In Australian Aboriginal culture, a sacred object or stone used in religious rituals, believed to hold spiritual power and passed down through generations.
From Australian Aboriginal languages (Aranda), a word without Indo-European roots representing Indigenous Australian religious concepts. Early anthropologists encountered this term and incorporated it into English ethnographic literature.
The word 'churinga' is linguistically fascinating because it represents knowledge transfer in the opposite direction—European languages borrowed Indigenous Australian terminology, rather than imposing their own categories, acknowledging that some spiritual concepts simply have no equivalent in Western traditions.
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