The ceremony may only take place when Orion is not in thesky, which is consistent with the report (Fuller et al. 2014a)that, in Kamilaroi culture, Orion’s setting in June is associ-ated with the male initiation ceremony
The traditional ceremonies are consistent with modern astronomy; another proof that they were the believed to be the first astronomers in the world.
or, in the Kimberleys, as one of the two supreme(and serpent-like) Creator-beings
This reminds me of writing the cultural astronomy paper in ASTR 340 where I wrote about Hindu theories about the astronomy and creation of the universe.
Blake (1981) stated that ‘no Australian Aboriginal languagehas a word for a number higher than four,’ despite the exis-tence of well–documented Aboriginal number systems ex-tending to far higher numbers (Altman 2011; Harris 1987;McRoberts 1990; Tindale 1925; Tully 1997). Harris (1987)comments: ‘Statements such as these, which do not even ad-mit five, are not simply misleading; they are false’
Does this mean that they just omitted the number four? This might have created a lot of misjudgments about their astronomical theories.
Even this frag-ment contains useful information, telling us that the Eorapeople believed that the Sun returned to the East over theirheads rather than under the ground, as believed by most othergroups.
Noticing that this idea was during late 1700s, the aboriginal Australians believed the sun rose in East everyday while the other believed otherwise.
Putative explanations of celestial phenomena appear throughout the oral record, suggesting traditional Aborig-inal Australians sought to understand the natural world around them, in the same way as modern scientists, but withintheir own cultural context.
It is fascinating that they used to try to understand the world around them. And the fact that they used to do it within their own culture might get us thinking about how it can give us different perceptions about the same astronomical phenomenon.