This article records tradition as it has been passed down and reported. Its sources are not yet part of the atlas's verified catalogue.
Arrernte religion holds that the land itself is the record of its own creation. In the framework called Altyerre, ancestral beings travelling across a formless world in a time before time gave it shape, and specific landforms around Alice Springs are held to be the sleeping or petrified bodies of those beings rather than scenery that merely surrounds a story. The eastern MacDonnell Ranges are attributed to the caterpillar being Ayepe-arenye, and the western ranges to Ntyarlke, another caterpillar ancestor, an account that ties Arrernte cosmology directly and specifically to the geography a visitor can stand in.
Altjira, described in Arrernte accounts as the creator being from whom the Inapertwa, formless proto-beings, became every living creature, sits at the root of this framework, though the fuller detail of how any one being's journey unfolds is knowledge held unevenly, some of it open and some restricted to initiated custodians. Tjurunga, sacred objects tied to particular ancestral beings and particular custodians, are part of how that unevenly held knowledge is kept and transmitted, though what a tjurunga depicts or how it is used is not something an outside account can responsibly describe further.
What is not restricted is that the tradition continues as a living one. Eastern and Central Arrernte dialects remain widely spoken and are taught in schools serving Alice Springs today, a form of continuity that runs alongside, rather than instead of, the ceremonial knowledge that anthropologists including Baldwin Spencer, Francis Gillen and later Carl Strehlow documented from the 1890s through the mid twentieth century, work Arrernte custodians themselves continued into the 1970s.