The Mouth Is Opened Twice

TL;DR

• The Arunta of Central Australia say the first people were sealed lumps until two beings cut their mouths open with stone knives.
• Their rite lays a “ban of silence” on every novice and lifts it by touching his mouth. Five more peoples between Lake Eyre and the Gulf of Carpentaria do the same.
• On Tutu in Torres Strait, seven boys who shouted to their mothers were killed by their fathers.
• The Marind-anim of New Guinea thrust clay into novices’ mouths to act out the first speech.
• The Eve Theory reads the rite as the first “I am”, staged again for each boy.

“A cut with the knife made the mouth, which was pulled open several times to make it flexible.” — Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen, The Native Tribes of Central Australia (1899), p. 389

Why are initiates forbidden to speak? #

Tutu is a sandbank island in Torres Strait. When its boys were made into men they sat for a month under mat shelters in the kwod, the men’s ground. A. C. Haddon had the account from Maino:

“For a month the kernge were hidden within these moveable shelters, spending all the day in the silent, stifling darkness. They might neither play nor talk, but had to keep quiet all the time, sitting still and looking down.” — Haddon 1904, p. 210

“Infringement of these rules was punished with death.” Once seven of the boys broke away, saw their mothers carrying yams and sweet potatoes, and shouted to them for food. They were brought back to the kwod, “where they were immediately killed by their respective fathers with the stone previously mentioned.” The fathers had a song for it: “My piccaninny he been born for nothing, he die to-day” (p. 210).

Seven sons were killed by their own fathers for one shout. A rule kept at that price sits at the centre of the rite.

Set that rule beside a myth. Peoples on several continents say the first humans were sealed, mouthless or half-made, and had to be opened to become people. Their initiations do the same to every boy. The rite shuts his mouth, for days or for months, sometimes on pain of death. Then it opens the mouth again, usually by touching the lips, and often with a new name and the right to speak to men.

The Eve Theory of Consciousness holds that the inner “I” was discovered and then taught, and that male initiation is where it was taught. On that reading the rite re-stages the moment a human being became a speaking self. The myth remembers the same moment as surgery.

Which peoples say the first humans had no mouths? #

The Arunta: a cut that makes the mouth #

The Arunta (Arrernte) live around Alice Springs, in Central Australia. Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen wrote down their traditions in the 1890s. In the beginning there were no men and women. There were the Inapertwa, “rudimentary human beings or incomplete men”:

“They had no distinct limbs or organs of sight, hearing or smell, and did not eat food, and presented the appearance of human beings all doubled up into a rounded mass in which just the outline of the different parts of the body could be vaguely seen.” — Spencer and Gillen 1899, p. 388

Two beings called Ungambikula, “out of nothing” or “self-existing”, came down from the western sky with great stone knives. Then: “A cut with the knife made the mouth, which was pulled open several times to make it flexible. A slit on each side separated the upper and lower eye-lids, hidden behind which the eyes were already present” (p. 389).

The eyes were already there behind the lids. The person was inside the lump, waiting to be let out.

The makers went straight on to the next cut. They performed “the rite of lartna or circumcision by means of a fire-stick” (1899, p. 389), and “after having circumcised the men the two ungambikula changed themselves into little lizards” (Spencer and Gillen 1904, p. 150). Opening the mouth and cutting the foreskin are one job, done by the same makers.

Crow’s bill and small mouths: Unmatjera and Kaitish #

North of the Arunta, the Unmatjera and Kaitish name other makers. An old crow finds a half-formed grub man, and it “cut the eyelids open, slashed across the face with its bill, making the mouth” (1904, p. 157).

The Kaitish give the work to two little-hawk boys. A sky being named Atnatu, who “had a black face and no atna (anus)”, drops them a stone knife. They circumcise themselves and walk the country initiating everyone they meet. Then they came to “some individuals who were remarkable for the possession of extremely small mouths”, and the brothers “both transformed them into complete men and women and also initiated them” (pp. 345–346). Small mouths are cured on the cutting ground.

Lake Eyre and the south-east #

North-east of Lake Eyre in South Australia the Yaurorka told the missionary Otto Siebert of the Mura-mura Paralina, who came on four incomplete beings cowering together:

“Going up to them, he smoothed their bodies, stretched out their limbs, slit up their fingers and toes, formed their mouths, noses, and eyes, stuck ears on them, and blew into their ears in order that they might hear. Lastly, he perforated the body from the mouth downwards, and projected a piece of hard clay (Daka) through it with so much force that it passed through the body, forming the fundament.” — Howitt 1904, pp. 780–781

The Yuin of the New South Wales south coast say the first creatures were limbless until the Emu-wren “turned them into men and women by splitting their legs, separating the arms from the sides, and slitting up their fingers” (Howitt, pp. 484–485).

From Alice Springs to the New South Wales coast the first people are sealed, and a visitor with a blade or a beak lets them out. Now watch what the same peoples do to a boy.

How do the Arunta close a boy’s mouth and open it again? #

The Arunta boy is painted and told he is now a Wurtja. A rule is laid on his mouth: “He must not speak unless spoken to, and even then his words must be as few as possible, and spoken in a low tone” (1899, p. 221). If he peeps at the men’s work, Twanyirika, “the great spirit whose voice was heard when the bull-roarers spoke, would carry him away” (p. 222).

He is circumcised while the bullroarers roar. Dazed and bleeding, he is told: “You have done well, you have not cried out.” The boards are pressed on the wound, and he learns that it was these and not Twanyirika which made the sound. “To this the boy listened in silence” (p. 248).

After subincision he is put with companions “who are told to camp with him but on no account to speak to him”, for three days, “during which he speaks to no one”. He still may not address any man who took part in his making. For each he must bring in game. The man performs a sacred ceremony, and then the youth, now called Ertwa-kurka, is opened:

“the mouth of the Ertwa-kurka and those of all present are touched with some sacred object which has been used during the ceremony, such as a Nurtunja, and in this way the ban of silence is removed.” — Spencer and Gillen 1899, p. 260

The Arunta have a word for it, Aralkalilima. At the Engwura, the last and greatest of their rites, the authors watched it again and again. A young man opened a vein over four of the old men, and “some of the blood had been allowed to flow into their open mouths, the idea being to strengthen the older men at the expense of the younger ones”. Then an old man “took a bunch of feathers which had been used as part of the decoration and touched with it the mouths of all those present. By means of this action, which is called Aralkalilima, the ban of silence was broken” (p. 382).

On another day the performer “personated a man carrying about the body of a dead man which he intended to eat”. The corpse was a bundle of grass stalks bound with fur-string called Atnuta, “emblematic of the limp body”. Afterwards “the ceremony of Aralkalilima was performed, the Atnuta being used to stroke the mouth of the ab-moara men” (p. 385). Mouths are unsealed with the stand-in for a body about to be eaten.

The people who say the first mouth was cut with a knife and pulled open have a named rite for opening mouths, and they perform it on every man they make.

What unseals the mouth among five Central Australian peoples? #

In 1901–02 Spencer and Gillen travelled from Lake Eyre to the Gulf of Carpentaria. Among people after people they met the “ban of silence”, and each time it was lifted at the mouth.

Urabunna, Lake Eyre. The rite opens with a hand: “a man who stands in the relationship of kadnini (paternal grandfather) to the boy seizes hold of him and puts his hand over the boy’s mouth, telling him to remain silent” (1904, p. 332). The boy is circumcised and told “that he is now a man and not a boy”. Then the men who assisted “put a little bit of meat up to his mouth, and in that way release him from the ban of silence” (pp. 334–335). His second name “is given to him by the father’s father when he is initiated” (p. 582). A grandfather covers the mouth, and a grandfather supplies the name that comes out of it.

Unmatjera and Kaitish. The circumcised youth kneels in smoke. “One or more of his mias (mothers) holds his arms while his sisters rub him all over and then touch his mouth with a yam, thereby releasing him from the ban of silence” (p. 344). The Unmatjera tell the same act as ancestral history: “The younger brother had not yet spoken, but after the ceremony the father stroked his mouth with some mulga leaves and thus released him from the ban of silence” (p. 417).

Warramunga, Tennant Creek. The boy brings food to “the men who had come to visit him and had shown him their penes”. Until then “he may not speak to them nor in their presence, but on being presented with food each man in turn gives him his finger to bite, and thus releases him from the ban of silence.” A footnote gives the men’s reason:

“After initiation he is supposed to be so much impressed with the performance that he is too overcome to talk. The older men also tell him that he has seen strange things and must not talk until he is told that he may by his kulla-kulla. The newly initiated youth is indeed supposed to spend his time pondering over what he has seen.” — Spencer and Gillen 1904, p. 353 n.

Binbinga, Macarthur River. The elder brother tells the boy that “the time had now come for him to walk about a black-fellow and no longer a boy.” He is cut, and “the boy was then made to suck the blood on the knife” (p. 368). Later each man “lifted his hand to the mouth of the latter, crooking the first finger, which the boy bit and was thus released from the ban of silence” (p. 369).

Five peoples with five languages, spread over more than a thousand kilometres, all put something to the lips: meat, a yam, mulga leaves, a man’s finger to bite, and among the Binbinga, first of all, the knife wet with the boy’s own blood.

Why are eastern Australian novices mute until they are named? #

H. E. Aldridge described for A. W. Howitt the Dora of the tribes around Maryborough, Queensland. It begins with an order:

“The boys are told to close their hands and not to open them till they get their new names, under all kinds of fearful penalties.” — Howitt 1904, p. 603

They march for days with fists shut, fed bits of meat by their guardians like infants. “Nor may they speak, being only permitted to nod or shake their heads” (p. 604).

At the ring the Headman chants words “which have no meaning in their language”. He asks several times, “What will your name be?” He speaks the name and says “Shout!”, “and all the assembled people set up a great shout, and repeat the name.” A spear, shield and boomerang are slipped into the boy’s hands, “and he now, for the first time since the ceremonies commenced, opens his hands and looks up from the ground”. “The old (child’s name) is dropped from this time forth” (p. 605).

The Dora boy is sealed at hands and mouth, and a name opens him. Afterwards his life hangs on what he can say. A traveller in that country is asked who he is:

“He says, for instance, ‘I am Bunda; the name I received at the Dora is so and so.’ … If he cannot satisfactorily tell them who he is, he will be almost certainly killed.” — Howitt 1904, pp. 234–235

He must say “I am”, and then the name the rite gave him.

Among the Turrbal of the Brisbane River, Queensland, the boys “are ordered not to speak on pain of death, and in the old times this penalty was certainly inflicted”, and “the old men tried the self-control of the boys by telling them that their mothers were calling them” (p. 596). On Tutu the mothers really were there.

Howitt watched the Kurnai of Gippsland, Victoria, lay their novices under rugs, “to be laid to sleep as boys, in order to be awakened as men.” The rule: “They were neither to move nor to speak. If one of them wanted anything, he was to signify this to his Bullawang by chirping like an Emu-wren” (p. 623). The Emu-wren is the men’s “brother” among the Kurnai and their neighbours the Yuin (pp. 148–150), and among the Yuin it split the limbless first beings into men and women. The boy who has lost his speech is allowed only the chirp of the bird that made people.

What were Torres Strait boys taught in the silence? #

On Tutu the month in the dark ended, for those who kept the rule, in a show. They were washed, oiled and dressed, and “two large seeds were put inside the cheeks to make them bulge out and a valve of a kind of white clam was inserted in the mouth, which, distending the latter, showed between the lips as a round white disc” (Haddon 1904, p. 211). A mat was dropped and the mothers ran up wailing, “but the boys showed no emotion, but their hearts beat loudly.”

After a month of shut mouths, the women first see each mouth propped open with a white shell. The boys have been told what they now are: “you a man now and no boy.”

On Mabuiag, a western island of the strait, Waria and Gizu gave Haddon the words of the instruction. The boy is in the hands of his mother’s brother. The teaching begins:

“We tell you and you think every year and every day. What word we speak out, you must put it along your heart.”

The uncle shows the dirt under his fingernail: “This dirt is outside, you put him inside.” Then the central sentences:

“You think yourself” (that is you also can think), “you’re no stone or firewood, you’re a man just like me.”

“If you hear another man call out for your father or call out for your mother, you no speak out, you keep him inside” (i.e. keep your words inside and not utter them). — Haddon 1904, pp. 213–214

The uncle tells him that he can think, and in the next breath that the words are to stay inside. “When you want to speak some word, you speak true, no tell lie.” And the sanction: “by and by you dead quick—maidelaig kill you—same too s’pose you speak too much word” (p. 214). The maidelaig is the sorcerer.

On Mer in the eastern strait the old men told the initiate where to keep what he had heard: “No keep word close to heart, he go speak quick; but in big toe, then you keep him long, when grey hair no speak” (Haddon 1908, p. 311).

What happens to the mouth in New Guinea? #

The Marind-anim live on the south coast of New Guinea, in Indonesia. J. G. Frazer gathered the Dutch reports. In the Marind story a stork throws fish onto the beach, where they become shapeless lumps of clay and warm themselves at a bamboo fire:

“Thus the apertures of their ears, eyes, mouth, and nostrils were opened, but as yet they could not speak, they could only utter a murmuring sound. Their fingers were still joined by membranes like those in the wings of bats.” — Frazer 1918, vol. I, p. 37

They cut the membranes with a bamboo knife. Then “a big bamboo burst with a louder crack than usual, which frightened the people so that they gave a loud shriek, and that was the beginning of human speech.”

This is the Arunta story with the steps pulled apart. The mouth is opened first, and speech arrives later with a shock.

The great Marind initiation, the Mayo, acts the origin story out. An initiated man comes hopping on two sticks as the stork and throws the novices one by one into the enclosure:

“There they must lie motionless; they are stripped of all their ornaments, and coated from head to foot with a thick layer of clay; more than that, lumps of clay are thrust into their mouths by initiated men, and these they have afterwards to spit out into holes dug in the ground.” — Frazer 1918, vol. I, p. 39

The novice is a clay lump with a stopped mouth. He spits the clay out. Then come lessons in every ordinary occupation, of which, “like newborn babes or their ancestors when they first emerged from the water or the earth, they are presumed to be entirely ignorant.”

Further east on the same coast, at Masingara in Papua New Guinea, Gágere told Gunnar Landtman of “a man named Íregíde who had no mouth or anus”, who “could not speak and only muttered, ‘Hm.’” A runaway girl cuts him open while he sleeps. He wakes: “My god, I got mouth now! My god, I got yarn (faculty of speech) now, from mouth yarn he come! … I man now, my word, I man now!” (Landtman 1917, pp. 426–428). His story is told at length in I Man Now.

Íregíde lacks a mouth and an anus. The Yaurorka Paralina makes both, forming the mouth and then driving clay through the body to make the fundament. One telling comes from the Papuan shore of Torres Strait, the other from the deserts by Lake Eyre, and they are strikingly close.

Is the pattern found outside Australia and New Guinea? #

Seram and Virginia #

On Seram in Maluku, Indonesia, every youth had to enter the Kakian society. Heinrich Schurtz quotes Prochnik’s account of the candidate’s return to his family:

“Der Bann des absoluten Schweigens wird aber erst nach Wochen von ihm genommen. Stumm bewegt sich der Jüngling im Kreise seiner Familie und auch in der Gemeinde herum, bis ihm bei einer Sitzung im Baleuw das Reden wieder gestattet wird.”

“The ban of absolute silence is taken from him only after weeks. The youth moves mute among his family and in the community, until at a sitting in the baleuw [men’s house] speech is permitted him again.” — Schurtz 1902, p. 345

Robert Beverley wrote of the Powhatan of Virginia, United States, that after the mad potion of the huskanaw the young men “must pretend to have forgot the very use of their tongues, so as not to be able to speak, nor understand anything that is spoken, till they learn it again” (in Frazer 1913, pp. 266–267).

The Guianas: vomiting up a voice #

The Taulipang and Arekuná are Pemon peoples of the Roraima country, where Brazil, Venezuela and Guyana meet. The Arekuná narrator Aküli told Theodor Koch-Grünberg how shamans came into the world. The ogre Piai’mä has five boys in his keeping. He gives them water until they vomit and says:

„Ich will euch erziehen, damit ihr nicht wie Tiere herumlauft … Das Wasser, das ich euch gab bis zum Erbrechen, soll euere Stimme gut und schön machen, damit ihr gut und schön singen könnt und immer wahr sprecht und nie eine Lüge sagt!“

“I will educate you so that you do not run about like animals … The water I gave you until you vomited shall make your voice good and beautiful, so that you can sing well and beautifully and always speak true and never tell a lie!” — Koch-Grünberg 1916, p. 64

The boys vomit in a little hut where no one sees, because the sight is very dangerous for women. They vomit into a big canoe and drink the vomit down again and again until they can drink no more. The last bark has its own rule: “Dieses Mittel darf nur stillschweigend genommen werden” (“This medicine may only be taken in silence”) (p. 65 n.).

Then Piai’mä makes two long cords from his wife’s hair, “steckte sie den Knaben in die beiden Nasenlöcher und zog die Stricke wieder langsam zum Mund heraus, daß Blut kam” (“put them into the boys’ two nostrils and slowly drew the cords out again through the mouth, so that blood came”) (p. 66). Two boys look at him when forbidden, and their eyes burst.

Many years later the three who are left walk into their parents’ house. Their mother does not know them. So each says who he is: „Ah, Okilanag bin ich!“ (“Ah, Okilanag am I!”). When they had named themselves she knew them, and they had beautiful voices, the gift of Piai’mä (p. 67).

Creatures that ran about like animals are purged, silenced and threaded through nose and mouth with a woman’s hair. They come home with voices and with the sentence “I am”. The Mabuiag uncle’s “you speak true, no tell lie” and Piai’mä’s “immer wahr sprecht und nie eine Lüge sagt” are the same clause in the same lesson, an ocean apart.

The pattern at a glance #

What is the silence for? #

Words kept inside become thought #

The sources say what the boy does with his silence. The Mabuiag boy keeps the words inside and is told he can think. The Mer boy stores them in his big toe. The Warramunga boy spends his time “pondering over what he has seen.” Haddon says the secluded lads “had an opportunity for quiet meditation which must have tended to mature their minds” (1904, p. 274).

Speech turned inward is inner speech, and inner speech is where a self lives. The rite stops the mouth so that the talk goes on inside, and it tells the boy in so many words that what is going on in there is him: “You think yourself.”

The god speaks while the boy cannot #

While the novice is mute, something else has the floor. Twanyirika roars around the Arunta boy. Then he is handed the boards and told that these made the sound. The voice that spoke over him is now a thing in his own hands, and after that his mouth is opened.

That is the order the Eve Theory proposes for the species: a voice heard as a god, then the discovery of who is speaking, then a person who says “I”.

The mouth opens on a name and on “I am” #

Look at the first words out of the reopened mouths. The Dora man: “I am Bunda; the name I received at the Dora is so and so.” The Arekuná brother at his mother’s door: “Okilanag am I!” Íregíde: “I man now”.

A self is the thing that can finish the sentence “I am ___”. The rites hand over both halves: the standing to say “I”, and the name that completes it. That fits the claim that the first-person pronoun spread with self-awareness itself.

Women’s hands, and the silence of the dead #

The Eve Theory says women had the self first and men were brought to it. The reopenings keep that in the gesture. Unmatjera sisters put the yam to the boy’s mouth. A girl cuts Íregíde’s. Piai’mä’s cords are twisted from his wife’s hair. And the voice the boy must not answer, on Tutu, on Mabuiag and on the Brisbane River, is his mother’s.

Silence is also the state of the dead. When a Warramunga man dies “a strict ban of silence is laid upon” his widows and kinswomen (1904, p. 525). The Binbinga, Anula and Mara eat their dead, and the fire kept burning beside the bones is kurta-kurta, “a term applied also, for example, to boys after they have been initiated and are out in the bush” (pp. 548–549). The silent novice is with the dead. He is the unformed lump again, and the touch on his lips is the knife.

Did one rite travel? #

The peoples themselves say the rites were carried. In Carl Strehlow’s Aranda text the opener of mouths is a lizard ancestor with a stone knife who “vom Norden kam” (“came from the north”) (Strehlow 1907, p. 6). The Kaitish hawk boys walk the country initiating group after group. Spencer and Gillen concluded that circumcision and subincision “originated somewhere in the north and gradually spread southwards, as indeed the natives believe that most of their customs have done” (1904, p. 18). Haddon found that the Torres Strait hero tales “evidently point to a borrowing of a cult from Daudai to the Western Islands” (1904, p. 54), Daudai being the New Guinea coast where Íregíde’s story was told.

A rite that travels needs a charter, and the charter travels with it. The cut mouth and the sealed novice are found together because they were carried together. The myth tells the boy what is being done to him, and the rite shows him what the myth means.

The first opening happened once, to someone, and was remembered as a knife across a blank face. The second is done to every boy, so that the first is never lost.

The peoples who say the first humans had to be cut open are the peoples who close each novice’s mouth and open it again. The rite re-stages the moment a human became a speaking self, and the myth remembers that moment as surgery.

Sources #

1. Spencer, Baldwin, and F. J. Gillen. The Native Tribes of Central Australia. London: Macmillan, 1899.
2. Spencer, Baldwin, and F. J. Gillen. The Northern Tribes of Central Australia. London: Macmillan, 1904.
3. Howitt, A. W. The Native Tribes of South-East Australia. London: Macmillan, 1904.
4. Haddon, A. C., ed. Reports of the Cambridge Anthropological Expedition to Torres Straits, vol. V (1904) and vol. VI (1908). Cambridge University Press.
5. Frazer, James George. Folk-Lore in the Old Testament, vol. I. London: Macmillan, 1918.
6. Frazer, James George. Balder the Beautiful, vol. II. London: Macmillan, 1913. Virginia after Beverley, History of Virginia (London, 1722).
7. Landtman, Gunnar. The Folk-Tales of the Kiwai Papuans. Acta Societatis Scientiarum Fennicae 47. Helsingfors, 1917.
8. Strehlow, Carl. Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien, part I. Frankfurt: Joseph Baer, 1907.
9. Schurtz, Heinrich. Altersklassen und Männerbünde. Berlin: Georg Reimer, 1902.
10. Koch-Grünberg, Theodor. Vom Roroima zum Orinoco, vol. II: Mythen und Legenden der Taulipang- und Arekuná-Indianer. Berlin: Dietrich Reimer, 1916. Myth 21.