Tjurunga

religious object · Australia · Aboriginal

The tjurunga is the sacred board or stone of the Arrernte and other central Australian peoples, engraved with the patterns of the Dreaming and treated as the physical body of an ancestral being. The boards are kept in secret storehouses and brought out for initiation and ceremony, and a tjurunga is handed down as a bond between the living, the land and the ancestral beings, its power bound to the pattern carved on its surface. The name is also spelled churinga, and the classic accounts were written by Spencer and Gillen from the Alice Springs region. Tjurunga are restricted objects of the men'

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