Mokoi

When a person died in the stone country of north-eastern Arnhem Land, the mourners did not only grieve. They watched the air around the body. Something was working loose in it, a second self that had shared the dead person’s skin all their life and now had nowhere it belonged. The better part of the soul had a road home. This other part did not, and it would keep close to the place where the breath had stopped, thin-tempered and hungry, for as long as it could hold on.

The Yolngu of this coast, whom early ethnographers called the Murngin, held that a living person carried two spirits inside one skin. One was the true soul, sometimes named the birrimbir or waro, and at death it had a journey to make. It travelled back to the clan’s own sacred waterhole, the well of ancestral country from which the person’s spirit had first come, and there it rejoined the land and the dead who had gone before. The mokoi had no such road. It was the shadow-self, the flesh-soul, and it was simply left behind, cut off from the country that received the other, loitering where the body had fallen.

That is what made a death dangerous long after the dying was done. In this country a death was rarely thought to happen on its own. An old man’s passing, a hunter broken on the rocks, a child gone hot and still overnight, each one raised the same question, which was not how but who. A man of power working from a distant camp could set a mokoi loose against someone he hated, and the spirit would go unseen across the country to arrange the sickness or the accident that killed him. So a funeral was also an inquest. The living studied the circumstances of the death for the fingerprints of the sorcerer who had sent the thing that caused it.

The mokoi keeps no reliable shape in the tellings. It is spoken of as a dark form that moves through the bush after dark, quick and unseen, known by its effects rather than its outline. Where it does take on a body is in wood. Across north-eastern Arnhem Land people carved tall mortuary figures, some of them taller than a standing man, and painted them with the close cross-hatched designs that stand for rib and flesh, finishing them with lorikeet-feather armbands and clan markings. These figures served as a receptacle for a dead man’s spirit, and they were built out of an older practice, the bound bark figures and the square painted grave-posts called Wuramu that once stood over the dead. The anthropologist W. Lloyd Warner carried the first of these carvings away from Milingimbi Mission in the late 1920s, and Yolngu artists were still making them, larger and finer, into the middle of the twentieth century.

A grandmother watches a small boy drift from the cooking fires toward the low platform where a body has been laid, and she calls him back before he has gone ten paces, because that is exactly where the thing waits. It stays near the dead. It harms whoever comes too near.

When a mokoi took hold of a living person, the damage showed in the body and the mind. The possessed might lose their reason, go deaf or dumb, wander without knowing where they were, or turn without warning to violence. Sickness of the mind was not separated from sickness sent by magic; both were the work of something that had gotten inside.

Word that a mokoi had been sent against the camp did not bring only fear. It brought a counter. A community’s own ritual specialists answered a hostile spirit in kind, calling up their familiar spirits to intercept and destroy the intruder before it could close on its target. The contest played out in the dark and at a distance, one power hunting another over the sleeping country, and its outcome was read afterward in who sickened and who did not.

Its strengths follow from what it is. Loosed by a sorcerer, it can carry death across great stretches of land while never being seen, and once it fastens on a victim it brings disease, ruin, or the collapse of the mind. It belongs to the night and to the ground around the dead, and it moves through both without a sound. But it is not an ancestral being, and it does not share their freedom. It needs a living hand to aim it, and a rival power can turn it back or run it down. Its reach ends at the edge of the burial ground and the place of death, which the living learn to skirt and, in time, to appease. The soul that mattered most had already gone home to the water; the mokoi was only the remainder, and a remainder can be driven off. No one in that country died of nothing, and no mokoi came from nowhere.

Frequently Asked Questions

What is a mokoi in Aboriginal mythology?

A mokoi, also spelled mokuy, is an evil spirit in the beliefs of the Yolngu people of north-eastern Arnhem Land in northern Australia. It is the malignant shadow-soul or “flesh-soul” that is left behind when a person dies, lingering near the body and the burial ground, and it can also be sent by a sorcerer to harm or kill an enemy.

Why do the Yolngu connect the mokoi with death and sorcery?

In Yolngu belief a death is rarely regarded as natural, so a fatal illness or accident is blamed on a mokoi dispatched by a sorcerer through black magic. This means that when someone dies, the community looks for the person responsible for sending the spirit, treating the death as the result of an attack rather than chance or old age.

Does Yolngu belief say a person has two souls?

Yes. Yolngu tradition holds that each person contains two spirits, a good or true soul often called the birrimbir or waro and a bad one called the mokoi or mokuy. At death the good soul returns to the clan’s sacred ancestral waterhole, while the mokoi is left behind near the place of death and must be appeased or driven away.

What do the carved mokuy figures of Arnhem Land represent?

The tall carved and painted wooden mokuy figures made in north-eastern Arnhem Land represent these sinister spirits of the dead and serve as a receptacle for a dead person’s spirit. Painted with cross-hatched rib-and-flesh designs and clan markings, they descend from earlier bound bark figures and from the painted grave-posts known as Wuramu.

How do people protect themselves from a mokoi?

Because a mokoi lingers where a person has died, people keep away from burial platforms and the sites of deaths, especially at night, and take care to appease the spirit or drive it off into the bush. When a mokoi is believed to have been sent by a sorcerer, a community’s own ritual specialists summon familiar spirits to hunt it down and destroy it before it can reach its victim.

Related Entries

Garkain, Yawkyawk, Mimi, Wondjina, Rainbow Serpent, Baiame, Bunjil, Quinkin, Inapertwa, Bunyip, Yara-ma-yha-who, Yowie, Aboriginal Mythology