Wawalag- Aboriginal Australian GroupCollective

The Journey and the Serpent

The two sisters traveled northward from the interior toward the coast through Yolngu country in northeastern Arnhem Land, naming plants and animals as they went and performing ceremonies at each stopping place. One sister was pregnant and the other carried a young child. Each site they passed through became sacred through their passage.

They arrived at a sacred waterhole, Mirramina, not knowing it was the dwelling place of the great rainbow serpent Julunggul. Near the waterhole, the pregnant sister gave birth, and the blood from childbirth flowed into the sacred waters, disturbing the serpent in the depths. The sisters attempted to drive him back with sacred songs and dances, and at first their ceremonial power held. The serpent recoiled from their singing. But exhausted from childbirth and their long journey, their voices faltered, and Julunggul rose fully from the waterhole amid a great storm of lightning and rain. He swallowed the sisters and their children whole. When he later regurgitated them, they emerged transformed. The act of swallowing and release set the pattern of death and rebirth.

The Pattern of Initiation

What happened at Mirramina became the basis for Yolngu male initiation. In ceremony, young men are symbolically swallowed by the serpent: taken from their mothers, drawn into seclusion, instruction, and ordeal. Their emergence is treated as a new birth. Sacred instruments reproduce the sounds of Julunggul, and the initiates' time within the ceremonial ground reenacts the sisters' passage through the serpent's body.

The sisters themselves originally possessed the ceremonial knowledge. Through their encounter with Julunggul, that power passed from the female to the male ritual domain.