Therefore, to revert to our immediate subject, in putting forward the practice of magic as an explanation of the rise of monarchy in some communities, I am far from thinking or suggesting that it can explain the rise of it in all, or, in other words, that kings are universally the descendants or successors of magicians; and if any one should hereafter, as is likely enough, either enunciate such a theory or attribute it to me, I desire to enter my caveat against it in advance. To enumerate and describe all the modes in which men have pushed, or fought, or wormed their way by force or by fraud, by their own courage and wisdom or by the cowardice and folly of others, to supreme power, might furnish the theme of a political treatise such as I have no pretension to write; for my present purpose it suffices if I can trace the magician’s progress in some savage and barbarous tribes from the rank of a sorcerer to the dignity of a king. The facts which I am about to lay before the reader seem to exhibit various steps of this development from simple conjuring up to conjuring compounded with despotism. [Sidenote: Social importance of magicians among the aborigines of Central Australia.] Let us begin by looking at the lowest race of men as to whom we possess comparatively full and accurate information, the aborigines of Australia. These savages are ruled neither by chiefs nor kings. So far as their tribes can be {p335} said to have a political constitution, it is a democracy or rather an oligarchy of old and influential men, who meet in council and decide on all measures of importance to the practical exclusion of the younger men. Their deliberative assembly answers to the senate of later times: if we had to coin a word for such a government of elders we might call it a _gerontocracy_.​[1193] The elders who in aboriginal Australia thus meet and direct the affairs of their tribe appear to be for the most part the headmen of their respective totem clans. Now in Central Australia, where the desert nature of the country and the almost complete isolation from foreign influences have retarded progress and preserved the natives on the whole in their most primitive state, the headmen of the various totem clans are charged with the important task of performing magical ceremonies for the multiplication of the totems, and as the great majority of the totems are edible animals or plants, it follows that these men are commonly expected to provide the people with food by means of magic. Others have to make the rain to fall or to render other services to the community. In short, among the tribes of Central Australia the headmen are public magicians. Further, their most important function is to take charge of the sacred storehouse, usually a cleft in the rocks or a hole in the ground, where are kept the holy stones and sticks (_churinga_) with which the souls of all the people, both living and dead, are apparently supposed to be in a manner bound up.