Territorial connectivity through body-part dispersal in Egyptian, Irish and Australian mythology

The geographic dispersal of specific body-parts from the corpse of a slain deity, mythic man-beast or Dreaming Ancestor is a trope common to ancient Egyptian, medieval Irish and present-day Indigenous Australian mythology, respectively. This paper presents examples from each of these three domains, and uses the selected narratives – none of which have hitherto been juxtaposed – to explore the ways in which mythic anatomy can be re-imagined as religious or cultural geography and mapped onto the land. In Egypt, the god Osiris is murdered and dismembered by his brother Seth, who hides the numerous body-parts in different locations throughout the Two Lands. In Ireland, the main epic of the Ulster Cycle – the Táin Bó Cuailnge – ends with the Brown Bull of Cooley killing the White-Horned Bull of Ai and scattering the latter's horns, bones and innards in different locations on his journey homeward. The Djabugandji people of the Barron River region in Northern Queensland have a prominent Dreaming in which the Ancestral carpet-snake Buda-dji is chopped into many pieces by three envious bird-men, who throw the segments in all four directions; they become landforms which range from the coast to the Tablelands. For each culture, such narratives serve to connect and unite disparate settlements and/or sub-populations; indeed, the Queensland songline crosses a language boundary, as does a supplementary example from the Australian Central/Western Desert. The mythic entity's body-parts – which tend to proliferate over time, accompanied by an expansion in the myth's geographic footprint – are often reflected in local toponyms, although sometimes only via belated folk etymologies. The intercultural comparison presented here spans three continents and four millennia, suggesting that the trope enjoys near-ubiquitous distribution; the scattered corporeal relics of Christian saints may constitute a historical extension of the same impulse. Overall, the trope probably represents a local reflex of the widespread cosmogonic paradigm in which a primordial being is sacrificed and its body-parts are used to create the world.