Chapter IX, The Primal Religions, The Australian Experience, Summary and Analysis

In religion, the idea that "later equates to better" does not hold. Everything in the modern religions of the last four thousand years was prefigured in the tribal religions. In the Australian aboriginal experience, there is a distinction between ordinary life and the mystic world they term "the Dreaming". Time measures out the ordinary experience of life, but the unending procession of the "everywhen" cannot be measured. To the aboriginal mind, larger-than-life figures of antiquity were the geniuses that fashioned everything so perfectly in the ordinary world. These figures are not, however, gods. The practice of their religion, therefore, turns not on worship but on participation in the ancestral paradigms.