onal and suprarational explanations for or senses of the cosmos persist. More generally, Nielsen, et al. point out, religious traditions appear to have always arisen out of a fundamental human need to locate humanity's place in and relationship to a cosmos that eludes complete understanding. "Life is perceived as grounded in the ultimate," which gives rise to "sacred words (myths), sacred acts (rituals), and sacred places (symbols and sites)" (Nielsen, et al. 22-3). The interpenetration of these three artifacts of religious experience, which elaborate a Weltanschauung in whatever culture they arise, forms the framework of analysis of all religions by Nielsen, et al.
Nielsen, et al. examine primal religions with reference to beliefs, customs, and practices that have survived into the modern period among indigenous peoples in Australia, North America, and Africa. In Australia, despite regional differences of emphasis that seem to be connected to the geographical variations of the land, the controlling worldview is one of "the Dreaming," a concept that refers to such varied features of human experience and understanding as the idea of the Creation and the vicissitudes of everyday experience. The Dreaming also takes in the distinction between what Western sources would refer to as cosmic and ordinary time, or perhaps eternal and human time. Dream Time refers to the cosmic order and has a sacral character about it, intersecting with ordinary time at certain geographical points or in the context of ritual observance. Nielsen, et al. cites the linkage in aboriginal religious thought between a sense of spiritual power and the natural environment.
[T]he Dreaming has nothing to do with dreaming as an illusory state of consciousness; rather, it is the most fundamental Aboriginal actuality, the underlying framework of time and space in which Aborigines orient themselves (Nielsen, et al. 26).
That orientation is consistent with the sacred i...