Altyerre

Altyerre (anglicised by Carl Strehlow as Altjira, and recorded by Spencer and Gillen as Alcheringa/Alchera) is the central religious concept of the Arrernte, denoting at once the eternal creative order commonly translated 'the Dreaming' and, in Carl Strehlow's controversial reading, a personal eternal sky-being. Strehlow's Aranda informants described Altjira as a tall, red-skinned man with long fair hair and emu feet, living in the sky-land with red-skinned wives and children; the Milky Way is the great river of that land. Strehlow argued the word should not be reduced to 'dreaming', since the people knew it as something eternal and uncreated, and the verb altjirerama ('to dream') was glossed by his collaborators as 'to see God'. Spencer and Gillen, by contrast, treated the cognate term as a name for a mythic past age rather than a deity, and later scholars such as Sam Gill and Jason Gibson have analysed the resulting translation dispute as one of the foundational problems in the study of Aboriginal religion.

Domains

• sky and heavens
• eternity and the dreaming

Powers

• to exist eternally without origin or end
• to dwell in the sky-land above the earth

Epithets

• Altjira maraCarl Strehlow, Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien, Teil I (1907); 'mara' = good. (secondary)

Sources

• Altyerre (Altjira) is the eternal, uncreated sky-being of the Aranda, read by Carl Strehlow as a high god and the eternal creator of world and humankind, though the term also names the totemic Dreaming order.: Carl Strehlow, Die Aranda- und Loritja-Stämme in Zentral-Australien, Teil I: Mythen, Sagen und Märchen des Aranda-Stammes (Frankfurt: Joseph Baer, 1907). (secondary); Sam D. Gill, Storytracking: Texts, Stories, and Histories in Central Australia (New York: Oxford University Press, 1998). (secondary)