Richard Thurnwald’s 1927 fascicle in Alfred Bertholet’s Religionsgeschichtliches Lesebuch is a comparative ethnographic source reader on Indigenous religions of Australia, New Guinea/Melanesia, and Polynesia/Micronesia. It frames and arranges field reports by Strehlow, Spencer and Gillen, Wirz, Keysser, Tregear, Hocart, Müller-Wismar, and Thurnwald himself around recurrent religious mechanisms: force-bearing objects, avoidance bans, soul-substance, sorcery, possession, cult societies, mana, tapu, and ritual speech.
Die großen Verschiedenheiten an Veranlagung, Lebensweise, Kulturbesitz und Gesellschaftsbau unter den hier zusammengefassten Völkern bedingen ein Auseinanderhalten wenigstens der Hauptgruppen. Denn auch die Religion, ihre geistige Systematisierung, die Formen ihres seelischen Ausdrucks sowie endlich ihre sozialen Gestaltungen sind eingebettet in die jeweilige Kultur.
English translation: The great differences in disposition, way of life, cultural inheritance, and social structure among the peoples grouped together here make it necessary to keep at least the main groups apart. For religion too—its intellectual systematization, the forms of its psychic expression, and finally its social configurations—is embedded in the respective culture.
This is the work’s main thesis: religion must be read through social form, subsistence, material culture, and historical memory. Its three-part structure—Australians, Papua-Melanesians, Polynesians/Micronesians—is selective rather than encyclopedic, using “representative” materials to compare recurring patterns of sacred force and social regulation.
The Australian section centers on Aranda and Loritja tjurunga. Thurnwald’s key conceptual move is to treat these as Kraftträger: not mere symbols and not soul-containers, but alternative bodies linking persons, totem ancestors, places, secrecy, initiation, and increase rites.
In der tjurunga besitzt also der Eingeborene einen Talisman, der ihn mit schaffender Macht ausrüstet und ihm den Schutz des iningukua (Totem-Vorfahren) gegen Feinde gewährt.
English translation: In the tjurunga, then, the native possesses a talisman which equips him with creative power and affords him the protection of the iningukua (totem ancestor) against enemies.
Thus ritual objects mediate creative power. The kangaroo cult, with song, bodily decoration, blood, fat, and mimetic performance, becomes a practical intervention in animal abundance; myth is enacted as technique.
The Papua-Melanesian section broadens the comparison through death myths, ancestor-ghosts, magic stones, sorcery, taboo, shamanism, possession, and secret cults. Wirz’s kugi supplies a category for a religious field not yet analytically separated into ghost, demon, ancestor, and impersonal danger.
Der Eingeborene tut das nicht, für ihn ist alles bloß „kugi“ und die Vorstellungen über die Existenz übernatürlicher Kräfte und Erscheinungen verworren, unklar und ineinander überfließend.
English translation: The native does not do this; for him everything is merely "kugi," and his notions of the existence of supernatural forces and phenomena are confused, unclear, and flowing into one another.
The Kai material on Seelenstoff is the most systematic theoretical passage. Names, shadows, voice, hair, excreta, traces, gestures, and residues transmit force; magic works through contact, resemblance, and retained substance.
Die Welt der „Seelenstoffe“ umgibt den Eingeborenen ringsum mit geheimnisvollen Kräften, so daß er kein Ding, keine Begebenheit, abstrakt betrachten kann.
English translation: The world of "soul-substances" surrounds the native on all sides with mysterious forces, so that he cannot contemplate any thing or any event in an abstract manner.
This explains fetishism and sorcery without reducing them to irrationality: objects act because they bear transferred vitality. It also explains anxiety over leftovers, footprints, names, and bodily traces, since injury to the “soul-substance” can injure the person.
The Marind-anim Majo cult is Thurnwald’s fullest example of myth as institution. Initiation, seclusion, food restrictions, sexual rites, and fertility symbolism are interpreted as a ceremonial technology authorized by Dema ancestors and directed toward coconut-palm productivity.
Der ganze Geheimkult besteht aus zweierlei Momenten: der symbolischen Wiederholung der Mythen, besonders der Kokosmythe, an den Novizen einerseits, und in dem geschlechtlichen Genuß der alten Eingeweihten andererseits.
English translation: The whole secret cult consists of two elements: the symbolic reenactment of the myths, especially the coconut myth, upon the novices on the one hand, and the sexual enjoyment of the old initiates on the other.
In the Polynesian and Micronesian final section, the same issues appear through mana and tapu. Mana names efficacy, success, rank, and divine force; it is at once cosmological and personal.
Niemand kann gegen das Mana aufkommen.
English translation: No one can prevail against Mana.
Tapu, by contrast, names charged prohibition: the social form of sacred force. In the Maori materials it governs chiefly bodies, food, property, names, houses, roads, asylum, illness, and political command.
Das Wort „tapu“ der Maori-Sprache bedeutet nicht eigentlich „heilig“ oder „besudelt“, obgleich es eine jede dieser Bedeutungen annehmen kann, sondern „verboten wegen Heiligkeit oder der Sitte gemäß“.
English translation: The word "tapu" in the Maori language does not, properly speaking, mean "holy" or "defiled," although it can take on either of these meanings, but rather "forbidden because of holiness or in accordance with custom."
The closing Yap prayers show speech as transaction with powers: offerings seek rain, fertility, food, protection, and the lifting of bans. The book’s continuing relevance lies in its dense assembly of early ethnographic passages and in Thurnwald’s comparative vocabulary—Kraftträger, Meidungsbann, Seelenstoff, mana, tapu—through which religion appears as embodied force, social prohibition, and ritual practice. Its racial and evolutionary language marks its period, but its strongest insight is that religious concepts operate within material, social, and ceremonial worlds.
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