The Bullroarer

 What is the Bullroarer?

Mystical, Magical, Ancient, communications, Initiation, Ceremony, Musical and weapon.  That is what a bullroarer is.  That is what you call a very versatile piece of equipment. 
So many cultures have bullroarers incorporated deeply.  Is this more than a coincidence.  The bullroarer was around for everyone.  The swinging vortex above the users head.  Creating a vortex anywhere is very powerful.
The bullroarer, rhombus, or turndun, is an ancient ritual musical instrument and a device historically used for communicating over greatly extended distances. It dates to the Paleolithic period, being found in Ukraine dating from 17,000 BC. Anthropologist Michael Boyd, a Bullroarer expert, documents a number found in Europe, Asia, the Indian sub-continent, Africa, the Americas, and Australia.
In ancient Greece it was a sacred instrument used in the Dionysian Mysteries and is still used in rituals worldwide.

Scandinavia

Scandinavian Stone Age cultures used the bullroarer. In 1991, the archeologists Hein B. Bjerck and Martinius Hauglid found a 6.4 cm-long piece of slate that turned out to be a 5000-year-old bullroarer (called a brummer in Scandinavia). It was found in Tuv in northern Norway, a place that was inhabited in the Stone Age.

Britain and Ireland Scotland

In Britain and Ireland, the bullroarer under a number of different names and styles is used chiefly for amusement, although formerly it may have been used for ceremonial purposes.

In parts of Scotland it was known as a "thunder-spell" and was thought to protect against being struck by lightning

In Australia

Bullroarers have accompanied the didgeridoos in initiation ceremonies and in burials to ward off evil spirits, bad tidings, and even women and children.
Bullroarers are considered secret men's business by some Aboriginal tribal groups, and hence forbidden for women, children, non-initiated men, or outsiders to even hear.  Fison and Howitt documented this in "Kamilaroi and Kurnai" (page 198). Anyone caught breaching the imposed secrecy was to be punished by death.

They are used in men's initiation ceremonies, and the sound they produce is considered in some indigenous cultures to represent the sound of the Rainbow Serpent. In the cultures of southeastern Australia, the sound of the bullroarer is the voice of Daramulan, and a successful bullroarer can only be made if it has been cut from a tree containing his spirit.

In 1987, Midnight Oil included a recording of a bullroarer on their album Diesel and Dust (at the beginning of the song "Bullroarer") inadvertently causing offense to the Aboriginal people of Central Australia from whom the recording was taken. The bullroarer can also be used as a tool in Aboriginal art

Mali

The Dogon use bullroarers to announce the beginning of ceremonies conducted during the Sigui festival held every sixty years over a seven-year period. The sound has been identified as the voice of an ancestor from whom all Dogon are descended.

Māori culture (New Zealand)

The pūrerehua is a traditional Māori bullroarer. Its name comes from the Māori word for moth. Made from wood, stone or bone and attached to a long string, the instruments were traditionally used for healing or making rain

Native North American

Almost all the native tribes in North America used bullroarers in religious and healing ceremonies and as toys. There are many styles.

Native South American

Amazonian Shamans, for example in Tupi, Kamayurá and Bororó culture used bullroarers as musical instrument for rituals. In tupian languages, the bullroaren known as hori hori.

http://www.flickr.com/photos/toddsheridanartist/7841793152/

An interesting read from a book called Engendering Violence of Papua New Guinea by

Margaret Jolly, Christine Stewart, Carolyn Brewer.  It can be found here at this link

This collection builds on previous works on gender violence in the Pacific, but goes beyond some previous approaches to ‘domestic violence’ or ‘violence against women’ in analysing the dynamic processes of ‘engendering’ violence in PNG. ‘Engendering’ refers not just to the sex of individual actors, but to gender as a crucial relation in collective life and the massive social transformations ongoing in PNG: conversion to Christianity, the development of extractive industries, the implanting of introduced models of justice and the law and the spread of HIV. Hence the collection examines issues of ‘troubled masculinities’ as much as ‘battered women’ and tries to move beyond the black and white binaries of blaming either tradition or modernity as the primary cause of gender violence. It relates original scholarly research in the villages and towns of PNG to questions of policy and practice and reveals the complexities and contestations in the local translation of concepts of human rights. It will interest undergraduate and graduate students in gender studies and Pacific studies and those working on the policy and practice of combating gender violence in PNG and elsewhere.

Read here at Google Books