate how intimately the bullroarer’s motion was linked to ideas of a rotating, powerful column – whether of storm, fire, or sound – that connects realms.

Serpent Symbolism: Across many cultures, the bullroarer is tied to serpentine imagery. We saw an archaeological instance: the Körtik Tepe Neolithic bullroarer engraved with a snake. This is amazingly prescient, because thousands of years later, bullroarers in cultures half a world away also bear snake motifs. In the Amazon, some Yuruparí flutes and accompanying bullroarers are painted with snake patterns, often representing the anaconda spirit (a water-serpent connected to fertility). Among the Bororo of Brazil, the bullroarer is actually named me’gálo, meaning “ghost” or “shade”, but their initiation rites include a huge serpent effigy, and the roar of the bullroarer is said to be the hiss of that primordial snake-spirit emerging from water. In Aboriginal Australia, perhaps the most famous mythic being is the Rainbow Serpent – a gigantic snake that controls water and rain. In some Northern Territory tribes, the loudest bullroarers are explicitly called “Rainbow Serpent’s roar”, and are only swung during the most sacred rainmaking and initiation ceremonies. The sound is believed to awaken the Rainbow Snake from underground and bring torrential rain or floods (again symbolically “swallowing” the uninitiated, to be reborn after the flood). In one recorded Yolngu narrative, the men told the women that the bullroarer was “Yurlunggur” – the name of the Great Python – crying out in hunger, and that if women approached, the snake would eat them. The bullroarer, being physically a elongated flat object, is even shaped a bit like a snake’s head or body. Some bullroarers are painted with zigzag stripes or given names like “Lightning snake.” The association likely arises because snakes are often metaphors for both fertility (rain, water) and danger (fangs, strangling) – much like the bullroarer is both life-giving (calling rain, marking rebirth) and deadly (taboo, punishable by death). The swirling motion of a bullroarer even resembles a snake twisting rapidly, and the “whizz” could be likened to a snake’s hiss or the buzz of a flying serpent.

In Greece, the link was also present: Dionysus was sometimes called “Drakon” (serpent), and his mystic fanatics handled snakes; the bullroarer in Orphic myth might have double-meaning as a symbol of the Ophidian (snake) nature of Dionysus’ soul. Moreover, one of Dionysus’ mythical toys was a pine-cone on a staff (thyrsus) – pine-cones and spirals often represented the coiled force of a snake or the pineal gland, etc. In any case, what we repeatedly find is the bullroarer functioning as a conduit to serpent energy. It might be the Rainbow Snake of Australia, the Anaconda Spirit of Amazon, the ancestral Piton of New Guinea, or the cosmic Python behind Dionysian frenzy. All these serpents share qualities: they connect earth and sky (rainbows or climbing vines), they shed skin (rebirth), they produce a humming/hissing (in mythic imagination), and they are often guardians of sacred knowledge taken from women (interesting side note: many cultures have an “Eve and the Serpent” style motif, perhaps not coincidentally).

Finally, consider the phallic aspect: Many have noted the bullroarer’s shape is phallic, and the sound may be thought of as a kind of “male voice” claiming creative power (where female power is to give birth, male power is to produce thunderous sound). In some languages the bullroarer name even doubles for penis (Greek rhombos in slang, or the Kaurna term in Australia which I won’t repeat here). By wielding this “flatus” (breath/voice) of the Bullroarer, men symbolically inseminate the social world with order and rebirth, so to speak. It becomes a male womb – as Dundes argued, the enclosed initiation hut with bullroarer sound is a big male uterus where boys are reborn. And what commonly symbol in myth is both phallic and serpentine? The snake/dragon, of course. So the bullroarer may unite these symbols: it is at once a serpent (phallic) and a thunder-voice (womb-like), a unifier of male and female creative principles under male control.

In summary, the bullroarer’s whirr = thunder, its spin = cyclone, its identity = serpent, all tie into a picture of it as a cosmic connector and fertility regulator. Its deep hum is the sound of creation, the breath of ancestors, the roar of the storm that brings life-giving rain and strikes down the unworthy. Little wonder that cultures treated it with awe. The men who could wield this tool effectively claimed “We control the thunder and the rain, we command the serpent of the sky” – a powerful assertion of sacerdotal authority. Thus, the symbolism reinforced the social function: by monopolizing the bullroarer, men monopolized the perceived ability to speak to gods, bring rain, and renew the world.

6. Synthesis & Implications: The Bullroarer and the Rise of Male Secret Societies#

We have seen that the bullroarer is far more than a curiosity; it is a through-line connecting myriad societies and belief systems. What does this mean for our understanding of early human culture? The evidence suggests that the bullroarer is a proxy for the emergence of structured, secrecy-based male sodalities in prehistory – in other words, it marks the point when men began organizing exclusive ritual groups (or “mystery cults”) with initiation ceremonies that deliberately separated male religious knowledge from women. This represents a significant social development: a formalization of male solidarity and the institutionalization of gendered ritual power. Many scholars consider such secret male “clubs” a hallmark of fully modern human social organization. They entail not just kinship but supra-kin associations, long-term planning (initiations happen on cycles), and symbolic transmission of knowledge across generations.

If the diffusionist perspective is correct, the bullroarer cult may preserve a glimpse of the very early stages of religion and social stratification. Imagine small hunter-gatherer bands late in the Ice Age – as population densities grew and complex language/mythology blossomed, it is hypothesized that women initially held significant sway in communal rituals (through their role in fertility, perhaps communal menstrual synchrony, etc.). At some point, men in these societies formed “men’s houses” or initiated men’s ceremonies to assert their own collective power – possibly in response to women’s influence. The bullroarer could have been a novel technology that aided this male ritual revolution: it created terrifying sounds that could be mystified, it required physical strength or skill to operate (thus easy to restrict to men), and it could serve as a shibboleth of initiation (only those who have been through the rite know the trick). By constructing elaborate myths (like those of Yurupary or Twanyirika) around the bullroarer, the male elders effectively sanctified their coup. They had a magical tool that women did not. In many origin myths, this transition is dramatised by a violent confrontation – which symbolically stands for a broader shift from (perceived) female-led to male-led ritual structure.

This is, of course, a theoretical reconstruction, but it is consistent with the ethnographic pattern. Bullroarers are almost never found in totally egalitarian societies or ones with balanced gender ritual (for example, some Indigenous North American groups with more complementary gender roles did not emphasize bullroarers, whereas those with strong gendered secret societies did). They are prominent in cultures known for intense male initiation practices – Aboriginal Australians, many sub-Saharan groups, New Guinea highlanders, Amazon forest tribes, etc.. Significantly, these are often societies that lack formal state structures but have ritual means of social control (sometimes called “ritual government”). The bullroarer cult is a form of “ritual brotherhood”: it forges unity among men of different families or clans by a shared secret and ordeal. Anthropologist G. Höltker (1938) called the bullroarer a cornerstone of what he termed the “Hunting Men’s Union” – a hypothetical ancient fraternity that spanned continents.

If indeed the bullroarer cult diffused from a common source, it implies a surprising level of cultural interconnectedness in the prehistoric world. It suggests that early human ritual culture was, to a degree, unified – not a myriad of unrelated inventions, but variations on a theme set long ago. This does not diminish local creativity; rather, each society indigenized the bullroarer complex in its own style (different names, myths, artistic designs). But the underlying grammar (initiation + voice-of-spirit + female exclusion + myth of prior matriarchy) persisted like a deep structure. For comparative mythology and archaeology, this is a profound point: it means that certain mythic ideas can survive tens of thousands of years. (This aligns with recent research by d’Huy, Witzel, etc., finding Palaeolithic roots for some myths.)

There are also implications for the study of religion. The bullroarer case supports the notion that religion did not simply evolve independently in each region but had lineages, much like languages do. It raises the possibility of a “proto-religion” in the Upper Paleolithic that included shamanic and proto-initiatory elements, which then diversified. The widespread bullroarer might be one of the rare detectable traces of that proto-religion. If male initiation rituals with bullroarers were indeed practiced in Ice Age Eurasia (as the artifacts suggest), then the roots of things like the Eleusinian Mysteries, the Freemasonic lodges, or the Sande/Poro societies of West Africa could arguably all go back to that epoch.

Another implication is for how we think about cultural evolution vs. human universals. The bullroarer example indicates that we must be cautious in attributing similar cultural practices to independent psychological causes. While male envy of women or adolescent fear of adulthood may be near-universal feelings, the specific institutional response (like a bullroarer cult) is not inevitable – it seems to have been invented once or a few times and then taught or imitated elsewhere. This cautions against overusing the “psychic unity of mankind” as an explanation for global cultural patterns. Sometimes, history (diffusion) is a simpler explanation than dozens of coincident inventions. In Kroeber’s words, “the multiplication of independent origin hypotheses without necessity is like multiplying miracles” – better to trace inheritance where possible.

From a social perspective, the diffusion of the bullroarer complex suggests that secret initiatory societies were a successful social strategy that spread widely. These societies often served to educate young men, enforce laws (through fear of supernatural sanction), and bond the community during crises (since the ceremonies are communal). They also frequently acted as mechanisms of social coercion – keeping women and juniors subservient – which can stabilize certain patriarchal social orders. Thus, one could argue the bullroarer cult conferred a kind of fitness on cultures that adopted it, helping them maintain internal cohesion and possibly out-compete groups without such structure. That might explain its broad dissemination.

One might ask: if the bullroarer cult was so widespread early on, why didn’t it survive everywhere? The answer lies in later transformations. For example, as societies grew into chiefdoms and states, new instruments of power emerged (armies, priesthoods, written laws). The raw terror of the bullroarer might have been less necessary or got subsumed into new forms (e.g. church bells in medieval Europe perhaps took over the role of “sounding the spirit” to congregations, but in a non-secret, communal way). Indeed, in Europe the bullroarer devolved into folklore because organized religion (Christianity) viewed such pagan remnants with suspicion or ridicule. In some places (like among the Navajo) the bullroarer shifted into a shamanic tool for healing and weather-working, as open initiations waned. In essence, where the old male cult model broke down (due to external or internal pressures), the bullroarer’s role changed or it vanished. However, the fact that it still exists at all – and is even being revived in some neo-pagan or indigenous contexts – speaks to its enduring allure.

It is profoundly moving to consider that when, say, an Aboriginal elder in Arnhem Land swings his bullroarer today and an Amazonian shaman does the same, they are unknowingly participating in a single cultural lineage that may stretch back 15,000 or more years. They are speaking, as it were, the same ritual language, inherited from a common ancestor culture. This is not coincidence; it is community across time. It means that even after continents drifted apart in human prehistory, certain traditions remained as connective threads in humanity’s tapestry. The bullroarer – “man’s most sacred ritual object” as Haddon called it – has truly given us a lesson in folklore and prehistory. It teaches that while empires rise and fall, while languages and technologies change, some sounds and symbols echo unchanged across epochs and continents. In the hollow roar of a spinning plank, we hear the distant voice of our ancestors, a roar that still resonates in the world’s far corners carrying the message that we remember more of our beginnings than we realize.

7. FAQ and Conclusion#

Q: Isn’t it possible that bullroarers were invented multiple times independently? A: While not impossible for the device itself, the full ritual complex around bullroarers is too specific to attribute to coincidence. As we argued, the chances that dozens of cultures all independently decided that a whirring board should be used in male-initiation ceremonies, kept secret from women, and explained by myths of female origin and theft, are extremely low. Independent invention might explain the presence of noise-makers in general, but not the consistent clustering of mystic roles. Diffusion (cultural spread) is the more parsimonious explanation in light of the ethnographic and archaeological evidence.

Q: How could a ritual practice spread across oceans and continents in prehistoric times? A: Through two main mechanisms: human migration and intercultural exchange. Early humans were far more mobile and interconnected than once thought. For example, genetic studies show ancient gene flow between Australian Aboriginals and South Americans, implying possible contact or parallel migration routes. Similarly, the first humans to enter the Americas may have carried bullroarer traditions from Siberia (where Chukchi and other Arctic groups did have bullroarer-like practices). Maritime contact between Polynesia, Australia, and possibly South America is also a subject of ongoing research – any such contacts could spread cultural items. More subtly, ideas can spread through intermediary cultures even if people themselves don’t travel all the way. The bullroarer might have diffused across Eurasia into multiple streams: one south into Oceania, one west into Europe/Africa, one east into the Americas. By the time of European colonial expansion, bullroarers were already nearly ubiquitous outside of large civilization centers. This broad distribution suggests a very old diffusion pattern, likely tracing back to the late Pleistocene/early Holocene when humans colonized new lands.

Q: Does the bullroarer complex imply an actual matriarchal period in history? A: The myths of women’s former ownership are so widespread that some 19th-century scholars (Bachofen, etc.) indeed posited a “primordial matriarchy”. Modern anthropology is more cautious. Most likely, these myths are symbolic inversions that serve to justify the status quo (patriarchy) by imagining an earlier time when women had power and lost it due to some transgression. It’s possible they preserve an echo of real gender upheavals in prehistory – for instance, as societies grew, men’s physical dominance may have increasingly asserted itself in religion, supplanting female-centered practices (like open fertility rites). However, it’s unlikely there was a universal matriarchal stage; rather, different societies had different gender dynamics, and the bullroarer myth might have been retrofitted to local scenarios. In any case, the important point is that men everywhere felt the need to explain why women are excluded, and did so with remarkably similar stories. Whether those stories reflect actual events or not, they reveal a shared psychological and social pattern.

Q: Are there any cultures where women do use bullroarers? A: Very few. One notable exception: among the Zulu of South Africa, there was a tradition of young women (girls) using a bullroarer called iNsimbi during their own puberty rites. However, this was a relatively small bullroarer, and interestingly the practice died out by the 20th century, possibly under influence from men’s cult restrictions. In general, whenever bullroarers were adopted by women, men tended to either abandon them or reclaim them with different significance. The Selk’nam (Ona) of Tierra del Fuego had, according to myth, an original women’s bullroarer (Kokoch) used to subjugate men, but in historical times it was men who used it to frighten women in their initiation (a role-reversal explicitly said to be revenge). These few cases actually reinforce the overall rule by casting it in relief. Virtually everywhere in ethnography, bullroarers are “secret men’s business.”

Q: The bullroarer seems simple; could it have ritual uses beyond the male cult? A: Yes, in some cultures it also had other ritual applications. For instance, certain Native American shamans (Navajo hataalii) used bullroarers to summon healing spirits in ceremonies open to both genders. In parts of Melanesia, bullroarers were spun not only at initiations but at funerals to ward off the deceased’s ghost or at planting rituals to invoke ancestral blessings. These uses, however, typically exist alongside – not instead of – the main initiatory function. They may represent either older layers (e.g. a shamanic use that pre-dated the full men’s cult) or later adaptations (using the revered instrument for additional purposes once its secrecy erodes).

Q: Do modern cultures remember the meaning of the bullroarer? A: Among groups that actively use it, absolutely – they have rich mythologies and explanations as we’ve seen. Among cultures where it lapsed into a toy, often the original meaning was largely forgotten but faint folk beliefs lingered. For example, Irish rural folk in the 19th century called the bullroarer a “banshee toy” – banshees being female spirits – which might hint at a memory of the ghostly voice idea. In Madagascar, European observers noted the bullroarer was a boys’ toy by 1900, but locals still had a taboo that women shouldn’t handle it and a legend that it fell from the sky. So even where explicit knowledge faded, fragments of the old significance survived. Today, there are revitalization efforts: for instance, some Australian Aboriginal communities are re-teaching young men the bullroarer’s sacred role as part of cultural revival, and certain neo-pagan groups have adopted bullroarers in rituals (though often without the strict gender rules). The bullroarer thus continues to fascinate and is finding new meanings even in the modern world.

Conclusion: The case of the bullroarer underscores a key insight: deep commonalities underlie the surface diversity of human cultures. This simple instrument, found on every inhabited continent, carries with it a complex of rites and myths that are eerily similar wherever we look. The evidence strongly favors that this is not a fluke of parallel invention, but the legacy of a primordial cultural heritage – one that likely originated in the prehistoric dawn of human symbolic life and diffused widely as our ancestors peopled the earth. By following the bullroarer’s echoes, we have traced threads of initiation and myth that bind Australian Aboriginal elders with Amazonian shamans, Greek initiates with Hopi rain priests. These threads suggest that early Homo sapiens, as they spread out of Africa and across the globe, shared certain ritual solutions to the challenges of society: how to mark the transition to adulthood, how to maintain cohesion and authority, how to interact with the unseen forces of nature. The bullroarer complex was one such solution – elegant in its simplicity, profound in its effects.

Understanding this deep diffusion does not diminish the uniqueness of each culture’s expression; rather, it enriches our appreciation of human creativity, showing how an ancient idea can be adapted in countless colorful ways while retaining a common core. It also encourages us to revisit other widespread myths and symbols with an eye to possible ancient connections. In a time when anthropology shied away from “grand narratives,” the bullroarer invites us to consider that some grand narratives might be true – that there are indeed long lines of cultural descent connecting us to Ice Age ancestors. By rehabilitating diffusion as a valid explanatory mechanism (shorn of colonialist baggage), we can better integrate all evidence – ethnographic, archaeological, genetic – into a coherent human story.

In closing, the bullroarer has served as a guide into that story. It has shown that behind the various tongues of the world, there may lie a shared spiritual grammar taught by our forefathers (and perhaps foremothers). To hear a bullroarer’s haunting drone in the desert night or the jungle dusk is to experience a sound that literally echoes across millennia – a sound that once heralded the sacred in Paleolithic camps and still does in remote villages today. It reminds us that, as a species, we have a cultural memory that far predates writing or even agriculture. It challenges us to listen to those echoes and piece together the wisdom (and follies) of our deep past. The bullroarer, a small wooden board with a big voice, thus becomes a key to unlocking human spiritual history – truly a global marker of cultural diffusion and the dawn of fully human ritual.

Sources Cited: (Chicago Author-Date style)

• Lang, Andrew. 1885. Custom and Myth, pp. 85–90. (Early observation: “to study the bull-roarer is to take a lesson in folklore,” noting its wide diffusion and mystic uses).
• Frazer, James G. 1890. The Golden Bough (1st ed.). London: Macmillan. (Discusses bullroarer in initiation rites, parallels between New Guinea and Dionysian ritual).
• Matthews, R. H. 1898. “Bullroarers Used by the Australian Aborigines.” Journal of the Anthropological Institute 27: 52–60. (Documents universal bullroarer taboo to women across Australian tribes).
• Spencer, Baldwin, and F. J. Gillen. 1899. The Native Tribes of Central Australia. London: Macmillan. (Detailed Arrernte initiation ceremonies; Twanyirika myth: bullroarer as spirit voice, symbolic death/rebirth).
• Haddon, Alfred C. 1898. The Study of Man. London: Macmillan. (Comparative series of bullroarers worldwide; calls it “the most ancient, widely spread, and sacred religious symbol in the world”).
• Loeb, E. M. 1929. “Tribal Initiations and Secret Societies.” UC Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 25(3): 245–288. (Global survey; argues bullroarer complex must have diffused: elements too consistently grouped).
• Nature (Editorial). 1929. “Secret Societies and the Bull-roarer.” Nature 123 (June 8, 1929): 857–859. (Summarizes consensus that bullroarer complex likely spread from early man’s culture).
• Zerries, Otto. 1942. Das Schwirrholz (The Bullroarer). Stuttgart: Kohlhammer. (Monograph documenting bullroarer uses in 40 South American tribes + elsewhere; supports diffusion).
• Dundes, Alan. 1976. “A Psychoanalytic Study of the Bullroarer.” Man 11(2): 220–238. (Interprets bullroarer complex via Freudian symbols: bullroarer = male phallus and feces, initiation = male rebirth, etc.).
• Gewertz, Deborah (ed.). 1988. Myths of Matriarchy Reconsidered. Sydney: Oceania Monographs 33. (Essays on the “women’s sacred flutes” myths in Melanesia and Amazonia; skeptical of literal matriarchy but analyzes the function of the myths).
• Knight, Chris. 1995. Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture. New Haven: Yale University Press. (Proposes that early human culture involved women’s solidarity and men’s response by creating ritual like bullroarers to mimic menstrual synchronization).
• Gregor, Thomas, and Donald Tuzin (eds.). 2001. Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia: An Exploration of the Comparative Method. Berkeley: UC Press. (Comparative studies of male cults; multiple chapters discuss bullroarer/flute myths in both regions).
• Dietrich, Oliver, and Jens Notroff. 2016. “A Decorated Bone ‘Spatula’ from Göbekli Tepe: On the Pitfalls of Iconographic Interpretation in Early Neolithic Art.” Neo-Lithics 1/16: 22–30. (Reports possible bullroarer-like objects at Göbekli Tepe and Körtik Tepe; snake-incised bone with hole; experimental confirmation of sound).
• Rusch, Neil et al. 2018. “The Doring River Bullroarers Rock Painting: Continuities in Sound and Rainmaking.” Journal of Archaeological Science: Reports 21: 1307–1321. (Analyzes a South African rock painting of bullroarer players; replicated instruments for sound; links to San rain-control rituals).
• Cutler, Andrew. 2024. “The Bullroarer: a history of man’s most sacred ritual object.” Vectors of Mind (Substack), July 24, 2024. https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/the-bullroarer-much-more-than-you
• Cutler, Andrew. 2025. “Why Did Male Initiation Rituals Diffuse?” Vectors of Mind (Substack). https://www.vectorsofmind.com/p/why-did-male-initiation-rituals-diffuse