This can be readily seen in one of the great ceremonies termed the Djungguan. It takes place, like the rest of the great ceremonies, in the dry season, and always on the men's ceremonial grounds.
Actual participation includes only initiated men, though the women play an important role as well.
All the ceremonies are associated with age grading and moiety or clan totems. They all consist of ceremonial leaders and participants who paint themselves with sacred totemic designs which usually employ feather ornaments, the decorations varying from ceremony to ceremony. A fundamental conceptual framework courses through all the ceremonies with various dramatic sections portraying a myth by dance and song. In the way that ceremonies treated as separate and distinct by the natives are also realized to fit into a larger whole, the totality of such could be analogized with Wagner's Nibelungen Ring. A fundamental difference, of course, is that the story is not a myth to them but a dogma with the same ceremonial significance to the Murngin as the Mass to the Catholic.