Of all the words the West has attached to the Aboriginal peoples of Australia, few have been as misunderstood as Dreaming, often called "Dreamtime". The translation suggests something dreamlike, vague, far away. For the communities who live it, the Dreaming is the exact opposite: it is the most concrete foundation of existence, the law that holds the world together.
One English word for many concepts
When Europeans arrived, the Australian continent was home to hundreds of distinct languages and a great many groups, each with its own traditions. There is therefore no single "Aboriginal Dreaming", but many related conceptions, each with its own name. Among the best known:
- Tjukurpa for the Anangu of the central desert (Pitjantjatjara and Yankunytjatjara-speaking peoples);
- Altyerre (spelled alcheringa in older sources) among the Arrernte of the Alice Springs area;
- Ngarrankarni and other terms in the Kimberley regions.
The English word was born from early ethnographers' attempts to translate the Arrernte term, which pointed to an idea of original time also connected with dreaming. "Dreaming" and "Dreamtime" have since entered common use, and many Aboriginal people use them today when speaking English, while stressing that they are only approximations.
Not a past, but an "always"
The anthropologist W. E. H. Stanner coined a famous term: everywhen. The Dreaming is not a closed era, like the golden age of Greek myth. It is a time that remains present, because the ancestral beings who shaped the world have not vanished: they turned into rocks, springs, hills, trees and constellations, and in that form they remain active.
In many narratives the earth was at first formless. The ancestral beings, often both human and animal in character, emerged, travelled, hunted, fought, married, made mistakes and paid for them. Each of their actions left a mark on the landscape. A waterhole may be the spot where an ancestor stopped to drink; a line of boulders, the group of ancestral women who rested there.
The Dreaming as law
What strikes anyone studying these traditions most is that the Dreaming is first of all law. The ancestral narratives establish:
- Who may marry whom, through kinship and section systems that are often highly elaborate.
- Who holds responsibility for which places, and therefore who must look after their ceremonies.
- How food is shared, how one hunts, how one behaves towards in-laws and elders.
- Which knowledge is restricted to men, to women, or to people initiated to a certain degree.
When an elder says something "is Tjukurpa", they are not telling a fairy tale: they are pointing to a norm that was not invented by humans and therefore cannot be changed at will.
Country, not territory
Another key word is country. In Aboriginal English it does not just mean a geographical area, but a living whole of land, water, plants, animals, ancestors and people. People speak of their country as of a relative: they "sing" it, visit it, worry about it. Many say that country owns people, and not the other way round.
This is why the bond between the Dreaming and land is inseparable. An ancestral narrative cannot be understood apart from the places where it unfolds, and a sacred site is not sacred in the abstract: it is sacred because a Dreaming event happened there and still acts there.
Totems and belonging
Each person, in ways that vary from group to group, is linked to one or more ancestral beings: the kangaroo, the goanna, the emu, the honey ant, the rain. This bond, which anthropology calls totemic, can be inherited through the father's or the mother's line, or tied to the place where the mother first became aware of the pregnancy. It brings precise duties: caring for the ancestor's places, knowing its songs, sometimes observing food restrictions.
Layered knowledge
Dreaming stories are not an undifferentiated heritage. There are public versions, told to children and sometimes shared with visitors, and restricted versions, passed on only through initiation. Respecting these traditions also means accepting that we will not know everything about them: many communities explicitly ask that certain stories, images or names are not disclosed.
Why it matters to students of esotericism
For those who study symbolic traditions, the Dreaming offers a profound lesson: the idea that the sacred does not dwell in some heavenly elsewhere, but in the landscape, in relationship, in responsibility. Studio Esoterico Cornelio approaches it in the same spirit in which one reads the great texts of the West: as the testimony of a humanity that conceived the cosmos differently, to be listened to rather than imitated or appropriated.
In short
- "Dreaming" is an approximate translation of many Aboriginal concepts, such as Tjukurpa and Altyerre.
- It does not denote a closed past, but an original time that is always present.
- It is first of all law: it governs kinship, ceremony, food and responsibility for places.
- Country is a living relative, marked by the actions of ancestral beings.
- Much knowledge is restricted and should be respected as such.
