noun
definition
An object of religious significance among Aboriginal peoples of Central Australia.
Examples of churinga in a Sentence
In doing so they drop a wooden soul-token called a Churinga.
Each spirit, as it quits its nanja or natural haunt to enter the mother, drops a churinga, a slab of stone or wood marked with the child's totem and containing its spirit attributes.
The literal sense of the term churinga, applied by the Central Australians to their sacred objects, and likewise used more abstractly to denote mystic power, as when a man is said to be " full of churinga," is " secret," and is symptomatic of the esotericism that is a striking mark of Australian, and indeed of all primitive, religion, with its insistence on initiation, its exclusion of women, and its strictly enforced reticence concerning traditional lore and proceedings.