The Bullroarer: a history of man's most sacred ritual object

Mystery cults worldwide say the instrument is the voice of god, once belonged to women, was stolen by men, and use it to turn boys into men through a process of death and rebirth

Hopi Indian in ceremonial dress whirls a bullroarer decorated with a snake

“No ethnomusicologist, I think, would stand for plurigenesis as regards the bull-roarers, which even in decorative detail are often alike and are used for the same purpose wherever and whenever found.” ~Jaap Kunst, 1960

The bullroarer doesn’t look like much. Just a slat of wood or bone attached to a string and then spun to produce a “roar.”¹ But to study the bullroarer is to gaze at the history of man, from the beginnings of religious expression in the Ice Age to the mystery cults of the ancient Greeks and primitive cannibals alike². 

This is sufficient reason to engage, but it also gives us a view of the history of anthropology. The field was founded as the scientific inquiry into who we are and where we came from. In the 19th and 20th centuries, a central question was whether far-flung cultures were connected deep in the past or, rather, if their similarities were due to the “psychic unity of mankind.” The bullroarer was a prime artifact in this debate, as it was studied in over 100 separate cultures all over the world by researchers of every ideological stripe. There was—and is—agreement that it is used in strikingly similar ways. Around the world, the bullroarer is called the voice of god or is cognate with the name of the first ancestor or simply “soul.” It’s said to be invented by women who are now forbidden to see or hear it, under pain of death. Or, as tends to be true in more complex societies, it is remembered as spiritually significant in myth but has become secularized and is used only as a child’s toy. 

Despite all this, the bullroarer has largely been forgotten. The dictionary defines primitive as “relating to, denoting, or preserving the character of an early stage in the evolutionary or historical development of something.” Animals don’t have language or creation myths, so at some point, humans must have lived in a primitive culture—the first people to grapple with their mortality, abstract ideas, and the spirit world. The charter of Anthropology was to understand those first forays into the human condition and how those foundational ideas progressed into the myriad cultures today. In the last several decades, anthropologists have abdicated this search because of how problematic the ideas of progress and primitive are to the prevailing ethos. If societies can progress, does that mean some are better than others? Easier to look away than try to explain the bullroarer, who we are, or where we came from.

My answer to the 100,000-year gap between modern humans and modern human culture is that fundamental psycho-cultural ideas like “I am” or god could have spread worldwide about 15,000 years ago. Big if true, I know. However, researching this hypothesis led me to a curious debate, spanning a century and still raging. The most readily available information on cultural diffusion is produced by those seeking Atlantis or the like. Their evidence is typically something like the “manbags” associated with civilization-bringers and carved into the pillars at Gobekli Tepe, temples in Sumeria, and pyramids in Meso-America.

Now, this isn’t not evidence. But it’s quite soft. Bags are useful, and the physics of holding something in your hand suggests a certain form. That a bag is often present in world-founding myths is maybe the 100th most surprising finding in comparative mythology. Still, theories of lost world-spanning civilizations generate enormous interest. Graham Hancock, the most successful of such theorists, has appeared 12 times on the Joe Rogan Experience, and his Netflix special, Ancient Apocalypse, was recently renewed for a second season. There is a cottage industry devoted to detailing links between far-flung myths and megaliths, yet somehow they rarely mention the bullroarer, the best evidence of cultural diffusion.

Prehistoric links between civilizations have been studied for over a century by hundreds (thousands?) of archeologists, anthropologists, linguists, geneticists, and comparative mythologists of all ideological stripes. Yes, the academy in 2024 doesn’t like to discuss diffusion, but this is a fairly new phenomenon. In the past, many academics argued the bullroarer spread with the beginning of fully human culture (or at least fully developed mystery cults). Their research is still available if largely forgotten. It makes sense that this would be ignored by current anthropologists, who want nothing to do with beginnings as that requires discussing “primitive.” However, it’s a totally unforced error that the Atlantis consortium doesn’t lean into the bullroarer, learn its ways, and press the issue. It’s the most compelling case for a connection among the “ancients” worldwide, and there are hundreds of attestations, including in trendy contexts like Göbekli Tepe and the Eleusinian Mysteries. As far as research goes, it’s a slow pitch down the middle, and they don’t even take a swing.

I organize this study chronologically because the story is as much about the researchers as the bullroarer itself. This means the article lives up to its name; it’s more detail than many readers need. Skimming may suffice (I highlight the most important entries in the Outline). I err on the side of too much information in order to make this resource widely available. No other such collection exists, and certainly not online and in English. In my search, it was only late that I happened upon the best current treatment of the bullroarer in The Domesticated Penis: How Womanhood Has Shaped Manhood. Most of the chapter, “The Cultural Penis: Diversity in Phallic Symbolisms,” concerns the bullroarer. But you can see how a student of the bullroarer would miss this text, given the chapter and title names indicate nothing about the instrument. It’s a sort of metaphor for anthropology. Grand theories of human origins can be discussed if tucked away under layers of psychoanalytic feminism.

The quest to understand our origins is a fundamental human drive. I believe past generations of anthropologists were right, and the bullroarer is an important piece of that puzzle. This article presents their research with some commentary.

Summary and General Argument

“Passing eastward across Siberia into America, as well as southeastwardly to Australia, shamanism traveled as but one element of a living compound that included—besides the x-ray style of animal painting and engraving, the atlatl, and the bullroarer—an elaborate complex of social regulations, ceremonials, and associated mythological ideas, which scholars have designated by the very broad term totemism.” ~Joseph Campbell, Historical Atlas of World Mythology, 1983

A few facts about the bullroarer have been established for over a century. From Africa to Australia to the Americas, it is:

1. Used in male initiation ceremonies of death and rebirth

2. Said to be the voice of god

3. Said to have been originally invented by women but was stolen by men near the beginning of culture when they took control of the mystery cult. Often, women are now banned from seeing it or learning the associated mysteries, under pain of death

These practices aren’t universal, but they are common themes. Even tribes that don’t treat the bullroarer as sacred often did at some earlier time.

Mystery cults teach initiates about their place in the universe, the nature of life and death, and the history of humanity. In the 19th century, the first European anthropologists knew the bullroarer as a relic from the Greek mystery cults of antiquity. The Eleusinian Mysteries included an ecstatic procession known as Bacchoi. This celebrated the dismemberment of Dionysus by the Titans, who lured him to his death using a bullroarer and a snake (among other implements). Maenads, the female followers of Dionysus, are said to have reenacted this moment. They wore snakes in their hair and, in ecstatic climax, would tear a live bull (the symbol of Dionysus) to pieces with their bare hands, feasting on its raw flesh. (Some argue this is a precursor of the bread and wine that become the flesh and blood of God in the Christian sacrament.)

When anthropologists started collecting data outside Europe, they found the bullroarer at the center of mystery cults worldwide, documented in more than 100 tribes, especially in Australia, Papua New Guinea, North and South America, Melanesia, and Africa. The use transcends the agriculturalist vs hunter-gatherer divide. In Africa, it is known to the Bantu, as well as the Bushman. In the Americas to the Hopi of the Southwest and to the Xingu of the Amazon. 

The Dionysian mysteries have not been practiced in millennia, and the bullroarer has been stripped of any mystic meaning in Europe, where it is now a child’s plaything—the original fidget spinner, complete with a bloody backstory. The only two exceptions in Europe prove the rule. Take a moment to try and guess them based on what has been presented so far.

Answer: they are those with the best claims of being indigenous, the Basque and the Sami. The Basque are an interesting case of syncretism, where their pagan bullroarer rites of spring have been rolled into the Easter celebration³. For the Sami, it is part of their shamanic practices. It is popular to suggest that both cultures preserve pre-Indo-European culture. The Basque, from Ice Age Europe, and the Sami, from Siberia, also back to the Ice Age if one accepts continuity between Siberian shamanism now and in the Paleolithic⁴. The bullroarer is part of Siberian folk music (1,2) and has been found in Europe going back 20,000-30,000 years. It is interesting that the two most conservative cultures in Europe either both retained or independently invented the bullroarer tradition.

These exceptions aside, Europe has secularized the bullroarer. Such a process seems to have happened in many parts of the world. Otto Zerries mentions “An interesting case occurs among the Apinayé [an Amazonian tribe], who consider the bullroarer simply as a toy; nevertheless they call it "me-galo", which means soul, ghost, shadow.” Similarly, the bullroarer is a toy to the Kikuya, a Bantu tribe in Kenya, whereas it is of utmost ceremonial import to the rest of their Bantu neighbors. So, the bullroarer question is two-fold:

1. Why is the bullroarer used similarly in mystery cults worldwide?

2. Why is it part of primitive religion and then fades?

Almost no one argues that there is nothing to explain, that the similarities are trivial. The answer to 1) has always been diffusion or the psychic unity of mankind. The latter posits the human mind is so similar that it unerringly finds the same solution to the same problems, and bullroarer cults are largely independent developments. The problems the bullroarer purportedly solves are related to who we are and where we came from, and how to answer that in a way that promotes social cohesion (the establishment of a mystery cult). This has a nice universalist ring to it until one considers 2, that cultures seem to “progress” out of the bullroarer phase. Indeed, early researchers who rejected diffusion suggested a psychic unity of the savage mind rather than of all minds. Europeans had put such barbarous worship behind them, and it was only a memory by the time of antiquity.

Further, it should be noted that psychic unity is never used on a regional level. For example, bullroarer cults are universal across Australia, spanning the two dozen or so language families. These cults share cognates and songlines and tell similar stories of how the world began. The age of this religious tradition is debated (the Rainbow Serpent is about 6,000 years old), but it is never treated as evidence of the psychic unity of the Aboriginal mind. Australians don’t have the bullroarer gene (or the Rainbow Serpent gene). It’s obvious there was a common root at some point in the past. In fact, one can do this in each region, as the bullroarer cults of Papua New Guinea or the Amazon or the Americas also exhibit local variations that suggest a phylogeny, and where it’s already accepted that there is region-wide cultural diffusion, such as Clovis culture in the Americas, agriculture in PNG and the dingo in Australia. Consider the bullroarer phylogeny in just Australia and Papua New Guinea, which were one landmass until about 8,000 years ago. If one posits separate phylogenies, then they ought to be younger than 8,000 years. And if that’s the case, why did both regions invent strikingly similar bullroarer cults in the last 8,000 years, which then spread internally? This is a strict “Ages of Man” model where every culture passes through the bullroarer stage, invariably connecting the instrument to mystery cults, death and rebirth, and myths of a primordial matriarchy.

Modern anthropologists are allergic to linking the phylogenetic tree between any two continents. For example, one possible path for the bullroarer cult is from Eurasia to Papua New Guinea at the end of the Ice Age and then from there on to Australia. There are many suggested cultural phylogenies that old: Afroasiatic, pronouns in Euroasiatic, the Cosmic Hunt, serpent sacrifice, and Australian firestick rituals. Deep time isn’t an issue. But culture spreading between continents is deemed problematic. Consider the treatment of diffusion in “A History of Anthropological Theory,” a widely used textbook:

“Related to psychic unity was the doctrine of independent invention, an expression of faith that all peoples could be culturally creative. According to this doctrine, different peoples, given the same opportunity, could devise the same idea or artifact independently, without external stimulus or contact. Independent invention was one explanation of cultural change. The contrasting explanation was diffusionism, the doctrine that inventions arise only once and can be acquired by other groups only through borrowing or immigration. Diffusionism can be construed as non-egalitarian because it presupposes that some peoples are culturally creative while others can only copy.” 

Let it be said that diffusion does not presuppose a single invention or racial superiority. All that needs to hold is that it’s easier to share an idea than to invent it, and you get significant diffusion. This could be regional or even worldwide if the data support it. The canonical example is writing, which was invented independently around five times⁵. As it stands, Chinese and Korean characters share a common ancestor. If there was evidence the same held for Chinese and Sumerian, this would not be racist. It’s just that the data don’t support it.

For a century, the bullroarer debate was on whether mystery cults were reading from the same religious “script.” Then, the anti-diffusionists won the day, and the bullroarer was forgotten. After describing two extreme schools of diffusionist thought, the textbook goes on:

“An undercurrent of both approaches was the hereditarian belief that some human races were more capable of cultural innovation than others. Hereditarianism, or “racism,” was an attitude that early-twentieth-century anthropologists strongly opposed. For this reason, doctrinaire diffusionism never achieved a wide following. In the wake of the racial policies of National Socialism (i.e., Nazism), it became disreputable and faded from mainstream theoretical view. Accordingly, in recent decades, anthropologists, including archaeologists, who propose early human contact over long distances have been held accountable with the burden of proof.”

Being “held accountable with the burden of proof” is a euphemism for isolated demands for rigor⁶. In fact, not giving bullroarer diffusion a fair shake is explicitly stated by some (non-diffusionist) anthropologists:

“Interest has long since waned in ‘diffusionist’ anthropology, but recent evidence is very much in accord with its predictions. Today we know that the bullroarer is a very ancient object, specimens from France (13,000 B.C.) and the Ukraine (17,000 B.C.) dating back well into the Paleolithic period. Moreover, some archeologists—notably, Gordon Willey (1971)—now admit the bullroarer to the kit-bag of artifacts brought by the very earliest migrants to the Americas. Nevertheless, modern anthropology has all but ignored the broad historical implication of the wide distribution and ancient lineage of the bullroarer.” ~Thomas Gregor, Anxious Pleasures, 1973

Or Bethe Hagen in 2009:

“The bullroarer and buzzer were once well-known and well-loved by anthropologists. They functioned within the profession as hallmark artifacts that symbolized the cultural relativist commitment to independent invention even as evidence (size, shape, meaning, uses, symbols, ritual) stretching tens of thousands of years across human history pointed to diffusion.” ~Bethe Hagen, Spin as Creative Consciousness, 2009

Considering all this, the simplest explanation is as follows: 

In the Upper Paleolithic, new ideas about how one should relate to the spiritual and social world were ritualized in mystery cults that happened to use the bullroarer. These spread from Eurasia to the rest of the world, perhaps around the end of the Ice Age. This outline used to be a common view among anthropologists, but eventually, the bullroarer was forgotten because the straightforward explanation runs afoul of cherished biases in the field⁷. For example, Australian Dreamtime stories tell of a time when mysterious civilizing figures showed up on canoes and established a mystery cult⁸. Demonstrating a kernel of truth to this Aboriginal myth is not a good career move for an anthropologist. As such, the bullroarer is now largely ignored. I hope this article helps to change that. Understand the bullroarer, and we understand our past.

Outline:

Each date is hyperlinked to the item’s location in the document. The most important entries are bolded.

• 1885: Custom and Myth, Andrew Lang

• 1890: Golden Bough, James Frazer

• 1892: The Medicine Men of the Apache, John G. Bourke

• 1898: Bullroarers Used by the Australian Aborigines, RH Matthews

• 1898: The Study of Man, Alfred C. Haddon

• 1899: The Native Tribes of North Central Australia, Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen

• 1909: The Threshold of Religion, RR Marett

• 1912: The Lost Language Of Symbolism Vol I, Harold Bayley

• 1913: Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific, Felix Speiser

• 1919: Balder the Beautiful Vol-ii, James George Frazer

• 1920: Primitive Society, Robert H. Lowie

• 1922: Bantu Beliefs and Magic with Particular Reference to the Kikuyu and Kamba Tribes of Kenya Colony, C.W. Hobley

• 1929: Tribal Initiations and Secret Societies, EM Loeb

• 1929: Secret Societies and the Bull-roarer, Nature editorial board

• 1932: The Patwin and Their Neighbors, A.L. Kroeber

• 1937: Excavations at Snaketown, Vol 2: Comparisons and Theories, Harold S. Gladwin

• 1942: Das Schwirrholz: Investigation on the Distribution and Significance of Bullroarers in Cultures, Otto Zerries

• 1950: Early Man in the New World, Kenneth Macgowan and Joseph A. Hester, Jr

• 1952: Old World Overtones in The New World: Some Parallels with North American Indian Musical Instruments, Theodore A. Seder

• 1954: A Magdalenian ‘Churinga,’ Henry Field

• 1959: The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell

• 1960: The Origin of the Kemanak, Jaap Kunst

• 1966: The Slain God. Worldview of an Early Culture, Adolf Ellegard Jensen

• 1967: The Distribution of Sound Instruments in the Prehistoric Southwestern United States, Donald Brown

• 1970: Man and the Invisible, Jean Servier

• 1973: The Bullroarer in History and in Antiquity, JR Harding

• 1973: Anxious Pleasures: The Sexual Lives of an Amazonian People, Thomas Gregor

• 1978: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Bullroarer, Alan Dundes

• 1988: Myths of Matriarchy Reconsidered, Deborah B. Gewertz

• 1992: Ritual Masks: Deceptions and Revelations, Pernet Henry

• 1995: Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture, Chris Knight

• 1998: What is wrong with music archaeology? A critical essay from Scandinavian perspective including a report about a new find of a bullroarer, Cajsa Lund

• 2001: Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia: An Exploration of the Comparative Method, Gregor and Tuzin

• 2003: The Evolutionary Origins and Archaeology of Music, Iain Morley

• 2009: Spin as Creative Consciousness, Bethe Hagen

• 2010: The Bullroarer Cult in Cuba, Michael Marcuzzi

• 2011: The Neolithic in Turkey, New Excavations & New Research, Vecihi Özkaya, Aytaç Coşkun

• 2013: The prehistory of music: human evolution, archaeology, and the origins of musicality, Iain Morley

• 2015: The Domesticated Penis: How Womanhood Has Shaped Manhood, Loretta Cormier and Sharyn Jones

• 2016: A Decorated Bone 'Spatula' from Göbekli Tepe. On the Pitfalls of Iconographic Interpretations of Early Neolithic Art, Dietrich and Notroff

• 2016: The Waters of mendangumeli: A masculine psychoanalytic interpretation of a new guinea Flood myth— and Women’s laughter, Eric Silverman

• 2017: Cosmology Performed, the World Transformed: Mimesis and the Logical Operations of Nature and Culture in Myth in Amazonia and Beyond, Deon Liebenberg

• 2019: A functional investigation of southern Cape Later Stone Age artefacts resembling aerophones, Kumbani et al

• 2022: Australian Aboriginal symbols found on mysterious 12,000-year-old pillar in Turkey—a connection that could shake up history, Archeology World team

A chronology of bullroarer research:

Magdalanean bullroarer

1885: Custom and Myth, Andrew Lang

After an introductory chapter on the methods of comparative mythology, Lang turns to his subject proper with a chapter, “The Bull-Roarer: A Study of the Mysteries”⁹ in which he intends “to show that certain peculiarities in the Greek mysteries occur also in the mysteries of savages and that on Greek soil they are survivals of savagery.”

“The bull-roarer has, of all toys, the widest diffusion, and the most extraordinary history. To study the bull-roarer is to take a lesson in folklore. The instrument is found among the most widely severed peoples, savage and civilised, and is used in the celebration of savage and civilised mysteries. There are students who would found on this a hypothesis that the various races that use the bull-roarer all descend from the same stock. But the bull roarer is introduced here for the very purpose of showing that similar minds, working with simple means towards similar ends, might evolve the bull-roarer and its mystic uses anywhere. There is no need for a hypothesis of common origin, or of borrowing, to account for this widely diffused sacred object.”

Bullroarers are selected because they lay bare the two schools of thought at the time: cultural evolution and diffusion. Cultural evolution holds that there are natural stages of culture: savagery, barbarism, and civilization. Savage minds everywhere are alike, and therefore, we should expect them to produce similar cultural artifacts from sustenance to religion. Even down to the type of instrument that symbolizes the voice of god and the custom that women should be killed, blinded, or gang raped if they ever see the instrument. The alternative is that such practices were invented (possibly only once), are particular to a place and time, and spread due to the vicissitudes of (pre-)history. There may be psycho-social “hooks” that keep a practice in place. But the attractor state is not so strong that the practices are called from the ether whenever non-literate groups of people start experimenting with religion.

Lang shows how mystery cults in the Americas, Africa, Oceania, Australia, and Ancient Greece all use (or have used) bullroarers in their most important rites. Often, women are barred, initiates are tortured and painted, and the mysteries are connected to the tradition of a great deluge. Because cultural evolution does not suppose a psychic unity of all minds but rather a psychic unity of all savages, Lang must explain why the bullroarer is religiously central during the first stage of cultural development and then later discarded when civilization is achieved.

To do this, Lang takes for granted that mystery cults will exist, that they will need some sort of church bell to call people to the assembly, that the bullroarer is the simplest solution to this problem, and if it’s a boy’s club, that it could naturally develop for women to be put to death if they hear the sound.

“There are thus undeniably close resemblances between the Greek mysteries and those of the lowest contemporary races. As to the bull-roarer, its recurrence among Greeks, Zunis, Kamilaroi, Maoris, and South African races, would be regarded, by some students, as a proof that all these tribes had a common origin, or had borrowed the instrument from each other. But this theory is quite unnecessary. The bull-roarer is a very simple invention. Anyone might find out that a bit of sharpened wood, tied to a string, makes, when whirred, a roaring noise. Supposing that discovery made, it is soon turned to practical use. All tribes have their mysteries. All want a signal to summon the right persons together and warn the wrong persons to keep out of the way. The church bell does as much for us, so did the shaken seistron for the Egyptians. People with neither bells nor seistra find the bull-roarer, with its mysterious sound, serve their turn. The hiding of the instrument from women is natural enough. It merely makes the alarm and absence of the curious sex doubly sure…”

“The conclusion from all these facts seems obvious. The bull-roarer is an instrument easily invented by savages, and easily adopted into the ritual of savage mysteries. If we find the bull-roarer used in the mysteries of the most civilised of ancient peoples, the most probable explanation is, that the Greeks retained both the mysteries, the bull-roarer, the habit of bedaubing the initiate, the torturing of boys, the sacred obscenities, the antics with serpents, the dances, and the like, from the time when their ancestors were in the savage condition.”

This explanation is tenuous, but Lang’s framing of the problem and gathering of the facts is valuable. From the very beginning, the bullroarer was connected to male mystery cults involving serpents, death, and rebirth.

1890: Golden Bough, James Frazer

A few years later, James Frazer published The Golden Bough, one of the most influential anthropology books of all time. Bullroarers were no more than a side note, but their associations are informative:

“Examples of this supposed death and resurrection at initiation are the following. Among some of the Australian tribes of New South Wales, when lads are initiated, it is thought that a being called Thuremlin takes each lad to a distance, kills him, and sometimes cuts him up, after which he restores him to life and knocks out a tooth. In one part of Queensland the humming sound of the Bullroarer, which is swung at the initiatory rites, is said to be the noise made by the wizards in swallowing the boys and bringing them up again as young men. ‘The Ualaroi of the Upper Darling River say that the boy meets a ghost which kills him and brings him to life again as a man.’”

According to Cormier and Jones (2015), “Frazer describes the use of the bullroarer in harvest rituals by so-called savage people of New Guinea as being of the same nature as ecstatic cult rituals of the Dionysian Mysteries.”

1892: The Medicine-Men of the Apache, John G. Bourke

Bullroarer use is discussed among the Apache, Navajo, Hopi (Tusayan), Zuni, Rio Grande Pueblo tribes, and Utes.

“The identification of the rhombus or “bull roarer” of the ancient Greeks with that used by the Tusayan in their snake dance was first made by E. B. Tylor in the Saturday Review in a criticism upon “The Snake Dance of the Moquis of Arizona.””¹⁰

Notably, the snake dance involves being bitten by rattlesnakes, another surprising similarity with the Greek mysteries, which some classicists also think involved snake venom.

1898: Bullroarers Used by the Australian Aborigines, RH Matthews

Matthews quotes authors from all over the continent going back to the 1840s to demonstrate that the bullroarer is universally used in initiation ceremonies in Australia. Like many others, he notes, “The uninitiated or the women are not permitted to see it or to use it under pain of death.” Unlike most, he reports that the strings of the bullroarer were often constructed with human hair.

It’s important to remember that many of these scholars were not in communication or even friendly towards one another. Therefore, it doesn’t seem likely that the bullroarer is a fake class of ritual object imposed by anthropologists; many independent observations found it to be central to mystery cults the world over.

1898, The Study of Man, Alfred C. Haddon

FIG. 40. Comparative Series of Bull-Roarers:

1. Bushman (after Ratzel);

2. Eskimo (after Murdoch), 7½×2;

3. Apache, North America (after Bourke), 8×1½;

4. Pima, North America (after Schmeltz), 15½×1;

5. Nahuaqué, Brazil (after V. d. Steinen), 13×2;

6. Bororo, Brazil (after V. d. Steinen), 15×3½;

7. Patani Malay, E. coast of Malay Peninsula (original, from a description by W. Skeat), 8;

8. Sumatra (after Schmeltz), 4½×1;

9. New Zealand (original), 13½×4½

10. Toaripi, British New Guinea (original), 20×3½, 11½×1;

11. Mabuiag, Torres Straits, 16×3;

12. Muralug, Torres Straits (original), 6½×1½;

13. Mer, Torres Straits (original), 5½×1½;

14. South Australia (after Etheridge), 14½×3; both sides of the same specimen are shown;

15. Wiradhuri tribes, N. S. W. (after Matthews), 13½×2¼;

16. Clarence River tribe, N. S. W. (after Matthews), 5×1;

17. S. E. coast, N. S. W. (after Matthews, 13×4½;

18. Kamilaroi tribe, Weir River, Queensland (after Matthews), 11×1½.

Matthews was writing under the impression there was no systematic study of the bullroarer in Australia. Little did he know Haddon was working on a worldwide study that same year. In his project to understand the nature of man, Haddon devoted a chapter to “the most ancient, widely spread, and sacred religious symbol in the world.” He draws from Lang and adds some examples of his own, including the figure above. Like Lang, he prefers independent invention. The artifact could have been produced by “similar minds, working with simple means towards similar ends.” If it did diffuse, it was so long ago there are no tools to investigate (this is before carbon dating, genetics, etc):

“The distribution of the bull-roarer seems to preclude the view that it has had a single origin and been carried by conquest, trade, or migration, in the usual way. It is impossible to say whether it formed part of the religious equipment of man in his first wanderings over the earth. The former view does not appear to be at all probable: it is impossible to prove the latter supposition.

The implement itself is so simple that there is no reason why it should not have been independently invented in many places and at diverse times. On the other hand, it is usually regarded as very sacred, and as being either a god itself, as representing a god, or as having been taught to men by a god. Where this is the case there is every reason to believe that its use is very ancient. So that it is probable that in certain areas it was early discovered and has since been transmitted to the descendants, and perhaps to the neighbours, of the original inventors.”

The table is informative to the type of categories that were part of the initial study of the bullroarer. Over the next century, dozens of other cultures will be added to similar frameworks:

Table 2. From Haddon (1898): “I have drawn up the following table in order that we may see at a glance the various purposes for which the bull-roarer is employed, and the different places where it is so used. I have marked with a X those places where that particular use is an universal practice (or very nearly so); the / means that some tribes only use it for that purpose, and a ? indicates that I believe this to be, or to have been, its use.”

Interestingly, he reports that in Ireland, there may have been memories of when it was more than a toy:

“Those given to me were made for me, and may not represent the common form of bull-roarer in the north-east corner of Ireland. My informant stated that once when, as a boy, he was playing with a ‘boomer’ an old country woman said it was a ‘sacred’ thing.”

And in Scottland:

“I have been told that the bull-roarer was known as a ‘thunder-spell’ in some parts of Scotland, and in Aberdeen as a ‘thunder-bolt.’ Professor Tylor also records it from Scotland. My friend, Mrs. Gomme, has very kindly allowed me to copy the following from the second volume of her Traditional Games of England, Scotland, and Ireland (1898, p. 291):

** Thun'er- Spell, — A thin lath of wood, about six inches long and three or four inches broad, is taken and rounded at one end…

1899 The Native Tribes of North Central Australia, by Baldwin Spencer and F. J. Gillen

This general work on Australian culture includes a chapter on the bullroarer:

“Amongst the aborigines of the Centre, as indeed everywhere else where they are found, considerable mystery is attached to their use—a mystery which has probably had a large part of its origin in the desire of the men to impress the women of the tribe with an idea of the supremacy and superior power of the male sex.”

The Arunta hold that when a child’s soul enters his mother’s womb, his spirit tree (nanja) is said to drop a bullroarer (churinga). When the child is born, the mother will describe where she thinks the tree is, and her male relatives will go look for the bullroarer. If they don’t find it, they will make one using whatever wood they find nearby. The authors assume the ritual is something like Santa Claus, where the men, typically the grandfather, hides the bullroarer before the occasion. 

Other informative quotes:

• “We have evidently in the Churinga [bull-roarer] belief a modification of the idea which finds expression in the folklore of so many peoples, and according to which primitive man, regarding his soul as a concrete object, imagines that he can place it in some secure spot apart, if needs be, from his body, and thus, if the latter be in any way destroyed, the spirit part of him still persists unharmed.”

• “[The Arunta] associate with the bull-roarer the idea of the spirit part of some great ancestor.”

• “[Among the Kurnai] the bull-roarer is identified with a man who…conducted the first ceremony of initiation, and he made the bull-roarer which bears his name.”

• “To return however to the Arunta. We meet in tradition with unmistakable traces of the idea that the Churinga is the dwelling place of the spirit of the Alcheringa [Dreamtime] ancestors. In one special group of Achilpa men, for example, the latter are reported to have carried about a sacred pole or Nurtunja with them during their wanderings. When they came to a camping place and went out hunting the Nurtunjawas erected, and upon this the men used to hang their Churinga when they went out from camp, and upon their return they took them down again and carried them about. In these Churinga they kept, so says the tradition, their spirit part.”

1909: The Threshold of Religion, RR Marett

In the early 20th century, many thought that the first religious notions were animist, attributing spiritual essence to natural objects, places, and phenomena. Lightning became a god, and mammoths had spirits. Marett proposed a competing model: the first religious feeling was awe. This, he argued, was a more diffuse transcendence separate from, say, the agency of a spirit. Like others, he includes a chapter on the bullroarer, where he argues that all supreme gods in Australia started out as bullroarers, and then their character took form to explain the awe of the ceremonies where they were used. His explanation veers toward word salad¹¹, but, interestingly, he was led down this path by learning that the name for bullroarer is the same as the high god in some tribes¹². Importantly, the bullroarer has been used in theories on the genesis of religion for over 100 years. This is striking, given early examples are found in ritual sites like Gobekli Tepe, which are still theorized to be the birth of religion.

1912: The Lost Language Of Symbolism Vol I, Harold Bayley

As Bayley describes: “The regenerative number eight is apparent on fig. 227, and on fig. 228 there appears a roughly executed serpent, the symbol of regeneration.”

“Among the European mystics of the Middle Ages the bullroarer was apparently considered to be an emblem of the regenerating power of the Holy Spirit.”

1913: Two Years with the Natives in the Western Pacific, Felix Speiser

Some accounts have not aged well:

“In general, the Ambrymese are more agreeable than the Santo people. They seem more manly, less servile, more faithful and reliable, more capable of open enmity, more clever and industrious, and not so sleepy.

Assisted by my excellent guide, I set about collecting, which was not always a simple matter. I was very anxious to procure a “bull-roarer,” and made my man ask for one, to the intense surprise of the others; how could I have known of the existence of these secret and sacred utensils? The men called me aside, and begged me never to speak of this to the women, as these objects are used, like many others, to frighten away the women and the uninitiated from the assemblies of the secret societies. The noise they make is supposed to be the voice of a mighty and dangerous demon, who attends these assemblies.

They whispered to me that the instruments were in the men’s house, and I entered it, amid cries of dismay, for I had intruded into their holy of holies, and was now standing in the midst of all the secret treasures which form the essential part of their whole cult. However, there I was, and very glad of my intrusion, for I found myself in a regular museum. In the smoky beams of the roof there hung half-finished masks, all of the same pattern, to be used at a festival in the near future; there was a set of old masks, some with nothing left but the wooden faces, while the grass and feather ornaments were gone; old idols; a face on a triangular frame, which was held particularly sacred; two perfectly marvellous masks with long noses with thorns, carefully covered with spider-web cloth. This textile is a speciality of Ambrym, and serves especially for the preparation and wrapping of masks and amulets. Its manufacture is simple: a man walks through the woods with a split bamboo, and catches all the innumerable spider-webs hanging on the trees. As the spider-web is sticky, the threads cling together, and after a while a thick fabric is formed, in the shape of a conical tube, which is very solid and defies mould and rot. At the back of the house, there stood five hollow trunks, with bamboos leading into them. Through these, the men howl into the trunk, which reverberates and produces a most infernal noise, well calculated to frighten others besides women. For the same purpose cocoa-nut shells were used, which were half filled with water, and into which a man gurgled through a bamboo. All this was before my greedy eyes, but I could obtain only a very few articles. Among them was a bull-roarer, which a man sold me for a large sum, trembling violently with fear, and beseeching me not to show it to anybody. He wrapped it up so carefully, that the small object made an immense parcel. Some of the masks are now used for fun; the men put them on and run through the forest, and have the right to whip anybody they meet. This, however, is a remnant of a very serious matter, as formerly the secret societies used these masks to terrorize all the country round, especially people who were hostile to the society, or who were rich or friendless.

These societies are still of great importance on New Guinea, but here they have evidently degenerated. It is not improbable that the Suque has developed from one of these organizations. Their decay is another symptom of the decline of the entire culture of the natives; and other facts seem to point to the probability that this decadence may have set in even before the beginning of colonization by the whites.

My visit to the men’s house ended, and seeing no prospects of acquiring any more curiosities, I went to the dancing-ground, where most of the men were assembled at a death-feast, it being the hundredth day after the funeral of one of their friends. In the centre of the square, near the drums, stood the chief, violently gesticulating. The crowd did not seem pleased at my coming, and criticized me in undertones. A terrible smell of decomposed meat filled the air; evidently they had all partaken of a half-rotten pig, and the odour did not seem to trouble them at all.

1919: Balder the Beautiful Vol-ii, James George Frazer

Frazer spends the better part of a chapter seeking to explain why male puberty rites worldwide feature death and resurrection. The bullroarer is mentioned dozens of times. This case in New Guinea is interesting because, in Australia (where the bullroarer may have later spread), the Djungawal sisters are said to obtain the initiation rituals while in the belly of the rainbow serpent. Perhaps death in the belly of the beast is an ancient element of the bullroarer rites.

For this purpose a hut about a hundred feet long is erected either in the village or in a lonely part of the forest. It is modeled in the shape of the mythical monster; at the end which represents his head it is high, and it tapers away at the other end. A betel palm, grubbed up with the roots, stands for the backbone of the great being and its clustering fibres for his hair; and to complete the resemblance the butt end of the building is adorned by a native artist with a pair of goggle eyes and a gaping mouth. When after a tearful parting from their mothers and women folk, who believe or pretend to believe in the monster that swallows their dear ones, the awe-struck novices are brought face to face with this imposing structure, the huge creature emits a sullen growl, which is in fact no other than the humming note of bullroarers swung by men concealed in the monster’s belly.

…

It is highly significant that all these tribes of New Guinea apply the same word to the bull-roarer and to the monster, who is supposed to swallow the novices at circumcision, and whose fearful roar is represented by the hum ot the harmless wooden instruments. The word in the speech of the Yabim and Bukaua is balum ; in that of the Kai it is ngosa; and in that of the Tami it is kani. Further, it deserves to be noted that in three languages out of the four the same word which is applied to the bull-roarer and to the monster means also a ghost or spirit of the dead, while in the fourth language (the Kai) it signifies “ grandfather.” From this it seems to follow that the being who swallows and disgorges the novices at initiation is believed to be a powerful ghost or ancestral spirit, and that the bull-roarer, which bears his name, is his material representative.

1920: Primitive Society, Robert H. Lowie

Lowie was instrumental in developing modern anthropology, twice serving as editor of the American Anthropologist. In his classic on Primitive Society, he argues:

“These resemblances are hardly of a character to be ignored. They aroused the interest of Andrew Lang, who explained them as the result of “similar minds, working with simple means towards similar ends” and expressly repudiated the “need for a hypothesis of common origin, or of borrowing, to account for this widely diffused sacred object.” In this interpretation he has been followed by Professor von der Steinen, who remarks that so simple a contrivance as a board attached to a string can hardly be regarded as so severe a tax on human ingenuity as to require the hypothesis of a single invention throughout the history of civilization. But this is to mistake the problem. The question is not whether the bull-roarer has been invented once or a dozen times, nor even whether this simple toy has once or frequently entered ceremonial associations. I have myself seen priests of the Hopi Flute fraternity whirl bullroarers on extremely solemn occasions, but the thought of a connection with Australian or African mysteries never obtruded itself because there was no suggestion that women must be excluded from the range of the instrument. There lies the crux of the matter. Why do Brazilians and Central Australians deem it death for a woman to see the bullroarer? Why this punctilious insistence on keeping her in the dark on this subject in West and East Africa and Oceania? I know of no psychological principle that would urge the Ekoi and the Bororo mind to bar women from knowledge about bull-roarers and until such a principle is brought to light I do not hesitate to accept diffusion from a common center as the more probable assumption. This would involve historical connection between the rituals of initiation into the male tribal societies of Australia, New Guinea, Melanesia, and Africa and would still further confirm the conclusion that sex dichotomy is not a universal phenomenon springing spontaneously from the demands of human nature but an ethnographical feature originating in a single center and thence transmitted to other regions.”

Later research showed Amazonian tribes also barred women from viewing the bullroarer. So, add South America to his list.

1922: Bantu Beliefs and Magic with Particular Reference to the Kikuyu and Kamba Tribes of Kenya Colony, C.W. Hobley

“Inquiries were made as to whether the bull-roarer, which is well known in Kikuyu as kiburuti, was used in these [initiation] ceremonies, but curiously enough it appears to survive only as a child’s toy, whereas in many of the neighbouring tribes it and its first cousin, the friction drum, are regularly used in initiation ceremonial.”

1929: Tribal Initiations and Secret Societies, EM Loeb

“The case for diffusion is even stronger than stated by Lowie. Not only is the bull-roarer tabooed to women when used in connection with male initiation rites, but it is also almost invariably represented as the voice of spirits. Nor does the bull-roarer travel alone in connection with male initiation rites. This paper has demonstrated the fact that a form of tribal marking, a death and resurrection ceremony, and an impersonation of ghosts or spirits is found among male tribal initiation rites as the usual concomitants of the bull-roarer. There is no psychological principle involved which would necessarily group these elements together, and they therefore must be regarded as having been fortuitously grouped in one locality of the world, and then disseminated as a complex.”

This complex, Loeb argued, includes: “(1) the use of the bullroarer, (2) the impersonation of ghosts, (3) the "death and resurrection" initiation, and (4) the mutilation by cutting.”

As a specialist in Native American culture, he adds dozens of new examples to the literature. A subsequent paper compares initiations in North and South America, comparing 60 cultures from Alaska to Tierra del Fuego. Of interest to EToC, he notes: “Bachofen, Lippert, Briffault, and P. Schmidt have connected secret societies with the matriarchate [the end of the primordial matriarchy]. They believe that secret societies arose when men organized to put an end to woman-rule.” Bachofen published Mother Right in 1861 and died in 1887 before much of the anthropology outside of Europe had begun. He based his ideas on classical literature. The application of his ideas to mystery cults in Australia or the Amazon should be treated as an out-of-sample prediction.

1929: Secret Societies and the Bull-roarer, Nature editorial board

The most storied science journal lends its support to Loeb’s interpretation:

“From the distribution it is inferred that these traits are of archaic, possibly palaeolithic, origin, and not a matter of recent diffusion. As regards the bull-roarer, earlier theories are to be regarded as untenable. It would be possible to regard it as of independent origin in different regions only if attention were confined to its use as a toy or for purposes of magic. In connexion with initiation and secret societies, it is always associated with a form of tribal marking, a death and resurrection ceremony, and an impersonation of ghosts and spirits. It is tabooed to women and is invariably represented as the voice of spirits; but when found outside the area of initiation rites and secret societies it is neither. As there is no psychological principle which debars women from the sight of the instrument in Oceania, Africa, and the New World, it cannot be regarded as due to an independent origin and it must be inferred that it has been diffused from a common centre.”

1932: The Patwin and Their Neighbors, A.L. Kroeber

A colleague at Berkeley says Loeb’s worldwide distribution are the only way to understand specific instances of the bullroarer cult. Many anthropologists accepted Loeb’s ideas; this wasn’t fringe.

“A historical reconstruction of the course of development of the Kuksu system cults cannot as yet be carried very far on the basis of the data themselves. A general scheme of interpretation on a continental or world-wide basis might conceivably take one further. If for instance like Loeb one starts from the position that tribal initiations everywhere are due to a single, ancient diffusion with features like bullroarer, mutilation, death and resurrection rites, spirit impersonations as original criteria, and that secret societies grew out of this substratum as secondary parallels, considerable headway can be made toward reconstructing the history of the California or any other system.”

1937: Excavations at Snaketown, Vol 2: Comparisons and Theories, Harold S. Gladwin

It’s an oddity that reaction to the search for Atlantis has muddied the bullroarer debate for a full century:

“Passing on from physical type to culture, it can be said that the Texas industries described above, fall almost entirely within the boundaries of the Southern long-heads, Map 7. Nordenskjöld, Dixon, and others have enumerated a long list of traits which have been found in South America, which are also known to occur in Australia and Melanesia. Some of these traits, such as the spear-thrower, darts with fore-shafts, curved throwing-sticks, bull-roarers, and various forms of self-mutilation, as tattooing, and finger-amputation, have also been discovered in southern North America. A great deal of ingenuity has been used in providing explanations for the way in which these and other traits were acquired and, in almost every instance, the possibility has been denied that diffusion from Asia to America could have been the cause.

The reasons for this unwillingness to accept a rather logical explanation are twofold. First, such acceptance might seem to lend countenance to the extravagant theories which have been advanced by G. Elliot Smith in "The Ancient Egyptians and the Origins of Civilisation"; also by W. H. Perry in his "Children of the Sun: A Study in the Early History of Civilisation."

…

As a more or less direct consequence, whenever the question arises as to the independent invention or the diffusion of any given trait, immediately, at the first sound of the alarm, comes the solid body of American archaeologists to uphold the sanctity of American native inventiveness. In spite of the uniformity of opinion on this subject, I fell like murmuring, with the Queen in Hamlet, “The lady doth protest too much, methinks.”

Admitting freely that trans-Pacific or trans-Antarctic contact is not to be considered as more than a remote possibility, and again admitting that the spread of the Heliolithic Cult belongs to the same category as the lost continents of Mu and Atlantis, is it not to be considered as a possibility that, when the Southern long-heads entered the New World via the narrow Bering Strait or the Bering Isthmus, they should also have brought with them certain material and social traits? And would this not account rather more logically than some other explanations for the long list of analogies which are known to have been shared by these people in America and those in Australia and Melanesia, particularly when vestiges of the same traits and peoples are to be found along the coasts of eastern Asia and western North and South America?”

1942: Das Schwirrholz: Investigation on the Distribution and Significance of Bullroarers in Cultures, Otto Zerries

Zerries published a book on bullroarers in Germany in 1942. For obvious reasons, this did not obtain wide circulation. In 1953 he wrote a shorter volume focusing on the instrument in South America (including discussion of its use by 40 different cultures), in part because only a few copies of his book survived the war. Zerries maintained that the wide range of the bullroarer was evidence of an ancient common culture based on the separation of the sexes. The bullroarer, according to Zerries, has “its roots in an early cultural stratum of hunting and gathering tribes.”

Zerries points out that “An interesting case occurs among the Apinayé, who consider the bull-roarer simply as a toy; nevertheless they call it ‘me-galo,’ which means soul, ghost, shadow.” 

As in many other places, there are associations with snakes: “The bull-roarers of the Nahuqua are fish-shaped and decorated with snake ornaments.”

“Bull-roarer of the Bakairi (Upper Xingu) by M. Schmidt p. ~28 fig. 158; 27 cm high, in shape. of a human figure.”

1950: Early Man in the New World, Kenneth Macgowan and Joseph A. Hester, Jr

In the section on psychic unity vs diffusion in regard to Native American culture:

“This dogma is called the autochthonous origin of Indian cultures. It asserts that practically all the traits, discoveries, and inventions which Columbus, Cortes, and Pizarro found in the New World were homegrown products—importations barred. The question at issue between the friends and the opponents of this dogma is commonly expressed as Independent Invention versus Diffusion. But the phrasing is not quite accurate: it needs a little amplification. Anything invented by man is in a sense an independent invention. In the present case we are talking of an invention made in one center, the New World, independent of a similar invention in another center, the Old. We are concerned, not with independent invention, but with parallel independent invention. “Diffusion” is still more inaccurate. Normally it means the gradual transfer of some trait or technique from one people to another, often through the intervention of a third or of a third and a fourth people. In the present discussion it is more a matter of a people’s carrying the trait or the technique to a new home. The question is not merely, “Did the Indian invent pottery?” or “Did the American Australoid invent the bull-roarer?” It is rather, “Did he invent it in the New World or the Old?” or “Did he invent it in the Old World and carry it to the New?” or “Did he invent it in the New World while another fellow invented it in the Old?””

1952: Old World Overtones in The New World: Some Parallels with North American Indian Musical Instruments, Theodore A. Seder

Before population genetics, scientists sought to understand the relationship between New and Old World populations via cultural similarities, of which bullroarers were a prime piece of evidence:

The Mountain Cahuilla of California locked their children in a room with their sacred bundle if they should happen to hear the sounds of the bull-roarer; at their jimsonweed drinking ceremony they had an official who led the novitiates in dancing, whirling the ceremonial bull-roarer to keep the women and children away from the dance house at this time. The sight of the instrument was denied Pomo women and children. The Tewa of San Ildefonso used their bull-roarers out of sight, in their kivas, where women could not see them. The Wimonuntci Ute bull-roarer was also taboo to women.

…

This simple instrument was used almost everywhere in the world, although there are occasional places where it is not found, such as Finland, northeastern Asia (except the Chukchee), and the eastern part of North America (excluding the Mattaponi). However, its importance varies according to the prominence of the societies and the secret society initiations of the various native groups. Thus, in Australia, the bull-roarer warns the women and children that the sacred mysteries are being performed, for in most tribes it is death for the women to see the initiation ceremonies or even the bull-roarer itself.

…

In North America, the bull-roarer has curative properties among the shamans of the Diegueno, Mono, Navaho, 53 Tonto Apache, Yokuts, Pomo, and Papago; formerly this was also true of the Tanaina.

The jimsonweed (datura) initiation ceremony is described in greater detail here. Regarding holes in distribution, note that the Sami use the bullroarer, and they now occupy Finland. This highlights the need to continue bullroarer research. To my knowledge, this blog post is the only document that includes the Sami and Basque in the cultural survey.

Additionally, the buzzer is discussed, a similar instrument that often appears with the bullroarer (and picked up as an item of research by Bethe Hagen in the 21st century).

Buzz: Made of a disk, an irregular chunk of solid matter, or a blade, the buzz is fastened in most instances to a looped cord, so that it can be spun rapidly back and forth by the twining and untwining of the loop under tension from the hands. It is probably related to the bull-roarer in its origin. As proof of this we find the South American Caraja using it as a male instrument at their masked dances; the Indians of the Rocky Mountain regions use it as a charm to bring rain, snow, warm weather, favorable winds-i.e., as a fertility charm, a practice that extends to the Navaho in the Southwest, the Eyak in the Mackenzie-Yukon area, and the Naskapi in the Northeast. The buzz is used, too, by the Zuni War Priests as a warning, just as is the bull-roarer in many regions. Another point of contact between the buzz and bull-roarer may be found in its restriction to the males alone. This takes place among the Caraja of Brazil, as mentioned above. The Ingalik, who supposedly use it as a toy occasionally for boys or men, limit it to daytime use in the summer, revealing a lost symbolism.

1954: A Magdalenian ‘Churinga,’ Henry Field

At this time, the bullroarer tradition was widely believed to share a common root and insights from Australia were applied to Stone Age Europe. Here is a write-up of a discovery for “Man, A Monthly Record Of Anthropological Science”:

“The Abbé Breuil identified this ivory specimen [pictured above] as the first complete Magdalenian 'churinga' (bullroarer) ever found…The simple geometric pattern resembles that on Australian churinga and wooden shields. Since the Australian aborigines consider sacred the whirring noise of a churinga, no woman, child or uninitiated person is allowed to see a bullroarer. Thus, in Magdalenian times a similar veneration may have been observed.”

1959: The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology, Joseph Campbell

Campbell is known as a Jungian, popularizing the idea of the monomyth. But he was also a card-carrying diffusionist:

“The structure of the earlier formula is examined in the next section; we may say here only, in summary of the foregoing findings, that the Greek and Indonesian myths examined have revealed not only a shared body of ritualized motifs but also signs of a shared past, an earlier stratum of their common story, in which a snake and not a pig played the animal part. And the fact that (one way or another) the two cycles were not merely linked remotely by a long, tenuous thread, but established on a broad, common base is made evident by a baffling series of further likenesses.

For example, in both mythologies the numbers 3 and 9 were prominent. We know, also, that in the Greek rites of the goddess—and of her dead and resurrected daughter Persephone, as well as of her dead and resurrected grandson Dionysos—the choral chant, the boom of the drum, and the hum of the bull-roarer were used just as in the rites of the cannibals of Indonesia. We recognize the labyrinth theme in both traditions, associated with the underworld and rendered in the figure of a spiral: in Greece, as well as Indonesia, choral dances were performed in this pattern. The reference in the Indonesian myth to Ameta's desire to prepare a drink for himself from the blossoms of the cocopalm suggests a relationship of wine or intoxication to the cult of the maiden-plant-moon-animal complex that would correspond nicely with the formula in the archaic Mediterranean culture. And finally, is not the figure of Demeter, at the time of her departure in wrath from Olympus, bearing in each hand a long, staff-like torch, comparable to Satene standing at the labyrinthine gate, telling the people of the mythological age that she is about to leave them, and holding in each hand an arm of Hainuwele?

There can be no doubt that the two mythologies are derived from a single base. The fact was recognized some time ago by the classical scholar Carl Kerényi, and his argument has been supported since by Professor Jensen, the ethnologist chiefly responsible for the collection of the Indonesian material.”

Later, he extends the argument to Australian mysteries:

“It surely is no mere accident, nor consequence of parallel development, that has brought the bull-roarers on the scene for both the Greek and the Australian occasion, as well as the figures masquerading in white (the Australians wearing bird down, the Greek Titans seared like clowns with a white clay).”

Lang made the same connection regarding white paint used in mystery cults in Ancient Greece and modern Australia as far back as 1885. One of the great divides between the likes of Lang and Campbell vs today’s anthropologists is a willingness to work details like this into grand theories. Like the rest of science, anthropology now prioritizes epsilon improvements and tight, narrow arguments. No room for an offhand comment about how white ritual paint hints that Australians had a version of the Dionysian Mysteries.

The prospect of diffusion was not a passing interest for Campbell. Decades later, in The Historical Atlas of World Mythology: The Way of Animal Powers, Campbell wrote:

“Thus, of the two Paleolithic traditions, that of the bear cult was the older by many centuries, having originated in Neanderthal Man’s veneration of the cave bear as the Animal Master; whereas shamanism, as far as we know, developed as a tradition only in the period of the temple caves and the creative explosion of symbolic forms. Passing eastward across Siberia into America, as well as southeastwardly to Australia, shamanism traveled as but one element of a living compound that included—besides the x-ray style of animal painting and engraving, the atlatl, and the bullroarer—an elaborate complex of social regulations, ceremonials, and associated mythological ideas, which scholars have designated by the very broad term totemism.”

The Historical Atlas of World Mythology, which Campbell was working on at the time of his death, lays out a picture where the human condition—including notions of our own mortality and the existence of spirits—was discovered, and then those ideas spread. The bullroarer, among many other shared cultural features, is used as evidence for the diffusion of totemism.

1960: The Origin of the Kemanak, Jaap Kunst

“No ethnomusicologist, I think, would stand for plurigenesis as regards the bull-roarers, which even in decorative detail are often alike and are used for the same purpose wherever and whenever found (that is, where it has not become a toy for children through lapse of time or change of faith).”

In the same article, he summarizes Curt Sach’s research:

 “The musicologist Curt Sachs formulated that viewpoint in the Preface to his monumental “Geist und Werden der Musikinstrumente.” He wrote:

“To those who, during many years of work, have observed time and again how the rarest cultural forms, often with totally incidental structural features at that, occur in widely scattered parts of the world and, however, in all these places the symbolic and functional aspects have been preserved, it seems almost irrelevant to emphasize and defend the kinship of these cultural forms. He has gradually formed a great picture of a world-circling cultural kinship, created over thousands of years by man himself, through migrations and sea-voyages, despite all natural obstacles.””

It’s crass, but one of the criticisms about diffusion runs something like, “You know who else thought good ideas started in one place and then spread? Nazis!” And it’s true, some documents suggest Zerries was drafted into the war. But this is quite a poor argument. Most anthropologists, including diffusionists cited here, were radical progressives for their time. Many more communists than Nazis. Sachs, for example, was a Jewish intellectual that escaped the Nazis. One of the strengths of bullroarer research is that the researchers run the ideological gamut, stretching over generations. The facts on the ground have survived the test of time, criticized from every direction.

1966: The Slain God: Worldview of an Early Culture, Adolf Ellegard Jensen

Jensen completed a PhD in physics but later became enamored with the ideas of anthropologist Leo Frobenius. He became one of the most important figures advancing Frobenius’s ideas and was appointed the leader of the Institute for Cultural Morphology following Frobenius’s death. However, this fell through as it was 1938 in Germany; he refused to divorce his Jewish wife and opposed the Nazis. After the war ended, he led the institute. He argues the bullroarer mystery cults and their attendant myths spread near the dawn of agriculture when man first ritualized death and rebirth.

“No one will readily regard the emergence of the same recognition [a link between death and procreation] among widely separated peoples as evidence of diffusion. The initiation rites, on the other hand, are cultural creations and thus have appeared at some point in the history of humanity. Imagine that Indians, Papuans, and Africans alike came to the realization of the connection between death and procreation. Can one seriously think that in Africa, New Guinea, and South America, initiation rites are created in which boys of initiation age are isolated in the bush, taught in the tribal myths and rituals, strictly kept apart from all women and girls, use a bullroarer or another noise instrument so that the boys can announce their presence at any time, invent a spirit that devours the boys and whose voice is designated by the sound of the noise instrument, and what other similarities occur in the initiation rites of Africa, Melanesia, and the Americas?

That the myths have been preserved over such long periods among non-literate peoples can be explained, on the one hand, by the fact that they are carried and retold within the framework of solemn initiation ceremonies by certain dignitaries. For example, among the Uitoto Indians, only the person who “gives the festival” and who is very knowledgeable and knows the myths of the origins of things can be the “master of the festival” (Preuß, 1923, p. 651 f.). On the other hand, the crucial factor for their preservation over such long periods lies in these cults themselves and their connection to the myth. The cults are essentially dramatic performances, whereby the myths are vividly presented to the community—especially to the growing youth.

The spread of the myth of theft in heaven, which in the version of grain theft extends to Indian tribes. Assuming that this type of myth, which extends into South America, was developed in connection with ancient Greece, seems highly unlikely. Its origin must be much further back in time.

Absolute chronology does not allow us to make assertions here, as the method based exclusively on myths cannot provide exact data. However, it does allow the assumption that the myth originated with the introduction of grain cultivation and its spread in various regions of the Earth. It is not necessary to prove how it was shown; it is enough to indicate that it returned from such remote times. It can be pointed out that the myth tells of how people were given fruits and that this theft of the originally reserved grain fruit by the heavenly people brought bread to humanity.

In general, one can say of the Prometheus myth that it only occasionally holds a relation to the myth in the cult, especially in contrast to the Hainuwele myth complex, which includes extensive cults and clearly relates to the original myth. The heavenly theft, the core theft, finds its culmination and full development in the Hainuwele myth and is rich in cultic elaboration.

…The Prometheus myth stands closer to “our” way of thinking. It is only in the imagination of the heavenly journey that it contains “mythical” elements. All other images are taken from real life.”

(Originally in German, translated by chatGPT)

In another book, Myth and Cult Among Primitive Peoples, he discusses the significance of the bullroarer to dreamtime in Australian mythology:

"One of the names current among the Ungarinyin for the mythic primal era is Lalan. … For example, our informants used to call rock paintings, rock cairns, corroborees, bull-roarers, and other things associated with the primal traditions “Lalan-nanga,” i.e., “belonging to the mythic epoch.”

The more frequently used term for the period of the mythic heroes is Ungud or, more correctly, Ungur. . . . My colleagues and I noted a third, though less frequently used designation. It was Ya-Yari, a word perhaps derivable from yari, the Ungarinyin term for dream, dream experience, visionary state, but also dream totem. In a narrower sense, the native understands by ya-yari his own vital energy, the substance of his psycho-physical existence. Ya-yari is that something within him, that makes him feel, think, and experience.” (cf, the Eve Theory of Consciousness)

1967: The Distribution of Sound Instruments in the Prehistoric Southwestern United States, Donald Brown

“Bullroarers, the only whirling aerophones in the prehistoric Southwest, are surprisingly rare. One bull roarer was found at Pecos (Kidder 1932:293), another in cliff dwellings in the Verde Valley (Bourke 1892:477), and a third in a cache at Chetro Ketl (R. Gwinn Vivian, personal communication). All were made of wood. The lack of bull roarers, like that of rasps, is somewhat puzzling, since they also play an important part in the ceremonial life of historic Southwestern groups. Bull roarers are extremely perishable and were probably few in number since they are usually a ceremonial item. This may account for the missing bull roarers.”

1970: Man and the Invisible, Jean Servier

A delightful overview with some unique citations (translated from Spanish using GPT 4.5):

Among the Dogon, the Andumbulu were the first to use the bullroarer (ibid., p. 60). The Andumbulu are the small red men who inhabited the land after the first Creation. Men dispossessed them of their Mysteries, after which they became invisible spirits.

…

Certain tribes in northern New Guinea construct a hut around thirty meters long in the form of a monster about to devour the initiates. This enormous creature produces a ferocious growl, nothing other than the roar of bullroarers spun by men hidden inside its belly" (J.G. Frazer, Balder the Beautiful, pp. 227-235, 240-243).

…

On the island of Ceylon (Sri Lanka), the bullroarer is associated with certain Buddhist ceremonies. In Sumatra, it is used in black magic to persuade spirits to seize a woman's soul and drive her mad, thus maintaining the same feared power over women as elsewhere.

In Madagascar, it is merely a child's toy, reserved, however, for boys.

…

Macalister, who devoted a long article to the bullroarer in the Encyclopaedia for Ethics and Religions, notes its presence in Scotland, Cantyre, and the County of Argyll, where it is associated with an ancient celestial deity. Tradition holds that the first bullroarer, called Srannan (pronounced Strantham), fell from the planet Jupiter. In the County of Aberdeen, cowherds still used it as recently as 1885 to protect their herds from lightning.

In the Basque Country, the bullroarer, or "furrunfara," is crafted by shepherds. It's a small wooden plank with serrated edges, decorated with various patterns including the Basque cross of swirling commas, symbolizing celestial movement. Shepherds spin the plank at the end of a cord, sometimes attached to a stick. The buzzing sound produced repels animals foreign to the herd, particularly mares that might disturb sheep at night. This use suggests an older, nocturnal purpose for the bullroarer, though not explicitly tied to initiatory rites today.

In Spain, the "brunzidor" is known in Navarre, the Basque Country, and Aragon.

In Portugal, elders forbid children from spinning their "zunas" (bullroarers) during harvest time, perhaps fearing it affects the souls of the dead departing the earth at that season.

…

The ancient Greeks knew the bullroarer, which was used in the Mysteries of Bacchus, Cotytto, and the Mother of the Gods. One author describes it, echoing the Bambara myth previously cited: "It is a small board thrown into the air to make noise" (Etym. Magn., s.v. Rombos).

Archaeologists have discovered bullroarers made of bronze, gold, or carved from fine stones. One example, preserved in the Louvre Museum, has a convex surface adorned with reliefs depicting two seated figures holding thyrsi—the symbolic staffs of initiates in the cult of Dionysus.

Finally, Pliny recounts in his Natural History (XXVIII, 5,6) that during his time in Italy, it was forbidden for women to walk along roads spinning their spindles, as it was believed this could jeopardize the success of the harvest.

Eminent ethnologists such as Loeb and Lowie have agreed that the complex involving the bullroarer and initiation rites emerged from a common center.

If, as Margaret Mead states, "most scholars agree that the civilizations of the New World developed independently from those of the Old World" (People and Places, p. 168), we still need to discover the origin of this shared certainty, how the identical symbols expressing it have traveled.

From Australia to both Americas, passing through Africa, Oceania, and Europe—from the Magdalenean man to the carpenter or stonemason Companion who vigorously spins his bullroarer—another question confronts us: that of the unity of an initiatory tradition and a primordial teaching. For this time, even in the name of “rationalism,” we cannot appeal to “luck,” “chance,” or “coincidence.”

1973: The Bullroarer in History and in Antiquity, JR Harding

“In Europe it is possible that the bull-roarer goes back to Magdalenian times, ca. 15,000-10,000 B. C., or even to the Gravettian, ca. 25,000 -15,000 B.C. In the first case the supposition is based on the recovery of bone-, ivory- and sometimes stone-pendants, exactly imitating the blade of the instrument, from deposits of Magdalenian age in France. One from Saint Marcel, Indre, (Fig. 1) has serrated edges and an engraved design of lines and concentric circles, recalling some of the designs shown by Australian churinga.”

For some reason, this three-page paper is often cited, though it offers no new analysis. This quote highlights one recurring theme: the style of the bullroarer shows similarities across tens of thousands of years and kilometers.

1973: Anxious Pleasures: The Sexual Lives of an Amazonian People, Thomas Gregor

Gregor did fieldwork in the Amazon, one of the many people with myths of a primordial matriarchy, which ended with the theft of the bullroarers. Quoting his account at length:

“It [the patriarchal order of society] was not always so, at least not in myth. We are told that the women of ancient times (ekwimyatipalu) were matriarchs, the founders of what is now the men's house and creators of Mehinaku culture. Ketepe [whose account is in italics] is our narrator for this legend of Xingu ‘Amazons.’

THE WOMEN DISCOVER THE SONGS OF THE FLUTE. In ancient times, a long time ago, the men lived by themselves, a long way off. The women had left the men. The men had no women at all. Alas for the men, they had sex with their hands. The men were not happy at all in their village; they had no bows, no arrows, no cotton arm bands. They walked about without even belts. They had no hammocks, so they slept on the ground, like animals. They hunted fish by diving in the water and catching them with their teeth, like otters. To cook the fish, they heated them under their arms. They had nothing-no possessions at all. The women's village was very different; it was a real village. The women had built the village for their chief, Iripyulakumaneju. They made houses; they wore belts and arm bands, knee ligatures and feather headdresses, just like the men. They made kauka, the first kauka: "Tak . .. tak . .. tak," they cut it from wood. They built the house for Kauka, the first place for the spirit. Oh, they were smart, those round-headed women of ancient times. The men saw what the women were doing. They saw them playing kauka in the spirit house. "Ah, said the men, "this is not good. The women have stolen our lives!" The next day, the chief addressed the men: "The women are not good. Let's go to them." From far off, the men heard the women, singing and dancing with Kauka. The men made bullroarers outside the women's village. Oh, they would have sex with their wives very soon.

The men came close to the village, “Wait, wait,” they whispered. And then: “Now!” They leaped up at the women like wild Indians: "Hu waaaaaa!" they whooped. They swung the bullroarers until they sounded like a plane. They raced into the village and chased the women until they had caught every one, until there was not one left. The women were furious: "Stop, stop," they cried. But the men said, "No good, no good. Your leg bands are no good. Your belts and headdresses are no good. You have stolen our designs and paints." The men ripped off the belts and clothes and rubbed the women's bodies with earth and soapy leaves to wash off the designs. The men lectured the women: "You don't wear the shell yamaquimpi belt. Here, you wear a twine belt. We paint up, not you. We stand up and make speeches, not you. You don't play the sacred flutes. We do that. We are men." The women ran to hide in their houses. All of them were hidden. The men shut the doors: This door, that door, this door, that door. "You are just women," they shouted. "You make cotton. You weave hammocks. You weave them in the morning, as soon as the cock crows. Play Kauka's flutes? Not you!" Later that night, when it was dark, the men came to the women and raped them. The next morning, the men went to get fish. The women could not go into the men's house. In that men's house, in ancient times. The first one.

This Mehinaku myth of Amazons is similar to those told by many other tribal societies with men's cults (see Bamberger 1974). In these stories, the women are the first owners of men's sacred objects, such as flutes, bullroarers, or trumpets. Often, however, the women are unable to care for the objects or feed the spirits they represent. The men band together and trick or force the women to give up their control of the men's cult and accept a subordinate role in society. What are we to make of the striking parallels in these myths? Anthropologists are in agreement that the myths are not history. The peoples who tell them were likely to have been as patriarchal in the past as they are today. Rather than windows to the past, the tales are living stories that reflect ideas and concerns that are central to a people's concept of sexual identity. The Mehinaku legend opens in ancient times with the men in a precultural state, living "like animals." In conflict with many other myths and the received Mehinaku opinion about female intellect, the women were the culture creators, the inventors of architecture, clothes, and religion: "They were smart, those round-headed women of ancient times." The men's ascendance is achieved through brute force. Attacking "like wild Indians," they terrorize the women with the bullroarer, strip them of their masculine adornment, herd them into the houses, rape them, and lecture them on the rudiments of appropriate sex-role behavior.”

Later, Gregor speaks of the bullroarer directly:

“The puzzling link between the bullroarer and men’s cults was first noted by the anthropologist Robert Lowie more than sixty years ago. He, as well as anthropologists of the so-called diffusionist school, such as Otto Zerries, maintained that the wide distribution of the bullroarer was evidence of an ancient common culture based on the separation of the sexes. The bullroarer, according to Zerries, has ‘its roots in an early cultural stratum of hunting and gathering tribes’ (1942). And according to Lowie, the associated pattern of men's cults is ‘an ethnographical feature originating in a single center, and thence transmitted to other regions’ (1920).

Interest has long since waned in ‘diffusionist’ anthropology, but recent evidence is very much in accord with its predictions. Today we know that the bullroarer is a very ancient object, specimens from France (13,000 B.C.) and the Ukraine (17,000 B.C.) dating back well into the Paleolithic period. Moreover, some archeologists—notably, Gordon Willey (1971)—now admit the bullroarer to the kit-bag of artifacts brought by the very earliest migrants to the Americas. Nevertheless, modern anthropology has all but ignored the broad historical implication of the wide distribution and ancient lineage of the bullroarer.”

Strangely, Gregor grants that the bullroarer likely entered the Americas by diffusion with the earliest migrants from Asia, but also maintains that myths are not sometimes about historical events. The case for diffusion of the bullroarer is based in part on the mythic history of the instrument. In Papua New Guinea, Australia, and the Amazon, it is said that women were the original owners of the bullroarer and the attendant shamanistic mysteries. Lowie and Loeb interpret this and other ritual similarities to mean a primitive male mystery cult diffused. The earliest bullroarer Gregor cites (19 kya, Ukraine) is part of the Gravettian culture, known for shamanism and Venus figurines. Hundreds of the figures have been found, with no male equivalent. Scholars from Marija Gimbutas to Jacques Cauvin to Joseph Campbell have argued for the prominence of women in Paleolithic shamanism. Further, the Gravettian culture is on the shortlist for those who domesticated the dog, which is now known to every culture, including Australia. So there is precedence of global diffusion from this precise time and place.

If the bullroarer complex has been preserved for 15,000 years since it entered the Americas, what is the justification that there is not a kernel of truth to its origin myths, including the prominence of women? Showing indigenous knowledge includes a memory of the sea level rising after the Ice Age is a common exercise. Myths are treated as containing kernels of truth when they support physical facts that are already established. In principle, social truths are just as likely to be preserved in myths.

Finally, it’s important to remember these are not idle beliefs. They are the founding myths of the Amazonians, still alive and reflected in ritual:

“The ceremony of Matapu, however, does not dwell on the theme of illness. Rather, the central theme is the opposition of the sexes. From the men's point of view, the women should be a mystified and intimidated audience. At night, when the bullroarers are tucked away in the men's house, the women are treated to obscene jeers and insulting songs. On the final day of the ritual, the only time the women are full ritual participants, they are bested by the men in a race that ushers the spirit out of the village.”

1978: A Psychoanalytic Study of the Bullroarer, Alan Dundes

“The present psychoanalytic essay draws attention to the possible anal components of male initiation arguing that the bullroarer is a flatulent phallus.” 

Dundes argues that the widespread presence of the bullroarer in different cultures (Australia, New Guinea, North and South America, Africa, and Europe) and its use in male initiation rites are linked to deep symbolic meanings. These meanings are often related to phallic and anal symbols, reflecting male envy of female procreative powers. The bullroarer is considered a “flatulent phallus,” a symbol that incorporates both phallic and anal components and is used to emulate female reproductive abilities through male initiation rituals.

Dundes also highlights that myths often state that the bullroarer was initially possessed by women and later claimed by men, symbolizing the male attempt to usurp female creative power. The association of the bullroarer with thunder and wind further supports its symbolic role in male initiation, representing both the phallic creation of sound and the anal creation of wind

Despite arguing the natives are stuck in the anal stage of development, the paper is an excellent overview of the research up to that point. However, his argument really is that the bullroarer sounds like a fart and is shaped like a penis and is therefore reinvented in male initiations again and again for Freudian reasons. Boys will be boys.

1988: Myths of Matriarchy Reconsidered, Deborah B. Gewertz 

In 1861, Johann Bachofen published Das Mutterrecht (Mother Right), which argued human culture began with the mother-child relationship. The introduction to the English translation notes:

“Bachofen conceives “mother” as the one who bears life, then cares for her child with selfless love, devotion, and sacrifice. In this sense, Mother Right is a celebration of motherhood as the origin of human society, religion, morality, and decency. In English, the term “right” does not sufficiently convey the various meanings of the German term. Bachofen means rights, birthrights, justice, laws, interests, authority, and privileges.”

Bachofen proposed four evolutionary stages of culture:

1. Hetairism - A communal and undifferentiated society where relationships were promiscuous and matrilineal.

2. Matriarchy - The rise of female-dominated societies where descent and inheritance were traced through the mother.

3. Dionysian Stage - A period marked by the male-led overthrow of matriarchal systems, associated with the rise of male mystery cults such as those dedicated to Dionysus.

4. Patriarchy - The establishment of male-dominated societies that structured the social order on paternal descent and inheritance.

Bachofen reasoned that it would have been women who first rose above animal considerations and formed families because even in a promiscuous free-for-all, women are sure that a child is theirs and, therefore, can take responsibility for teaching it human values. In modern anthropological terms, this would be the beginning of cumulative culture. In the 19th century, treating the mother-child dyad as the foundation of culture was a revolutionary idea. But he wasn’t a feminist, and indeed, parts of his book are deeply unpopular with feminists today. He reasoned further that matriarchies are no more because civilization has progressed.

Bachofen's theories were rooted in analyses of classical texts and Hegelian dialectics¹³. He interpreted the Greek corpus as telling of a matriarchy deep in the past. Later generations, including Joseph Campbell and Marija Gimbutas, saw support for his theories in myth and archeology. Myths of Matriarchy Reconsidered is a reaction against this movement.

What is striking is that even the critical essays agree on a difficult-to-explain set of facts. Consider “‘Myths of Matriarchy’ and the Sacred Flute Complex of the Papua New Guinea Highlands” by Terence Hays:

“For example, Fischer concludes (1983:96) that the motif "that the secret instrument first belonged to a woman, corresponds totally with the origin myth of the bullroarer," a claim which finds support in Gourlay’s survey of "esoteric" instruments of Papua New Guinea: out of "fourteen myths ... that explain the origin of the bullroarer (as opposed to stories in which it already exists), all but two associate its first appearance with women" (1975:79)...

It might be added that women are also represented as the original inventors or possessors of the bullroarer in Baruya, Gadsup, Agarabi, Auyana, and Tairora. Only in Fore is the credit given to a male, and even there the male creator being invented it in an envious reaction to his female counterpart’s invention of the sacred flutes (Berndt 1962:51).”

Remember that Bachofen argued for a male coup connected to the male mystery cults of the order of Dionysus. In the European case, the mythological evidence is indirect. He makes several leaps to get to his radical theory. It’s a great surprise that in many other parts of the world (unbeknownst to Bachofen), the story is explicit: “Our bullroarer mystery cult was invented by women, from whom we stole it.” This was an out-of-sample prediction, and the facts on the ground are accepted even by those who think there is nothing to the myths.

1992: Ritual Masks: Deceptions and Revelations, Pernet Henry

“The myth of the discovery of masks by women is inscribed in a wider tradition. Actually, according to the myths of a great many societies, women are considered as the first owners of a number of important sacred and ritual objects (totemic emblems, bull-roarers, masks, ceremonial songs and dances, etc.); they are also the source of many institutions and aspects of culture, and play a determinant role as well in the events that made the world and the human condition what they are now.”

He doesn’t go so far as to endorse their diffusion but notes that it is a good working hypothesis, approvingly quoting Alfred L. Kroeber (1920):

“the assumption of independent origin, where conviction is not pretty definitely forced by the facts in hand, has about it something similar to the assumption of spontaneous generation by the older zoologists. He contends that an examination in detail from the point of view of a working hypothesis of connection is normally preferable because it provides at least an explanation that can be tested and corrected, whereas the assumption of spontaneously independent origin generally amounts to falling back on a principle so vague that its effect is the checking of further enquiry of a historical nature.”

He also approvingly references Willhelm Koppers (1930) on “The question of possible ancient cultural connections between the southernmost South America and Southeast Australia,” but I was unable to track down the original paper, nor would I have been able to read it as it is originally in German (“Die Frage eventueller alter Kulturbeziehungen zwischen dem siidlichsten Sudamerika und Siidostaustralien”). See also Henry’s 1978 dissertation on the diffusion of masks.

1995, Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture, Chris Knight

This 580-page tome argues human culture started ~50,000 years ago when women started a collective bargain denying men sex unless they shared hunting spoils. It interprets worldwide bullroarer rituals as a memory of this event.

“The origin of the bull-roarer. Amazonia: Méhinaku.

In ancient times the women occupied the men's houses and played the sacred flutes inside. We men took care of the children, processed manioc flour, wove hammocks, and spent our time in the dwellings while the women cleared fields, fished and hunted. In those days, the children even nursed at our breasts. A man who dared enter the women's house during their ceremonies would be gang-raped by all the women of the village on the central plaza. One day the chief called us together and showed us how to make bull-roarers to frighten the women. As soon as the women heard the terrible drone, they dropped the sacred flutes and ran into the houses to hide. We grabbed the flutes and took over the men's houses. Today if a woman comes in here and sees our flutes we rape her. Today the women nurse babies, process manioc flour and weave hammocks, while we hunt, fish and farm. (Gregor 1977: 255)”

Knight spends a great deal of time connecting the bullroarer to serpent worship, which he assumes goes back 50,000 years. However, recent research has shown there is no evidence of the rainbow serpent until 6,000 years ago. Contrast that with Eurasia where there is evidence of snake worship much earlier, often associated with snakes. A simpler model is much later diffusion into Australia (and the Americas and Africa).

1998: What is wrong with music archaeology? A critical essay from Scandinavian perspective including a report about a new find of a bullroarer, Cajsa Lund

Reports a shale artifact possibly used as a bullroarer, dated to 5.5-8 kya. Interesting to our purposes as it demonstrates that bullroarers may sometimes be made of materials that preserve well. That bullroarer is compared to a bone bullroarer from 8.5 kya, famous in the discipline for being the oldest Scandinavian musical instrument to date. (Remember, the two European cultures that still use the bullroarer—the Basque and Sami—both preserve pre-Indo-European influence.) In this paper, bullroarers are used as a proxy for epistemic issues. You can see the shift from grand theories to narrow arguments seeking to reduce uncertainty in a single slice of a single region of music archeology.

2001: Gender in Amazonia and Melanesia: An Exploration of the Comparative Method, Gregor and Tuzin

Gregor’s late 1970s work collecting and analyzing bullroarer stories in the Americas was cited in Blood Relations and Anxious Pleasures. Over two decades later, Gregor edited a collection of essays comparing the bullroarer ritual complexes in Melanesia and the Amazon:

“Approximately one hundred years ago anthropologists identified what was to become an intriguing, enduring mystery of culture history: the question of the sources and the theoretical implications of remarkable similarities between societies in Amazonia and Melanesia. A world apart and separated by forty thousand or more years of human history, some of the cultures in the two regions nonetheless bore striking resemblances to one another. In both Amazonia and Melanesia, the ethnographers of the period found societies organized around men’s houses. There the men conducted secret rituals of initiation and procreation, excluded the women, and punished those who would violate the cult with gang rape or death. In both regions, the men told similar myths that explained the origins of the cults and gender separation. The resemblances were such as to convince anthropologists of the day, including Robert Lowie, Heinrich Schurtz, and Hutton Webster, that they could only have come about through diffusion. Lowie flatly declared that men’s cults are “an ethnographical feature originating in a single center, and thence transmitted to other regions”.

The diffusionist school of anthropology waned soon afterward, and for a long period so did interest in the puzzling resemblances of specific societies in the two regions. Nonetheless, during this period anthropologists continued informally to remark upon the similarities in regions that were separated by such a vast gulf of history and geography.”

First, note that the two cultures are not separated by 40,000 years. The dog was domesticated about 20,000 years ago somewhere in Eurasia and then spread to both cultures. Bullroarers could have followed the same path or even one more recent. Further, he does say in a footnote that diffusion on those time scales is possible, though it is not part of the analysis of any of the essays. He is the only author in the anthology that entertains the possibility. 

Moreover, Gregor explicitly says the bullroarer was forgotten because diffusion became unpopular. From this, we can infer that the most obvious explanation is diffusion. If the bullroarer just as easily supported other frameworks, such as the psychic unity of mankind, then it would not have waned with diffusion. 

Gregor concludes the anthology by claiming, “In large part, the Amazonia-Melanesia similarities consist of, or are traceable to, the limited possibilities imposed by conditions of tropical rainforest adaptation.” This may explain their similar subsistence and kinship systems and division of labor. Or even the “social, cultural, and psychological variables” that determine “how gender comes to be hypercognized.” Perhaps, but it doesn’t explain the bullroarer, and that is never addressed. A remarkable failure, given the bullroarer, is on the cover of the book and has been central to the debate for over 100 years. Further, the “jungle” explanation fails the simplest test. Central Australian mystery cults have many similarities to those in the Amazon and Melanesia, particularly with respect to gender. And yet central Australia is one of the harshest deserts in the world. 

The anthology also contains an incisive defense of the comparative method (which has also been problematized in anthropology):

“More broadly, the studies [in this volume] speak to the power and versatility of the comparative method. As Boas rightly perceived, the Victorian “comparative method” was unacceptably Procrustean in that cross-cultural comparisons were manipulated in order to verify the doctrine of a universal, unilineal sequence of cultural development. The critique was important and timely, but it had certain unfortunate long-term consequences. First, it discredited (or placed impossible demands upon) comparison as such, thus precluding (or continually obstructing) the emergence of anthropology as a humanistic science. Second, the Boasian critique discredited the search for universals of human experience and culture, thus leaving cultural anthropology ill-equipped, intellectually and methodologically, to incorporate eventual (especially late twentieth century) discoveries in psychology, evolutionary biology, neuroscience, and genetics, all of which operate comfortably at the interface of universal and particular humanity. Finally, it fostered—as a supposed alternative to uni- versalism—the doctrine of cultural relativism, which, carried to its logical conclusion, glorifies the very incomparability of cultures. Such cultural insularity is, in our view, a fantasy, but it has contributed to what has become a very real intellectual insularity among cultural anthropologists, and on the part of anthropology vis-à-vis important allied disciplines; this insularity—or, if you will, fragmentation or lack of common cause—underlies the malaise or post paradigmatic sense of crisis one detects in current anthropology.”

Finally, one footnote reads:

“In a forthcoming doctoral dissertation, ethnomusicologist Robert Reigle (n.d.) writes of the remarkably similar instruments, melodies, legends, and related practices that exist in Brazil’s Matto Grosso and in the East Sepik and Madang provinces of Papua New Guinea. “Most striking,” he comments (personal communication), “are the musical forms and in- struments that don’t seem to exist anywhere except Brazil and New Guinea.””

The dissertation was published that same year, but Reigle’s most direct treatment of the issue came 15 years later. This would merit its own entry, except his focus is not on the bullroarer. He does affirm, once again, that anthropologists gave up trying to answer certain questions for half a century, which he would tepidly like to bring back:

“Striking parallels between the geographically and historically distant religio-sonic systems of Nekeni people (Serieng village, Papua New Guinea) and Enauené-Naué of the Brazilian Amazon fascinated bikmen (Tok Pisin, “important men”) and people of all ages, from a number of villages around Serieng. In this paper, I situate those parallels within a wide framework, after first presenting ideas about the potential value of comparative work. Rather than argue for a particular definitive answer, my goal is to raise pertinent questions about the complex relationships between Serieng music and Enauené-Naué music, as suggested by apparent musical and cultural parallels. I am suggesting the revival of an avenue of investigation that many American ethnomusicologists have neglected since the late 1960s, only gradually returning to comparative work since the turn of the 21st century.”

2003: The Evolutionary Origins and Archaeology of Music, Iain Morley

PhD thesis that summarizes the evidence for the earliest bullroarers:

“Although none of these pendant-like pieces had been claimed to be musical instruments, several similar ones from Aurignacian to Gravettian contexts have been suggested as possible bullroarers (Scothern 1992); as many small pendant-like pieces of bone with a single perforation seem to be the product of carnivore gnawing and digestion, until the reputed bullroarer artefacts have been re-analysed according to d’Errico and Villa’s criteria, it will be impossible to make any assertions about their anthropic origin, let alone their function…However, there are examples of reputed bullroarers of which there can be no doubt of their human origin. A particularly spectacular example is an artefact from Magdalenian layers at La Roche de Birol, in the Dordogne (see Figure 3.1).”

2009: Spin as Creative Consciousness, Bethe Hagen

Hagen notes that the best explanation is diffusion but that there are no more diffusionists to make the case:

“The bullroarer and buzzer were once well-known and well-loved by anthropologists. They functioned within the profession as hallmark artifacts that symbolized the cultural relativist commitment to independent invention even as evidence (size, shape, meaning, uses, symbols, ritual) stretching tens of thousands of years across human history pointed to diffusion. In virtually every part of the world, even today, these artifacts continue to be invented (?) and re-symbolized in many of the ancient ways.”

This is a recurring theme. Recall Gregor said essentially the same thing in 1973, and in 2001 said that interest in the worldwide similarities continued informally for decades, even if nothing substantial was published. There is no mystery as to why no one pursued diffusion. For generations, anthropologists have accepted the frame that diffusion requires accepting some people are capable of creativity while others are not. I hope the fallacy is apparent. That assumption has not come up once in this survey of the bullroarer, the most enduring artifact in the diffusionist case. Further, it embeds an egregious statistical fallacy. Imagine a lottery. Someone wins it. Is this then a claim that no one else could have won it? Of course not. Now, think of the inventor of the bullroarer ceremony as someone who won the idea lottery. Does one person inventing it imply that no one else in the world could have? Of course not. History is path-dependent, but it doesn’t imply the other paths never existed.

It bears mentioning that some diffusionists were racist and thought that great cultural achievements of non-Western people must have been due to forgotten contact with Egyptians or Atlanteans. It’s not as if anthropologists built a straw man out of whole cloth. However, diffusionists that focused on the bullroarer never made these arguments¹⁴. In part because everything indicates the bullroarer must have diffused at a very early cultural stage, before pyramids were a twinkle in Khufu’s eye. But also because they were less given to wild flights of fancy. They were trying to explain the distribution of the bullroarer, not justify the belief that non-Westerners weren’t inventive or tracking down the lost ten tribes of Israel. Both groups believe in diffusion as a mechanism but have wildly different motivations and standards for evidence. Lumping them together, or worse, treating Atlantis-chasers as the face of diffusion, confuses the issue.

Hagen has had to pull some strings to be able to study the bullroarer. In a 2012 piece, she explains how she viewed specimens in PNG:

“I still remember the light in my professor’s eyes when he spoke of them. They were not to be seen by women, so of course I had to see one. I could find only a small, grainy illustration in a textbook. Many years later, the director of the National Museum in Papua New Guinea refused my request to photograph their incredible collection of bullroarers because I was female, but came up with a workaround. He waved his hand, smiled, and said, “You’re a ceremonial man!”

She also mentions bullroarers have been found at Catalhoyuk and King Tut’s tomb. 

2010: The Bullroarer Cult in Cuba, Michael Marcuzzi

The bullroarer cult is used as an example of the persistence of African culture among slaves in the New World.

2011: The Neolithic in Turkey, New Excavations & New Research, Vecihi Özkaya, Aytaç Coşkun

The last page of the Appendix includes these images:

These are not identified as bullroarers. The treatment is as follows:

“There are decorations of incised lines (Özkaya and San 2007) and figures (Figs. 36-37) on the surfaces of decorative bone artifacts which are usually long ovals. These artifacts have holes at the middle or at the end, which suggest a possible functional use for these objects, even though their precise functional purpose is unclear. Close parallels to those with simple incised decorations (Özkaya and San 2007) are seen also at Hallan Cemi (Rosenberg and Davis 1992).

…

Apart from these, three other unique bone objects recovered during the 2008 season are worth noting (Fig. 37). On one of them-only partly preserved-the incised figure of a scorpion can be discerned, although part of the composition is missing. Although not completely preserved, the second find has incised figures on its semi-oval surface as well. Here, a snake with a body of multiple zigzagged lines and a triangular head, shown in a perpendicular position, can be discerned.”

Figure 37 is particularly identifiable as a bullroarer. The authors note similar finds at Hallan Cemi. In 2016, similar finds were published at Gobekli Tepe, at which point we will return to the question of identification. A slightly more polished version of this research is published: Körtik Tepe: The first traces of civilization in Diyarbakir.

2013: The prehistory of music : human evolution, archaeology, and the origins of musicality, Iain Morley

The section “Cultural Revolution?” discusses the Upper Paleolithic. It begins:

“One possibility that has long been entertained is that the appearance of such behaviours in the European record represents a genuine ‘revolution’ in capability amongst modern humans upon their arrival in Europe, part of a package of behaviours that has traditionally been taken to include symbolism, in the form of representation (‘art’) and ornamentation, as well as technologies such as bone points, harpoons, and flint blades.

…

Alternatively, it could indicate the spread and popularization of such behaviours, and this need not be indicative of a change in the cognitive capacity for the behaviours; there are many people in the world today with the cognitive capacity to use or programme a computer, for example, but who will never do so, along with the rest of their contemporaries in their culture.”

Soon after, five pages are devoted to the bullroarer. Similarities are briefly noted, but the bulk of the section deals with frequencies that different samples produce and the difficulty of knowing if an artifact was, in fact, used as a bullroarer (even if it functions as one). It doesn’t address why the bullroarer is used similarly, even comparing the diffusion vs psychic unity explanations. This is particularly galling because it is a book about human evolution. If the Upper Paleolithic was not a cognitive revolution, he says it could indicate the “spread” of such behaviors. The bullroarer has been discussed as a marker for that spread for a century. The thesis would be much stronger if used the vast literature on bullroarers to try and shed light on the question of how modern behavior evolved.

2015: The Domesticated Penis: How Womanhood Has Shaped Manhood, Loretta Cormier and Sharyn Jones

This is perhaps the best (and evenhanded) summary of the bullroarer complex to date. It includes hundreds of citations and is a reminder of the rigor that goes into even supporting arguments in academia. Like much of the research before, the introduction shows the central facts are not debated and require an explanation, but anthropologists no longer have the appetite.

“The enigma of the bullroarer complex has largely faded from the consciousness of contemporary anthropology. However, among the earliest anthropologists, in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, finding an explanation for the bullroarer’s widespread occurrence and symbolic similarities across cultures was central to burgeoning theories of cultural phenomenon.”

The sheer number of citations to different cultures is impressive but mostly covered in the above studies¹⁵. Here are a few selections that are fairly unique, with some commentary:

• “Navajo singers associate the bullroarer with the diyin din’é’ Holy People.”

  • The Holy People are responsible for the creation of the world and the introduction of order and balance. They are believed to have taught the Navajo people the proper ways to live, including ceremonies, healing practices, and ethical guidelines (c.f., the Australian Dreamtime).

• “Among the Ngarinyin [Australia], the bullroarer is the name of the Maiangara rainbow serpent.”

• “Among the Dogon of Mali, the bullroarer is used in the sigi ceremony, which is held once every 60 years. The bullroarer represents the speech of the dead and is said to utter, ‘I swallow, I swallow, I swallow men, women, and children, I swallow all.’”

• “Another theme in Papua New Guinea is the association of the bullroarer with either agricultural rites or control over the elements of nature…The Kiwai also use the bullroarer in agricultural rites, and it figures in two myths, one associated with the origins of agriculture and another with male-female gender-role reversal.75 The mythical Soido killed his wife, and from her dead body all the vegetables sprouted. Soido collected and ate them, but they passed to his penis. When he withdrew the first time he had sex with a new wife, all the vegetables in his penis were scattered over the field. This was the origin of vegetables. In agricultural rites, the bullroarer is used to encourage the growth of yams. After men and women have intercourse, their secretions are smeared on the bullroarer, which is swung, causing “medicine” to be spread over the field. In another Kiwai myth, the bullroarer was dis- covered by a woman when a chip of wood flew off a tree she was cutting and made a buzzing sound. In a dream, Maigidubu, an anthropomorphic snake-man, instructed her to give the bullroarer to her husband.”

  • Bullroarers dated to just before agriculture was invented have been found at Gobekli Tepe and Kortik Tepe. At Kortik Tepe, they are even decorated with snakes. It is possible that they were part of a pre-requisite package of cultural ideas that led to sedentism and agriculture.

• “German ethnologist and archaeologist Leo Frobenius argued [1898] that the bullroarer derived from the fish on the hook, that is, the way that a fish would appear if it were dangling from a fishing string.”

  • Just-so stories abound when trying to avoid diffusion.

• “The bullroarer complex appears in traditions that have both temporal depth and wide geographic range. We do not know the extent to which this interesting item of material culture diffused throughout or was invented independently in different parts of the world. Nevertheless, it is intriguing that in some myths the bullroarer was considered a female object before it became associated with men and masculinity. The bullroarer was frequently used to mark male initiation rites and memorialize important events.”

2016: A Decorated Bone 'Spatula' from Göbekli Tepe. On the Pitfalls of Iconographic Interpretations of Early Neolithic Art, Dietrich and Notroff

“The functional interpretation of these ‘bone spatulae’ is rather difficult. The finds outside Göbekli Tepe, and the two fragments found there, have more blade-like ends and could have been used as tools. However, the décor in most cases reaches the presumed active end of the tool and generally seems very elaborate for a simple tool for lifting or spreading materials. The holes in the narrower ends could simply be meant to prevent the loss of a potentially symbolically important object by tying it with a cord. But they could also have played a functional role.

A group of objects with a similar general form well known from archaeological and ethnographical contexts are bullroarers, i.e., musical instruments, usually made of wood, that produce a noise when swung on a long cord (e.g., Seewald 1934; Zerries 1942; Maringer 1982; Morley 2003: 33-37; Fischer 2009). Ethnographic data offers a wide variety of possible uses of bullroarers ranging from cultic ritual to more profane tasks, like scaring away animals from plantations (Morley 2003: 33, with bibliography).

In the archaeological record, bullroarers have been identified since the Palaeolithic. In many cases, however, their function has been open to doubt (Fischer 2009: 3-4). Prominent, sometimes richly decorated items with a likely bullroarer function stem from important French Palaeolithic sites, inter alia from La Roche de Birol, Dordogne (Magdalenian), Abri de Laugerie Basse (Magdalenian), Lespugue (Solutreen), Badegoule (Morley 2003: 34-35, Fig. 3.1-2). Experimental work by Dauvois (1989) has proven the sound-making capabilities of these pieces. An example of the late Upper Palaeolithic is known from Stellmoor in northern Germany (Ahrensburg Culture: Maringer 1982: 129), and there is a larger list of possible bullroarers from Mesolithic contexts (e.g., Fischer 2009: 12).

To get back to the Near East, PPN use of bullroarers is substantiated by bullroarer type pendants in bone from Çatalhöyük (Russell 2005: 351, Fig. 16.14a). Russell tentatively discusses a function as bullroarers for them; however, they are rather small.

It has to be noted though that the PPN pieces from southeastern Turkey are a little different from the usual shape of bullroarers. Some bullroarers have a lancet-shape with two narrowing ends, other examples have a narrow and a broad end, but usually the latter bears the hole for the cord. So some doubt remains regarding the functional interpretation of these objects, though they seem to have been of high value for their users, as they appear as grave goods at Körtik Tepe. An experimental reproduction of the presumed PPN bullroarers of hard wood serves its function very well and produces a deep vibrato sound.”

Essentially, it looks like a duck, swims like a duck, quacks like a duck. They even built a replica and it roars like a bull. But the paper focuses on the uncertainty—what can’t be stated as fact—concluding:

“The point of the present contribution is not to show that Neolithic art in general is not understandable. But there has to be a basic awareness of the fact that not every depiction is ‘readable’ beyond doubt, and that such depictions naturally should not be used as evidence for far-reaching interpretations.”

True, but not all that interesting. Science requires reasoning under uncertainty and the authors never engage with what it would mean if the object actually was a bullroarer. Would it update our view of Lang, who in 1885 said:

“the Greeks retained both the mysteries, the bull-roarer, the habit of bedaubing the initiate, the torturing of boys, the sacred obscenities, the antics with serpents, the dances, and the like, from the time when their ancestors were in the savage condition.”

Genetic studies tell us that the ancestors of the Greeks were Anatolian farmers, such as those at Gobekli Tepe (where they were inventing agriculture). Or consider Zerries (cited in the article), who argued the bullroarer spread “in an early cultural stratum of hunting and gathering tribes.” Or Loeb, who said it spread with an entire male initiation ceremony of death and rebirth. In 2016, the same year the paper was published, Dietrich wrote on the official Gobekli Tepe blog:

“Taking into account the fierce and deadly iconography of Göbekli Tepe’s enclosures, male initiation rites including the hunt of fierce animals and the symbolic decent into an otherworld (especially if the enclosures really were roofed), symbolic death and rebirth as an initiate could have been one purpose of rituals at Göbekli Tepe.”

It is remarkable that the person who found the bullroarer at Gobekli Tepe already believes the site likely housed Dionysus-esque initiations, is aware of the literature on the bullroarer, and yet doesn’t even bring up the implications of a bullroarer at Gobekli Tepe. The site even has the required snakes, just like the Dionysian Mysteries and many other bullroarer mystery cults. He is probably even aware that other archeologists have speculated that Gobekli Tepe and other PPN temples were the first inklings of Dionysian worship¹⁶. It is as Gregor said decades before, “Interest has long since waned in ‘diffusionist’ anthropology, but recent evidence is very much in accord with its predictions.”

2016: The Waters of mendangumeli: A masculine psychoanalytic interpretation of a new guinea Flood myth— and Women’s laughter, Eric Silverman

In a bit of a throwback, the bullroarer is once again pulled through a Freudian filter. As usual, the commonality of certain myths is accepted:

““Women had flutes and gave birth,” one man told me. “We had nothing” (see also Hogbin 1970:101). Or almost nothing. Ancestral men did possess the bullroarer, which, one day, they twirled. The noise frightened the primeval women, who fled, allowing men to filch the flutes and other sacred objects (see also Hays 1988).” 

2017: Cosmology Performed, the World Transformed: Mimesis and the Logical Operations of Nature and Culture in Myth in Amazonia and Beyond, Deon Liebenberg

This paper argues that bullroarer rituals and creation myths form a worldwide phylogeny that goes back to the Paleolithic in Europe. It’s only been cited a couple of times and is published by someone in an Informatics and Design department. Compare that to earlier bullroarer theorists who were influential anthropologists. The models the bullroarer tends to support are just not very popular.

2019: A functional investigation of southern Cape Later Stone Age artefacts resembling aerophones, Kumbani et al

This paper examines artifacts previously described as pendants and shows that their wear marks are more typical of something spun with force (e.g., a bullroarer). It would be fascinating to apply these methods to many other uncertain artifacts.

2022: Australian Aboriginal symbols found on mysterious 12,000-year-old pillar in Turkey—a connection that could shake up history, Archeology World team

Australian shamanism and rock art have some striking similarities to symbols found at Gobekli Tepe. Below are three images and their captions from the article:

“Left: An Australian churinga stone. Right: A closeup of the central pillar in Göbekli Tepe’s Enclosure D with a similar symbol. The pillar depicts a deity, showing this symbol is similarly sacred in the cultures that created both objects.”

“A “churinga stone” was found at Hasankeyf, another 12,000-year-old site in Turkey left by the same vanished people.”

“Another “churinga stone” was found at Hasankeyf. The carving resembles a double helix.”

Churinga stones are a class of ritual objects in Australia that include bullroarers and buzzers. Notably, in many parts of the world, bullroarers, and the two-holed “buzzers” go hand in hand, such as in the Dionysian Mysteries. Archeology World gets so close to the precise model suggested by anthropologists for decades: a primordial shamanic mystery cult spread globally, Australia inclusive. And yet, it is flavored with questions about a mystical lost race that may have understood DNA was a double-helix.

I cover this episode in the essay Archeologists vs. Ancient Aliens. To their credit, the latter crowd held their tongue on this being evidence that aliens edited our DNA and did manage to bring up bullroarers. Unfortunately, they failed to press their advantage and got drawn into a debate on whether the Smithsonian has been hiding pre-Columbian giants.

2023: Current Academic Sampler

Which brings us to current research. Everything above is selected because it is significant in some way. However, a search for “bullroarer” on Google Scholar yields dozens of results each year. The titles now are things like:

• 2023 Psychoacoustics of rock art sites: the case study of the shelters Diosa I and Horadada (Cádiz, Spain)

• 2023 Idiophones or Palettes? An Analysis of Flat Bone and Shale Implements from Matjes River Site, Southern Cape of South Africa 

• 2023: Spirituality and Song: The Importance of Indigenous Voices in the Music Classroom

• 2024: Musicking and Soundscapes amongst Magical-Religious Witches: Community and Ritual Practices 

Some of these are narrowly useful. But what unites them is a complete lack of interest in the big question of the distribution of the bullroarer.

Conclusion

The simplest explanation for this set of facts is the bullroarer was invented once, long ago, and spread. This explains why the bullroarer is more common in conservative (primitive) societies, is associated with similar rituals and ideas, and has been ignored by anthropologists for 50 years. This isn’t the only explanation, but we can be confident it is the simplest because of that last fact. Anthropologists stopped discussing the bullroarer after diffusion was problematized, despite ongoing findings that continue to support monogenesis. Remember, bullroarer mystery cults were hypothesized to be part of the rebellion against primitive matriarchy before any anthropology was done outside the classical world. (Also remember that women inventing a set of rituals that men later steal would qualify; matriarchy doesn’t have to mean political domination.)

The upside is that each culture’s Mysteries may have descended from the Original Mystery (possibly discovered by women). An idea so powerful it inspired millions to keep it secret, to keep it safe, as it branched and bloomed into a thousand cults. Or, as Cicero waxed eloquent about the Eleusinian Mysteries:

“For it appears to me that among the many exceptional and divine things your Athens has produced and contributed to human life, nothing is better than those Mysteries. For by means of them we have been transformed from a rough and savage way of life to the state of humanity, and have been civilized.” M. Tullius Cicero, De Legibus, ed. Georges de Plinval, Book 2.14.36

Those Mysteries included the Bacchic procession dedicated to Dionysus. Frenzied celebrants are depicted with snakes in their hair, pulling bulls apart with their bare hands in memory of Titans who did the same to their God. Titans that initially lured Dionysus with a bullroarer, a mirror, and a snake. It is remarkable that the Greek mysteries could have been passed down from before the Agricultural Revolution. More remarkable still is that some version of this cult could have spread to every continent. That is the upside, that all cultures are intertwined in ways we don’t yet understand but could if we were willing to study the bullroarer. For anthropologists, this is also the downside. Separation from Eurasian culture is an important part of how indigenous culture is currently defined. Further, discussing worldwide diffusion also requires squaring with ideas about progress. Why were bullroarers conserved in some places but not others?

We don’t know why primitive cults around the world use the bullroarer in similar ways. But, when we work up the courage to ask when and how the human condition was first understood and ritualized, the bullroarer awaits, scattered across museums, oral history, and a century of academic analysis, waiting for someone to put the puzzle together.

1. The advantage of a blog is the ability to embed video in a footnote, including Vikings getting in touch with their roots:

2. For cannibal’s use of the bullroarer in Australia, see the 1910 Die Bundandaba-Zeremonie in Queensland. For an account of Papua New Guinea, see Joseph Campbell’s 1959 Masks of God:

“The Swiss ethnologist Paul Wirz, in a two-volume work on the myths and customs of these head-hunting cannibals, tells of their gods—the Dema—who appear in the ceremonies, fabulously costumed, to enact again (or rather, not "again," because time collapses in "ceremonial time" and what was "then" becomes "now") the world-fashioning events of the "time of the beginning of theworld." The rites are performed to the tireless chant of many voices, the boom of slit-log drums, and the whirring of the bull-roarers, which are the voices of the Dema themselves, rising from the earth.”

3. From “Tambour à friction et tambour tournoyant,” translated with chatGPT:

“In 1956, Marcel-Dubois and Pichonnet-Andral encountered the rotating drum in the Pyrenees. They had the opportunity to observe it in context. As in most cases, it is an instrument found in the hands of pre-pubescent boys, not because of its "toy" aspect, but because it refers to very ancient "pagan" beliefs that religious syncretism allowed to integrate, here into the Catholic rite. Indeed, it is used before Easter during the so-called "days of darkness" (Holy Thursday, Good Friday, Holy Saturday), those of the passion and death of Christ, when the bells are reputed to have gone to Rome awaiting the resurrection of the Savior. It is linked to the ancient male rites of the end of winter, intended to promote the return of spring. Producing particularly inharmonious sounds, if not frightening, these sound objects produce a sort of din meant to scare away the winter "forces" so that they give way to the spring renewal. They can be heard in this sound example (MUS1956.003.069), captured while the young boys of Betpouey (Hautes-Pyrénées) stroll through the village streets. With their rotating drums but also rattles, they replace the bells destined for silence and call the faithful to the Good Friday service.”

The bullroarer among the Basque is also referenced here.

4. The genetic heritage of the Sami leads to Ice-Age Siberia. Similarly, there are cultural connections to extant Siberian shamanism (ctrl+f “Sami” on this Wiki).

5. There is debate on the Rongorongo script of Easter Island, a possible sixth invention. Read the stackoverflow discussion with eyes tuned to how people are trained to think about diffusion.

6. Connecting diffusionists to Nazis is also highly simplified. Bullroarer diffusionist Adolf Ellegard Jensen, for example, lived through the Third Reich. Even then, he refused to divorce his Jewish wife and openly criticized the Nazi regime, putting himself in danger. I’m not aware of any bullroarer diffusionist who was connected to the Nazis (though I don’t read German).

7. The actual dates were not known because much of the carbon dating took place after the bullroarer scholarship. However, even in the 19th century, the bullroarer was suggested to have been part of the first religion that spread over the globe.

8. You may protest that Aboriginal religion is the oldest in the world. But again, the Rainbow Serpent is just 6,000 years old—younger than serpent worship on any other continent (save perhaps Africa).

9. His conception of the progression of mysteries is interesting:

“In the first place, the bull-roarer is associated with mysteries and initiations. Now mysteries and initiations are things that tend to dwindle and to lose their characteristic features as civilisation advances. The rites of baptism and confirmation are not secret and hidden; they are common to both sexes, they are publicly performed, and religion and morality of the purest sort blend in these ceremonies. There are no other initiations or mysteries that civilised modern man is expected necessarily to pass through. On the other hand, looking widely at human history, we find mystic rites and initiations numerous, stringent, severe, and magical in character, in proportion to the lack of civilisation in those who practise them. The less the civilisation, the more mysterious and the more cruel are the rites. The more cruel the rites, the less is the civilisation … On the whole, then, and on a general view of the subject, we prefer to think that the bull-roarer in Greece was a survival from savage mysteries, not that the bull-roarer in New Mexico, New Zealand, Australia, and South Africa is a relic of civilisation.”

10. The full title of the book is actually “The snake-dance of the Moquis of Arizona: being a narrative of a journey from Santa Fé, New Mexico, to the villages of the Moqui Indians of Arizona, with a description of the manners and customs of this peculiar people, and especially of the revolting religious rite, the snake-dance; to which is added a brief dissertation upon serpent-worship in general, with an account of the tablet dance of the pueblo of Santo Domingo, New Mexico, etc.” which does invite criticism.

11

“When, however, the central mystery of the initiation rites has been enacted, which consists in revealing to the novices the means of producing these terrifying sounds, awe of the bull-roarer is in no way quenched and exploded. On the contrary, the element of fear becomes an ingredient in a richer emotional complex corresponding to the sense of being mysteriously helped to accomplish the passage from boyhood into manhood— of being filled with the mana that makes all things grow and prosper, whereof the bull-roarer is the vehicle. Meanwhile, the material vehicle is dimly distinguished from the indwelling power, the inward grace, which it embodies and imparts, and there has consequently occurred an advance to a more appropriate type of symbolization. An anthropomorphic being, similar in this respect to Hobgoblin but unlike him in being associated with the beneficent power set in motion by the initiation rite, whereof he is held, cetiologically, to be the founder, is supposed to speak through the bull-roarer; and, further, as the bullroarer is an instrument for making the thunder and rain that make things grow, so its anthropomorphic counterpart is identified with the sky-god who makes thunder in the sky and sends down the actual rain.”

12. He repeats the same in a 1929 work:

“Thus Baiame [an Australian ‘High God’] has such a duplicate and understudy in Tundun, a name said to mean ‘bull-roarer’. It was, in fact, largely on the strength of this etymological hint that I proposed to Lang the theory — I worked it up into an essay a good deal later on — that all the High Gods of Australia, prototypes and ectypes alike, were originally bull-roarers — not makers, therefore, so much as, specifically, makers of rain. (1929:13)”

13. The wheel of history turned on the contradictions of the previous age. Cultural assumptions (the thesis), were countered by an antithesis, which together were synthesized into the next age.

14. Remember, it was Lang back in 1885 who argued against diffusion of the bullroarer because it is the instrument the savage mind invents time and again. This is recast as the non-racist position in today’s textbooks, while monogenesis is disparaged.

15. For example, consider this paragraph:

“Although the bullroarer is documented in many cultures, it is perhaps most prevalent in those cultures of Australia and Papua New Guinea. The bullroarer is integral to male initiation rituals in many Australian aboriginal groups and is typically, but not always, kept secret from women. Such groups include the Antakirnya,21 the Arrernte,22 the Bād,23 the Diyari,24 the Gunai,25 the Kamilaroi,26 the Karadjeri,27 the Keeparra,28 the Mayi-Kulan,29 the Murin- bata,30 the Narungga,31 the Walpiri,32 and the Wurundjeri.33
In Papua New Guinea, the bullroarer has been documented as used in male initiation rites, which are typically forbidden to women in groups including the Bariai,45 the Bena Bena,46 the Bukaua,47 the Dugum,48 the Ila- hita Arapesh,49 the Kaliai,50 Koko,51 the people of Kiwai Island,52 the Lak,53 the Marind-anim,54 and the Ngaing,55 and the Trans-Fly Papuans.56 Bariai women are threatened with gang rape if they witness male initiation or see the bull- roarer;57 Ngaing women, on the other hand, are permitted to see the bull- roarer as long as it is not being whirled.58 Among the Kiwai, the bullroarer is called a madubu, which means “I am a man.”59 In many Papua New Guinea groups, including the Bukaua,60 the Ilahita Arapesh,61 the Kaliai, 62 the Koko,63 the Lak,64 and the Mundumagor,65 the bull- roarer is described as the voice of a supernatural being…Male-female reversals are found among the, [Kiwai,] Bariai, and the Kaliai.77 In Kaliai myth, at one time, men had breasts and cared for children while the women had knowl- edge of the bullroarer. Their cultural hero Kowdok gave the bullroarer to men and gave men’s breasts to women.”

16. See The Birth of the Gods and the Origins of Agriculture by Jacques Cauvin, an archeologist specialized in the Pre-Pottery Neolithic of the Near East.