Rainbow Serpent- Aboriginal Australian GodDeity"The Great Serpent"

The Creator Serpent

In the Dreamtime, before the land had form, an immense serpent stirred beneath the earth. It rose from the deep ground and began to move. Everywhere it traveled, the world took shape. The being is known by hundreds of names across the Australian continent: Ngalyod in Arnhem Land, Ungud in the Kimberley, Wagyl in the Southwest, Yurlungur among the Yolngu. Its gender shifts between traditions. Male in some, female in others, sometimes both or neither. But across all the languages and all the land, the serpent is the same: a being of immense creative power, bound to water, bound to life, and terrible when provoked.

The Shaping of the Land

As the Rainbow Serpent traveled across the unformed world, its massive body sculpted the landscape. Rivers formed in the furrows carved by its passing. Valleys were cut by its writhing movements. Hills and mountains rose where it pushed up the earth. Waterholes marked the places where it rested, coiled, or dove underground.

The Noongar people of the southwest tell how Wagyl carved the Swan River and the waterways around present-day Perth, coiling through the coastal plains and creating the wetlands and springs that sustained their people for millennia. In the Kimberley, Ungud shaped the gorges and monsoon pools and works alongside the Wanjina, ancestral spirits whose eyeless, halo-crowned faces gaze from rock shelters across the region, together controlling rain and the spiritual power of the land.

The Warumungu people of the central desert tell of Wollunqua, a Rainbow Serpent of staggering size that emerged from a waterhole called Thapauerlu. It traveled enormous distances, its body so vast that even when much of it had passed on, its tail still lay coiled in the waterhole from which it had risen. The ceremonies of the Wollunqua, documented by Spencer and Gillen, involved building a great mound of earth representing the Serpent's body and performing rites to ensure its continued presence without rousing it to dangerous action.

The Serpent and Water

The Rainbow Serpent dwells in the deepest waterholes. It controls the coming and going of rains. It determines whether water sources remain pure or dry up and fail. On a continent where drought means death, everything depends on the Serpent's mood.

The visible rainbow is the Serpent itself, moving between sky and earth, traveling from one water source to the next. In the monsoon country of the Top End, the arrival of the wet season is the Serpent's doing. When the first great storms break over Arnhem Land, the Serpent stirs, pulling water from the deep places and drawing it down from the sky. Lightning marks its passage. The flooding rivers and swelling billabongs that follow are signs of its renewed activity. In the dry season, the Serpent rests in the deepest permanent waterholes, coiled and still, conserving the water until the cycle turns.

Sacred pools associated with the Serpent serve as conception sites. The spirits of unborn children dwell in its watery keeping, waiting to be sent forth into women and born into the world.

The Wawalag Sisters

The Yolngu people of Arnhem Land tell one of the defining Rainbow Serpent myths. Two ancestral women, the Wawalag Sisters, traveled across the land during the Dreamtime, naming the animals and plants they encountered, giving form to the world through language. When they made camp near the sacred waterhole of Mirrimina, one of the sisters gave birth. The smell of afterbirth blood reached Yurlungur, the great Rainbow Serpent coiled in the depths.

Disturbed and drawn by the blood, Yurlungur rose from the water. The sisters tried to drive him back, singing and dancing desperately, but the Serpent could not be contained. He summoned a great storm, flooding their camp, and swallowed both sisters and the newborn child. Inside the Serpent's body, a transformation took place. Yurlungur eventually regurgitated them, changed, reborn.

In Yolngu initiation ceremonies, this swallowing and regurgitation is reenacted. Initiates are painted in the Serpent's designs and subjected to ordeals that mirror the sisters' experience at Mirrimina. When the boys emerge, they carry new names and new knowledge. The sound of the bullroarer, a wooden instrument swung on a cord to produce a deep, pulsing roar, announces the Serpent's presence. It is the last thing the boys hear before their childhood selves die.

The Mother Serpents

Among the Kunwinjku people of western Arnhem Land, the Rainbow Serpent has a mother: Yingarna, the original creator who gave birth to the first humans and to Ngalyod himself. She is the being from whom even the great Serpent came.

The Jawoyn people of the Northern Territory know a different primordial mother-serpent called Eingana, who existed before all other beings. In the Dreamtime, every creature that would ever live grew inside her swelling body, but she had no way to release them and writhed in agony. At last a god took pity and pierced her near the tail with a spear. All living things poured from the wound.

Every creature that lives remains connected to Eingana by an invisible spiritual cord. When Eingana lets a cord go slack, that creature sickens. When she severs it, the creature dies. If Eingana herself were ever to die, every cord would snap at once and all life on earth would end.

The Serpent's Sacred Law

The Rainbow Serpent enforces sacred law, particularly laws relating to water, blood, and proper conduct. Those who pollute water sources, engage in prohibited sexual conduct, or shed blood in forbidden circumstances risk the Serpent's wrath.

Blood taboos are potent. Menstrual blood, birth blood, and the blood of the uncircumcised can all disturb the Serpent. Women in many traditions must avoid certain waterholes during menstruation, and care must be taken not to allow blood to fall near sacred water sources.

Stories throughout Australia tell of entire camps drowned by floods sent by an angered Serpent, of transgressors swallowed whole, of catastrophic storms unleashed upon those who have broken the law. The same being that fills the waterholes and brings the rains can empty them and send drought. The same mouth that regurgitates the reborn can swallow the condemned.

The Serpent's Light

The Serpent's power flows through the hands of traditional healers, the wirinun, who use quartz crystals in their practice. These crystals are solidified light, fragments of the Serpent's rainbow essence, stones that have absorbed its spiritual force. Healers project this power to cure illness or extract harmful spiritual influences from the sick. Held in sunlight, a quartz crystal splits light into the Serpent's colors. A piece of its power in human hands.

At rock shelters like Ubirr in Kakadu, the Serpent appears painted on stone as Ngalyod: horse-headed, kangaroo-bodied, serpent-tailed. These images have been maintained and repainted across generations. The Serpent is not a figure from a completed past. It rests in the waterholes. It moves when the rains come.