The Rainbow Serpent

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In the deep waterholes that never run dry — the permanent billabongs, the spring-fed pools at the foot of the gorge, the still water under the riverbank — something is coiled. Across most of the Australian continent the same thing is said of such places, in languages that have nothing to do with one another: that a great snake lives there, that it made the watercourse, that it holds the water in its body, and that it must not be disturbed. Foul the pool, break the law that guards it, and the water will rise. The land’s most precious thing, in a dry continent, is kept by its most dangerous keeper.

This is the being that English came to call the Rainbow Serpent. The name is a translation, and a recent one, and it gathers under a single phrase a great many distinct ancestral beings who are not, in their own Countries, the same. That tension — one English name over many local powers — runs through everything that can be said about it.

Many waters, many names

There is no one Rainbow Serpent. There is Ngalyod, the being of the Kunwinjku and other Bininj peoples of western Arnhem Land, who swallows those who break the Law and surfaces in the wet-season floods. There is the Wagyl — also written Waugal or Waugyl — of the Noongar of the south-west, who traveled across the country in the creation-time and carved the Derbarl Yerrigan and the Djarlgarro Beelier, the rivers that run through the place now called Perth. There is Yurlunggur (Yulunggul) of the Yolngu in north-eastern Arnhem Land, and Bolung of the Dalabon and Rembarrnga, and Ungud in the Kimberley, and the Wollunqua of the Warumungu, and Wanampi among the Aṉangu of the central desert. The lists run on: Borlung, Almudj, Goorialla among the Lardil, Kunmanggur of the Murinbata, Witij among the Yolngu, Taipan among the Wik-Mungkan of Cape York. Each belongs to a particular people, a particular stretch of Country, a particular set of waterholes and a particular body of Law.

What they share is a shape and a function. The serpent is a being of the Dreaming — the ever-present creative order of the Aboriginal Australians that Aboriginal English calls by that word and that the languages render as Tjukurpa, Altjira, Jukurrpa, Wongar, and many other terms, each nation its own. It is not a god of the long ago who has departed. It is present now, in the water it made and keeps. It is identified with the rainbow that stands over the waterholes after rain, the arc of color read as the serpent itself rising between one pool and another; with the monsoon and the wet season that renew the land; and, in the far north, with the deep antiquity of the country’s permanent water.

Rock painting of a Rainbow Serpent in northern Australia. Photo Mark O’Neil / Digitaltribes, via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY 2.5.

The serpent’s gender is not fixed across these traditions, and this too marks how many beings the English name conceals. It is male in some, female in others, both at once or neither, the question itself sometimes beside the point. Some depictions carry breasts, others a beard. Kunmanggur of the Murinbata is figured with breasts; the Rainbow Serpent painted at Ubirr in Kakadu, called Garranga’rreli, traveled through that Country in human form and left her own image on the rock to mark that she had passed. The same painted Country, a little to the south at Burrungkuy, holds the great galleries of the western Arnhem Land ancestors. The serpent of one nation is not the serpent of another, and to assume a single creature behind all of them is already to read from outside.

The giver and the taker

Within the frame of the traditions, the serpent’s power has two faces that are not opposites but a single thing seen from two sides. It is the source of life. Water is its body; the rain it brings is fertility; it is bound up with birth, with blood, with the renewal the monsoon works on a parched land. It is also the taker. To disturb its waterhole — to swim where one should not, to take more than the Law allows, to bring the wrong people to the wrong place — is to wake it, and a woken serpent brings the flood, the drowning, the sickness, the storm. The same being that fills the river will, offended, send the river over its banks.

This ambivalence is the heart of the matter, and it is what later retellings tend to lose. The serpent is not a benevolent mother-creator with a fearsome side; it is a power in which creation and destruction are not separable, held in one coiled body. Among the Noongar, the elder Clarrie Isaacs described the Wagyl as holding the power of life and death over people and as demanding the respect due to it — and it was the Wagyl, in that tradition, that made the Noongar the custodians of the land. Custodianship and danger arrive together. The serpent gives the Country and gives the Law that governs it, and the Law is enforced.

The being belongs, across many of these traditions, to the most powerful and most restricted reaches of religious life — to initiation, to the making of the clever-men and clever-women, the healers and ritual specialists who, in a number of regions, are said to receive their power in an encounter with the serpent and with the quartz crystals associated with it. Much of this is closed knowledge. There is men’s business and women’s business here that is not for outsiders and not to be set down; the public record holds only the outline, and the outline is where it must stop. In western Arnhem Land the serpent stands behind the great regional ceremonies; among the Yolngu it is bound to the narrative of two ancestral sisters whose journey shaped the land and instituted ritual, a story whose deeper levels are restricted. What can be said plainly is the structure: the serpent is the power against which the Law is measured, the keeper before whom the country’s water and the country’s people stand answerable.

Aboriginal rock art at Ubirr, Kakadu National Park, western Arnhem Land. Photo Dave Pape via Wikimedia Commons, released CC0 / public domain.

Carved into the country

The serpent is a maker of landforms. It moved across the country in the creation-time, and where it traveled it left the shape of the world. The Wagyl’s passage carved the Swan and Canning rivers and the chain of springs and waterholes around them; in Arnhem Land and the Kimberley the serpents are said to have cut the gorges, raised the ridges, and opened the rock passages and the deep pools. The country is not a backdrop to the story. The country is the story, made solid — the ridge is the serpent’s track, the waterhole is where it rests, and the rainbow over the water is the serpent showing itself. This is why the places cannot be treated as scenery: they are the body of an ancestral being, and the Law that protects them is continuous with the being that made them.

The principle carries a force that is not metaphorical within the tradition. In the south-west, the Wagyl’s resting places along the river system are sites where the Law remains active, and disturbance of them is understood to have consequences in the present, not only in the creation-time. When a development at a known Wagyl site is contested by Noongar custodians, the contest is not nostalgia for a story; it is the assertion that the being is still there, in the water and the stone, and that the relationship of care it established still binds. The serpent made the people custodians; custodianship is a standing obligation, renewed in every generation that keeps the waters clean and keeps the wrong feet from the wrong ground. To read the river as the serpent’s body is to read it as something owed to, not merely something owned.

The antiquity of the image can be measured where the serpent is painted on stone. In the rock art of western Arnhem Land, archaeologists working with the traditional owners — Paul Taçon prominent among them — have traced a composite serpent figure, with a snake’s body and a kangaroo-like or horse-like head and a long muzzle, through the “Yam Figure” style. These Rainbow Serpent images are dated to roughly four to six thousand years old, among the older identifiable depictions of named ancestral beings anywhere in the country’s art, and they belong to a painted tradition that reaches back, in its earlier styles, far deeper still. (These are scholarly datings of the paintings, distinct from the tradition-internal account, in which the serpent is not “from” any date but ever-present.) Taçon and his collaborators argued that the rise of this serpent figure in the art tracks a real event — the postglacial rise in sea level that drowned the old coastline and remade the wetlands — read and remembered through the serpent that rules the water. The image and the country change together.

The name from outside

The phrase “the Rainbow Serpent” does not come from any of the languages whose beings it names. It was coined in English by the British anthropologist A.R. Radcliffe-Brown, in a paper titled “The Rainbow-Serpent Myth of Australia,” published in the Journal of the Royal Anthropological Institute in 1926. Radcliffe-Brown had noticed that many widely separated Aboriginal peoples spoke of a great water-snake associated with the rainbow, and he proposed that this was a single myth — “not confined,” he wrote, “to any particular ethnological province,” but very widespread and “may very possibly be practically universal.” He gave the recurring figure one name, and the name held.

This is a clear case of a comparativist umbrella term, and it must be marked as such. Radcliffe-Brown imposed the category from the outside, for the purposes of comparison, and in doing so produced a single English creature that does not exist as a single creature in any one tradition. Later anthropologists registered the problem: Charles Mountford preferred to speak of “rainbow serpent myths,” in the plural, rather than one myth. The umbrella reveals a real resemblance — the snake, the water, the rainbow, the ambivalent power do recur across the continent — but it conceals the differences that matter most to the people who hold the beings: the particular name, the particular Country, the particular Law, the particular gender and form and story. Ngalyod is not Wagyl is not Yurlunggur. They answer to different peoples, in different places, under different ceremonies. The English phrase makes them one; the traditions do not.

That the term originates with Radcliffe-Brown also marks the source-distance built into the whole record. What outsiders know of these beings came, for a long time, through explorers, missionaries, and ethnographers — and the figure of the Wagyl, for one, appears in the colonial archive as early as 1836, when Francis Armstrong, an interpreter at the Swan River Colony, recorded Noongar people reverently guarding rounded stones held to be the serpent’s eggs. The colonial gloss is not neutral, and the early anthropology often arrived with the assumptions of its time. The authority that matters now sits with the communities themselves, whose own accounts — careful about what may be shared and what may not — have become the central record rather than a footnote to it.

Afterlife of a name

Of all the ancestral beings of Aboriginal Australia — the sky-father Baiame of the south-east, the lightning-being Namarrkon of Arnhem Land, the rain-spirits called the Wandjina of the Kimberley among them — the Rainbow Serpent has traveled furthest into the wider Australian imagination — and the journey shows both the reach of the name and its cost. The serpent moved from the rock and the ceremony into bark painting collected and exhibited from the mid-twentieth century onward, and into the children’s book: Dick Roughsey, a Lardil artist, made The Rainbow Serpent (1974), which won the Children’s Book Council of Australia’s Picture Book of the Year in 1976 and became a classroom fixture for generations. Roughsey was telling, as an Aboriginal author, a story of his own tradition — a different thing from the many non-Indigenous retellings that followed. The figure became a shorthand for Aboriginality and, beyond that, a way of giving modern Australia an ancient past, the serpent pressed into service as a national emblem at festivals and events.

Rock art at Burrungkuy (Nourlangie), Kakadu National Park. Photo Kgbo via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 4.0.

The cost is the flattening. Lifted out of the particular Dreamings of each language group, the serpent has tended to lose exactly what makes it itself — the ambivalence, the danger, the many forms and genders, the binding to a specific Country and a specific Law. In the popular version it becomes a single bright friendly snake, a benevolent mother-creator, the destroyer’s face wiped away. The umbrella term that Radcliffe-Brown raised for comparison has, in the wider culture, become a thing in itself: one Rainbow Serpent, smiling, where there were many serpents and most of them to be feared. The reach of the image and the loss within it are the same movement — the more the serpent is recognized, the less of it is known, because what is recognized is the abstraction and what is lost is the particular being whose name and Country and Law gave it weight.

The living traditions are not flattened. In western Arnhem Land, in the Kimberley, in the south-west, in the central desert and Cape York, the serpents remain in the waterholes their bodies made, and the Law that protects those waters is held by the people whose Country it is. The Wagyl is still the Wagyl of the Noongar; Ngalyod is still Ngalyod of the Bininj. The single English name is a convenience and, for outsiders, a starting point — but it is a door that opens onto many rooms, and the rooms are not the same. To know the Rainbow Serpent at all is to learn that there is no such single thing, and that the deep water in each Country is kept by its own.

→ Related: Baiame · Bunjil · The Wandjina · Namarrkon · Uluru · Lake Mungo · Murujuga · Burrungkuy · The Aboriginal Australians · The Yolngu · The Torres Strait Islanders · Reincarnation · Soul · Immortality · Divination