_ Besides the three ways already mentioned of securing a wife--elopement, which is rare; capture, which is rarer still, and _Tuelcha mura_, in which a girl is assigned to a man before she is born, and while her prospective mother is still a girl herself--by far the commonest arrangement--there is a fourth, charming by magic. Of this, too, Spencer and Gillen have given the best description. When a man, they tell us, wants to charm a woman belonging to a distant tribe he takes a _churinga_, or sacred stick, and goes with some friends into the bush, where
"all night long the men keep up a low singing of
Quabara songs, together with the chanting of amorous
phrases of invitation addressed to the woman. At
daylight the man stands up alone and swings the
_churinga_, causing it first to strike the ground as he
whirls it round and round and makes it hum. His friends
remain silent, and the sound of the humming is carried
to the ears of the far-distant woman, and has the power
of compelling affection and of causing her sooner or
later to comply with the summons. Not long ago, at
Alice Springs, a man called some of his friends
together and performed the ceremony, and in a very
short time the desired woman, who was on this occasion
a widow, came in from Glen Helen, about fifty miles to
the west of Alice Springs, and the two are now man and
wife."
The woman in this case need not be a widow, however. Another man's wife will do just as well, and if her owner comes armed to stop proceedings, the friends of the charmer stand by him.
Another method of obtaining a wife by magic is by means of a charmed _chilara_, or head-band of opossum fur. The man charms it in secret by singing over it. Then he places it on his head and wears it about the camp so that the woman can see it. Her attention is drawn to it, and she becomes violently attached to the man, or, as the natives say, "her internal organs shake with eagerness." Here, again, it makes no difference whether the woman be married or not.
Still another way of charming a woman is by means of a certain shell ornament, which a man ties to his waist-belt at a corrobboree after having charmed it.[175]
"While he is dancing the woman whom he wishes to
attract alone sees the lightning flashes on the
_Lonka-lonka_, and all at once her internal organs
shake with emotion. If possible she will creep into his
camp that night or take the earliest opportunity to run
away with him."
Here, at last, we have come across a method which
"allows of the breaking through of the hard and fast rule
which for the most part obtains, and according to which the
woman belongs to the man to whom she has been betrothed,
probably before her birth."
[FOOTNOTE 175:
The reader will note that here are some additional objects usually supposed to be "ornamental," but which, as in all the cases examined in the chapter on Personal Beauty, are seen on close examination to serve other than esthetic purposes. These _are_ intended to _charm_ the women, not, however, as things of beauty, but by their magic qualities and by attracting their attention.]
Yet these cases are rare exceptions, for, as the authors inform us, "the woman naturally runs some risk, as, if caught in the act of eloping, she would be severely punished, if not put to death;" and again: these cases are not of frequent occurrence, for they depend on the woman's consent, and she knows that if caught she will in all probability be killed, or at least very roughly handled. Hence she is "not very easily charmed away from her original possessor." Moreover, even these adulterous elopements seldom lead to anything more than a temporary liaison, as we have seen, and it would be comic to speak of a "liberty of choice" in cases where such a choice can be exercised only at the risk of being killed on the spot. _