Vivid Wanderings: The Gunwinggu Rainbow Serpent as Symbolic of Indigenous Australian Life
Throughout Indigenous Australian belief systems there consistently arises the symbol of the Rainbow Serpent, a mythological being known by various names to individual tribes but generally linked with water (Berndts, World 251). In other cultures, the rainbow has often symbolized a connection to the heavens, whereas serpents may serve as intermediaries to the unmanifest, chthonic realms; though both these symbols occasionally share a common connection to water, it is perhaps solely in Indigenous Australian myth that rainbows and serpents are portrayed in one entity (Cowan 22). According to the anthropological studies of A. R. Radcliffe-Brown, Rainbow Serpents were generally depicted as living in deep waterholes and are responsible for rainbows, rain, and the quartz crystals used by Indigenous Australian medicine-men (19). While the symbol of the Rainbow Serpent may have its source in natural phenomena, it was far more than just a rainbow or a snake (Eliade 115). Ngaljod, the Rainbow Serpent of the Gunwinggu tribe of west Arnhem Land, was portrayed with a host of other meanings. She was attributed with the creation of the landscape, animals, and spirit-children, and was associated with certain religious rituals and socio-economic taboos (Mountford 78-9). These characteristics of the Rainbow Serpent were more common in northern Australia, but there was often disagreement over the sex and number of Rainbow Serpents, and occasionally other creatures would take on roles attributed to these iridescent ophidians (Maddock, Introduction 2-5). Such cross-continental ambiguity makes it difficult to assign an ultimate meaning to the Rainbow Serpent for all Indigenous Australians. By placing the phenomenon of Ngaljod first in its specific socio-cultural context, and then in contradistinction to the diffusion of Rainbow Serpents across the continent, it may be possible to offer a hermeneutical interpretation of what this symbol meant for the whole life of the Gunwinggu tribe, and why, despite its variations and current cultural degradation, the multivalent symbolism of the Rainbow Serpent spanned Indigenous Australian belief.
As the Indigenous Australians did not keep historical records beyond their myths, it is difficult to date their culture or its specific symbols. Based on scant archeological evidence it is believed to be possible that they settled in Australia roughly 30,000 years ago (Berndts, World 4). However, traces of red ochre found on skeletal remains from that period imply that there was already a substantial spiritual tradition, placing the date much earlier (Cowan 7). Either way, linguistic lineage suggests that the first Australians migrated from Southern Asia and reached the continent by sea (Cowan 9), eventually landing on the northwest coast (Berndts, World 2-3), which could explain why the Rainbow Serpent picks up cosmogonic connotations in the Kimberley and Arnhem Land regions.
The Gunwinggu were one of over 500 distinct tribes that existed in Australia prior to European contact (Cowan 68). Their traditional territory was on the western and southwestern side of what is now the Arnhem Land Reserve in northern Australia, a coastal environment well supplied with natural resources and water (Berndts, Man 1-3). Like the other Indigenous Australian tribes, the Gunwinggu had a minimum of material goods, did not live in permanent houses, and hunted and collected their food with the aim of sustaining their natural environment (Berndts, World 7-8). The tribe was bound by actual or implied genealogy and common rules for behavior and language (Berndts, World 32-6), but in the typical Indigenous Australian pattern, lived in small, dispersed foraging groups that occasionally coalesced into larger units for religious ceremonies and trade (Berndts, Man 105). Unlike most tribes, matrilineal descent was primarily used by the Gunwinggu to establish social and marriage relationships (Berndts, World 61), though patrilineal decent was effective in delineating land ownership and religious responsibility (Berndts, Man 111). Typically men hunted and performed the rituals while women collected food and raised children (Berndts, World 119). Tribal economy relied on these natural resources, and was based on reciprocal gift exchange and trade (Berndts, World 132), but magico-religious beliefs served as the major focal point of their culture and life (Berndts, Man 112).
Though Indigenous Australian life has been characterized by cultural isolation and the rejection of outside influences (Cowan 19-20), the Gunwinggu have had a long history of interaction with others (Berndts, Man 1). Not only did they trade goods and ideas with other tribes, but also there was sustained contact with Indonesian traders whom they called Macassans, and later with Japanese pearling fleets. A group of unidentified islands to the northwest called ‘Macassar’ became the vague point of origin for both these traders and the Gunwinggu’s mythological characters (Berndts, Man 4).
The Indigenous Australians explained their origins through long myth-cycles variously translated as the Eternal Dream Time, or the Dreaming, which described a time before mankind when supernatural beings or ancestral heroes appeared and wandered across the land, creating life and culture in the process (Eliade 42-3). The Dreaming was the most fundamental aspect of Indigenous Australian life, and offered much more than an account of creation. The myths described how the supernatural power of the ancestral heroes was embodied in the Australian landscape, as well as in the social precepts and rituals of the Indigenous Australians in a way that made those powers available for current life (Charlesworth 9-10). The Dreaming conjured an immediate or eternal present where the actions of the mythic beings were still occurring, particularly during ceremonies (Cowan 26), thus setting a precedent for all human action and relationship (Eliade 43).
Like the other Indigenous Australian tribes, the Gunwinggu myths did not tell of the creation of the earth or sky. The land was already in place when the first people arrived, and after altering the featureless landscape and preparing it for human habitation, the mythic beings left their spiritual essence or djang behind (Berndts, Man 18), often in sacred sites which marked their final resting place (Eliade 45). A djang also lived in every representative of a given species (Berndts, Man 114), in ritual objects, as spirit-children that women found at waterholes in order to become pregnant, and as the men in which these ancestral beings were presently incarnated (Eliade 49-50). This Indigenous Australian belief, generally called totemism, allowed man to express his direct spiritual connection to the world and the Dreaming (Cowan 39). In a totemic fashion, the Gunwinggu considered any rainbow to be the original Ngaljod serpent, and men could summon her great floods by smashing a rock associated with the serpent’s djang, which in myths was performed as an act of revenge or suicide (Berndts, Man 114, 27). As opposed to the ancestral heroes who created man and culture, only those beings connected to a local site were considered djang, except the Rainbow Serpent, who was both a creator and a local spirit (Berndts, Man 19).
The Gunwinggu word for rainbow, mai?, generally included a class of living beings; animals, reptiles, and birds that were biologically male, but when referring directly to the rainbow the term was affixed with the feminine prefix ngal- (Berndts, Man 20). The Rainbow Serpent Ngaljod, also known as Ngalmud or Ngaldargid, was often credited in the myths with giving birth to the first humans as the archetypal Mother (Berndts, Man 20). She came underground from ‘Macassar,’ carrying spirit-children inside her; she made humans’ feet, hands, and eyes, her urine became water, she taught men how and where to dig for food and what to eat, explained the djang and myths, and gave breath to children in the womb (Berndts, Man 117-8). Furthermore, Ngalmud was the Gunwinggu word for the Dreaming, the timeless spiritual quality that all djang share with the Rainbow Serpent (Berndts, Man 75). The fertile Mother was a widespread mythological character throughout Indigenous Australian belief, spanning form the Victoria River District in the east to the western Kimberley Range (Berndts, World 256). As a predominantly matrilineal tribe, it makes some sense that the Gunwinggu might have expressed this Mother figure in relation to the more terrifying symbol of the Rainbow Serpent. Many of their myths are concerned with Ngaljod as being both a protective and destructive mother (Berndts, Man 147), particularly in relation to maintaining the environment and social structure.
As their myths prescribed a spiritual connection with the land, the Indigenous Australians saw themselves as an integral part of their environment (Berndts, Man 113). Most Indigenous Australian myths described how the ancestral beings wandered from one waterhole to the next, naming and commemorating these sites as sacred places (Berndts, World 137), and almost every rock, spring, or waterhole was connected to mythic events (Eliade 57). The Indigenous Australians mapped every detail of their territory (Cowan 12), but some sites were more important because of religious associations or prohibitions (Berndts, Man 12). These places were set apart as potentially dangerous for women and uninitiated men (Charlesworth 11). Though people moved freely over the land belonging to other tribes, they did not trespass on their sacred sites without permission (Berndts, World 141). In the Gunwinggu tribe these sites existed in territories called gunmugugur, which were associated with and protected by units of patrilineal descent (Berndts, Man 54). Like other Indigenous Australian tribes, the Gunwinggu were semi-nomadic, but the men spent most of their time in and around their gunmugugur, where they were intimately familiar with the natural resources and sacred features (Berndts, Man 101, 107-8), including which waterholes may have housed Rainbow Serpents.
Throughout Indigenous Australia, the immense Rainbow Serpents were thought to inhabit certain waterholes. Men would take great care when drinking or bathing from these sites to obey strict laws and taboos out of fear that the serpents would create storms and drown them (Mountford 23). The Gunwinggu similarly feared the Rainbow Serpent, who might swallow them and spit out their bones, thereby making the site taboo for water and food (Berndts, Man 20-3). These stories were often connected with food taboos, and nearly all Gunwinggu myth contains some reference to cooking, gathering, or eating (Berndts, Man 43). Stories warn against cooking animals on sandy banks or rocks near the river, which may have been unstable places to cook, but the sizzling noise would surely bring the Rainbow Serpent (Berndts, Man 50). Occasionally an orphan child cried for food and the noise summoned Ngaljod, a common theme in myths throughout the region that may have served as an example to not spoil children (Berndts, Man 21-3). In another myth, a man eats secretly, and as a result the Rainbow Serpent drowns his tribe (Berndts, Man 45). Though there were no public sanctions against going to and eating in certain places, these taboos and prohibitions were unequivocal and may rarely have been broken. The Gunwinggu did not take the religious retribution of the Rainbow Serpent lightly (Berndts, Man 28). While the myths set out land ownership and a responsibility for specific resources by particular groups, it seems that the food taboos symbolized by Ngaljod may have encouraged the sharing and proper division of resources that would have been necessary to survival (Berndts, World 142-3), and the Rainbow Serpent’s feminine aspect may have related to the fact that the food collected by women was the most dependable part of the Gunwinggu diet (Berndts, Man 109). The supply of resources varied over place and season, and these prohibitions based on age, sex, locality, and ritual helped define what foods were socially considered available (Berndts, Man 35).
Ngaljod was also feared for bringing the rains and floods, an aspect of the Rainbow Serpent particularly dominant during the wet season, which lasted from November to March (Berndts, Man 144, 31). Throughout the dry season Ngaljod was depicted as a colorful, whiskered serpent living in the local waterholes, but when the rains struck she appeared in the sky as the rainbow (Mountford 71). The central feature of the wet season in northwest Australia was the monsoon, which pelted the coast and inlands with occasional cyclones and became the point of reference for marking the year (Berndts, Man 32). During this season the Gunwinggu migrated to higher ground, where their camping sites were based on mythological precedent; even if they were not djang or ritual grounds, they were most likely the richest in resources, and served as meeting places for the tribe (Berndts, Man 106-9). Throughout the monsoon season, jira songs were sung to pacify the Rainbow Serpent and ward off the harsh weather, while also narrating accounts of the first rains (Berndts, Man 144). Like other Indigenous Australian stories, these myths may have impressed upon the Gunwinggu the responsibility for keeping the land fertile (Eliade 50). Faced with having either too little or too much rain to make the most use of their resources, many of their myths and rituals reflected a strong interest in maintaining the balance of nature (Berndts, Man 51). The threatening aspects of nature symbolized by the Rainbow Serpent mythology may have reinforced this feeling that the land was sacred, but it was primarily through elaborate rituals that man could recapitulate and sustain his environment (Berndts, Man 207, 108).
Indigenous Australian ritual governed all transitions in life (Cowan 53), and allowed mankind to assure the continuation of their world (Eliade 65). The Gunwinggu ritual cycles were related directly to their territories, showing a concern with the cyclical progression of life through ritual intervention, and the three major rituals, the ubar, maraiin, and kunapipi, were dominated by the figure of the Mother (Berndts, Man 115, 117). In each of these ceremonial initiations, the men symbolically entered the Mother’s womb in the shape of the sacred ground, and though she was here symbolized as the Rainbow Serpent, Ngaljod took on a background role in the rituals, intermediated by other mythic beings (Berndts, Man 147, 227). In the ubar ritual a male serpent, Yirawadbad traveled over the country, and in the maraiin the Rainbow Serpent followed Lumaluma the whale and was later stolen by the Laradjeidja brothers (Berndts, Man 119-23). Though many of these rites were performed for the increase of animal and human species, they also formed a basis for economic obligation and moral action (Brendts, World 291-2), and most served as initiations where sexually maturing men were removed from their family orientation and placed in dependence to the older men of the tribe (Hiatt 50). Gunwnggu initiation did not include practices of circumcision or subincision like other Indigenous Australian tribes, and instead focused on the teaching of myths and ritual actions in association with food taboos that emphasized the sacred quality of the initiatory state (Berndts, Man 115). In the ubar ritual men poked the ground with sticks to ward off the Rainbow, and if the initiates ate certain foods Ngaljod would eat them (Berndts, Man 130-1). However, this “pre-enactment” of death, symbolized by being swallowed and reborn into the community, was the central aspect of the rituals (Berndts, World 167), and the snake, which appears to die when it sheds its old skin, was perhaps a fitting symbol for this transitional period of initiation (Turner 237). The last of the Gunwinggu initiation rituals, the kunapipi, began with the swinging of bullroarers, whose sound symbolized the Rainbow Serpent calling the initiates into the sacred ground to be swallowed, and thus reborn (Berndts, Man 139).
The Rainbow Serpent was an integral part of the Gunwinggu kunapipi ritual, but many sections of it resembled the eastern Arnhem Land kunapipi myths of the Wawalag or Wauwalak sisters, and the Gunwinggu themselves recognized the rites as an imported cult (Berndts, Man 122-3, 139). In the stories of the Murngin tribe, the Rainbow Serpent is Yurlunggur, who, enraged by the smell of blood, caused storms and ate the sisters after one of them gives birth (Eliade 101). Like Ngaljod, Yurlunggur was a harbinger of rain and fertility and becomes pregnant after eating the sisters (Eliade 109, 103), but the Rainbow Serpent of east Arnhem Land was more clearly symbolic of the penis, which the initiates had incised during the ritual (Cowan 101). Yurlunggur was the Great Father who called the young men to the sacred ground and served as a cosmic intimidation beyond that of their human fathers (Hiatt 50). Despite the ambiguity in the Rainbow Serpent’s sex, both versions of the kunapipi contained serpents and female mythic characters that ultimately assured fertility (Eliade 100), and signified the transition from the dry season to monsoonal flooding (Berndts, Man 228). Furthermore, the depiction of parental figures as monstrous beings may have shocked the initiates into a deeper understanding of social and environmental relationships (Turner 240) and the Gunwinngu association of Ngaljod with the Mother may once again have been due to their greater focus on matrilineal descent. Either way, the kunapipi ritual itself was from further south, and though undergoing a slight shifting of identities, found suitable mythologies in both Arnhem Land territories for its expression (Berndts, World 286).
It is worth noting that much of Gunwinggu mythology did not belong to them originally but came from outside tribes or from the Macassan traders (Berndts, Man 124), so it is difficult to offer definitive interpretations for any one symbol within an individual tribal context. Each local group was responsible for particular mythic episodes and rites associated with stops the ancestral beings made in their wanderings (Eliade 60). No one tribe “owned” a whole myth cycle, just those parts associated with their territory (Berndts, Man 243). Even within the tribe, there were as many versions of a myth as there were men telling it, and full details were often omitted (Berndts, World 242). Outside of a ritual context myths were told informally, and their main themes were elaborated, cut short, or omitted altogether depending on the speaker and situation (Berndts, Man 17, 40). Often it was the men who controlled the religious sites and rituals whose version were considered the most authoritative (Berndts, Man 16-7), but even then they often kept certain parts of the myths to themselves (Berndts, World 241). Women did not have knowledge or access to the secret-sacred myths and rituals, and it is possible that they took accounts of what happened on the men’s sacred ground as factual or symbolically true (Berndts, Man 16, 287). The myths also gained validity through contemporary experience such as the more portentous accounts of floods and monsoons (Berndts, Man 50). It is possible that depending on when or with whom anthropologists collected their material, they would have been given highly different versions of Indigenous Australian mythology, which could explain not only the multivalence of the Rainbow Serpent symbolism within the Gunwinggu tribe, but its diffusion across all of Australia.
Though there was no central Indigenous Australian authority or religion, a strong resemblance existed between the myths, rituals, and languages of the 500 distinct tribes (Charlesworth 7, Berndts, World 21). Each tribe kept mostly to themselves, but tribal territories were highly flexible (Berndts, World 22, 33), and local traditions were vivified by transmission from neighboring clans (Maddock, World 87). During intertribal ceremonies people met to exchange both goods and religious ideas, and there was a constant movement of both material and spiritual capital along trade roads that crossed the whole continent along waterhole routes (Berndts, World 16, 128). It is possible that the Dreaming tracks left by the migrating Rainbow Serpents along these routes represented a potential network of communications for the Indigenous Australians (Berndts, World 243). The anthropologist Charles P. Mountford suggests that the myths of the Rainbow Serpent reached Australia through the Cape York area in the northeast, becoming more complex in the eastern and northern coasts where external influence was greatest (93). It seems equally possible that these myths started in the northern and northwestern territories, such as the Arnhem Land region inhabited by the Gunwinggu tribe, from where external influences may have eventually diffused through the rest of the continent (Berndts, World 21).
Looking at a broad selection of Rainbow Serpent beliefs from a variety of different tribes, primarily collected by Mountford in his essay, “The Rainbow-Serpent Myths of Australia” (see Appendix One, Rainbow Serpent Types), it is possible to divide the symbol into several main functions that roughly correspond with certain geographical regions of Australia, though these are by no means clear cut distinctions. As mentioned previously, Rainbow Serpents in the north and northwest are often credited with the creation of the land, life, and culture during their mythic wanderings. In the east and northwest the symbol is associated with the powers and quartz crystals of medicine men. For the northern to west-central desert tribes the Rainbow Serpent is primarily a harbinger of rain, living in deep waterholes, and in southern Australia other mythic creatures such as the bunyip replace the serpent symbol altogether.
Like Ngaljod, many of the northwestern rainbow serpents arrived from off-shore and wandered into the middle of the continent leaving spirit-children at waterholes, but further into Australia this path is reversed; Jarapiri, the Rainbow Serpent of the Winbaraku tribe of Central Australia creates life as he migrates from the mountains to the sea, perhaps retracing the Indigenous Australians’ own migrant origins (Cowan 31-2). Kunukban of the northwestern Wardaman tribe was also credited with the creation of culture, but unlike the Gunwinggu Ngaljod who gave birth to mankind, this Rainbow Serpent stole culture from another ancestral being, Ekarlarwan, whom he chased across the continent (Cown 31-4). In myths from the Murinbata tribe in the Northern Territory the Rainbow Serpent Kunmanggur created animals and spirit-children only after a flying fox or his son speared him for stealing women (Maddock, Introduction 5-7, Moutnford 79-80), bringing up potential sexual taboos not present in the Gunwinggu’s mythic focus on food. Perhaps the most interesting variation on the Rainbow Serpent creation theme occured among the Unambal and Ungarinyin tribes who neighbored the Gunwinggu in the Kimberley Range area to the west. Here the Rainbow Serpent Ungud dreamt of the faceless figures called wondjina, who are painted on rocks throughout the region and are representative of rain (Eliade 69), and after raising the land from the sea laid these spirits as eggs across the country (Maddock, Introduction 14-6). Ungud however is only credited with the creation of nature and faded into the mythic background, while the wondjina are held responsible for the active creation of culture (Eliade 73, Mountford 84-5), a division of roles the motherly Gunwinggu Ngaljod does not express.
Another distinction between these two beings is that Ungud was also responsible for giving the mekigar medicine men their powers and quartz crystals (Cowan 36), a role often found in east and northwest Australia (Mountford 93). Each tribe had these “men of high degree” who played a central role in the rituals, healed the sick, defended the community from black magic, and were the only ones who could really see and converse with mythic beings like the Rainbow Serpents (Eliade 128-9). Often in shamanic initiation, magical objects such as crystals and a magic rope-snake were inserted into the medicine man’s body (Eliade 149); these objects were thought to represent magical power bestowed by the Rainbow Serpent (Cowan 86-8). Kanmare, the Rainbow Serpent of the Boulia District tribes of Queensland in the northeast, would drown men and make them sick before bestowing its magical powers (Radcliffe-Brown 19); men from the Wiradjuri tribe of New South Wales in the east would follow the rainbow to waterholes were the Rainbow Serpent Wāwi would teach them new songs for the rituals (Eliade 155). Targan, the Rainbow Serpent in Brisbane, Queensland, vomited quartz crystals when it rained, and the medicine men would know to look for them where the rainbow ended (Radcliffe-Brown 20-1). The Gunwinggu tribe also contained medicine men, some of whom had personal Rainbow Serpents that they could summon at will (Berndts, Man 146), but there was no connection between Ngaljod and quartz crystals, perhaps because these magical objects were not available in the Arnhem Land region.
Moving further south and west, the symbolism of the Rainbow Serpent became more concerned with its relationship to rain and waterholes, as well as with physical descriptions of distinct, terrifying beings. The Kajura of the Ingarda tribe and Wanamangura of the Talainji tribe, both in west Central Australia, are connected primarily to the rain totem (Radcliffe-Brown 22), and Unurugu, the Rainbow Serpent of the western Broome tribe, caused rainstorms if it was killed (Mountford 35). In the tribes around Perth in western Australia the Wogal is a winged Rainbow Serpent that lives in waterholes and is dangerous to approach (Radcliffe-Brown 22), and in the Central desert waterholes live many Wanambi who fly into the air and attack intruders with whirlwinds and rainbows (Mountford 52-3). Like many Rainbow Serpents these are depicted as being multicolored and bearded, with large eyes and long ears (Mountford 40). Some, like the Wollunqua of the Warramunga tribe in the west Central area, were so huge that they could touch the skies and had a reach of over 150 miles from their waterholes (Mountford 36). While the Gunwinggu Ngaljod also lived in waterholes and bore these kinds of physical characteristics, she also had a distinct and metaphysical quality that is missing from the western and southern Rainbow Serpents. Ngaljod was certainly associated with the monsoonal rains in Arnhem Land, but in the barren deserts it seems that the Rainbow Serpent symbolism is stripped of all other qualities besides those of maintaining the potable water necessary for survival.
In southern Australia, particularly in the Victoria region, beliefs in the Rainbow Serpent were superceded altogether by a variety of beings that lived in waterholes and drowned trespassers (Mountford 26), though rarely were they associated with religious structures or socio-economic taboos. Generally these beings were called bunyips, and they could take various forms depending on local sites (Mountford 30). Perhaps most Rainbow Serpent-like was the Myndie from the Melbourne District, a large serpent that would attack both people who broke laws and those who didn’t (Mountford 31-2). Other ferocious beings were the Gourke, a swamp-dwelling emu, and the Turden, an enormous dingo, who also attacked the Indigenous Australians of the Victoria region (Mountford 32-2). Similarly, on Groote Eylandt and Bathurst Island off the Northern Coast the beings associated with bright colors and rain were not serpents but the Ipilja-ipilja geckos and Maratji lizards respectively (Mountford 86-8), and it seems what was a highly developed Rainbow Serpent symbolism for the Gunwinggu tribe may eventually have lost most of its deeper significances with either distance or cultural isolation. But the question still remains of what the symbol of the Rainbow Serpent actually meant.
The theorist Paul Riceour suggests that unlike signs, which often have a one-to-one correlation with the things they represent, symbols conceal their meaning in a “double intentionality” that invites thought and reflection between the primary and latent meanings like a curtain drawn back at the theater (2-3). The symbolism of the Rainbow Serpent may have held much more than just this two-fold meaning behind the symbolic curtain, for the Gunwinggu tribe used it to express many facets of their life: their mythic origins, their relationship to land, food, and seasons, and their socio-economic structures and taboos. For Riceour, to offer a hermeneutic interpretation of a symbol one must start with the phenomena itself, but unlike comparative religious studies that seek to place a symbol in a larger homogenous system, it is only possible to bring out the truth of a symbol if one becomes personally involved in the life of that one symbol in its original context (8). The Rainbow Serpent has been compared to many mythological beings outside Australia, such as the naga of India, taniwah of New Zealand, water serpents of the Kalahari Desert (Mountford 92), the Babylonian Tiamat (Eliade 80), or the Chinese dragon, which is associated with moisture and iridescent pearls (Radcliffe-Brown 25). One might also look at the Biblical rainbow given to man as a covenant after the flood (Boyer 17); or at the Norse juxtaposition between the heavenly rainbow bridge Bifrost and the two serpents that live in the waters and under the world tree, Iormungund and Niddhog (Sturluson 15-26), whose names bear a slight phonetic resemblance to the Arnhem Land Rainbow Serpents Yurlunggur and Ngaljod. However, as Radcliffe-Brown points out, such comparisons may only be valid after intensive cultural studies in each separate belief system (25), and the radical diversity of Rainbow Serpent symbolism within the unique cultural milieu of Indigenous Australia already offers more than enough material for consideration.
Even within the context of Australia, many of the theorists and anthropologists looking at the symbolism of the Rainbow Serpent have tried to draw broad, abstract conclusions from all the instances in which it is portrayed, while perhaps neglecting many of its individual distinctions between tribes. Ronald and Catherine Berndt interpret the serpent as the male counterpart of the uterine All-Mother (Maddock, Introduction 2), and Géza Róheim also suggests a psychosexual interpretation in the penile fear of being swallowed back into the womb (Hiatt 46-7). Both Radcliffe-Brown and Kenneth Maddock view the Rainbow Serpent as a striking representation of the creative and destructive forces in nature (Maddock, World 94-6) though Radcliffe-Brown reduces the possibility that there were many distinct Rainbow Serpents into one symbolic being (Maddock, Introduction 3). Mircea Eliade, in line with his own theories of interpreting symbols, claims that the Rainbow Serpent is a religious structure that unites opposites (Eliade 79). Religion certainly dominated Indigenous Australian life, and while the various serpents portrayed ambiguities between many and one, male or female, living above or below the ground, or being either anthropomorphic or zoomorphic creatures (Maddock, Introduction 8), it is possible that Eliade, and the majority of these theorists, are projecting their own systems of classification on what is most likely not a homogenous totality or abstract symbolism. It is clearly evident from anthropological accounts that even after European contact, the Indigenous Australians had a very strong belief that these seemingly mythological serpents were real beings that still inhabited the country’s waterholes (Mountford 58). Though they were both characters in mythic narratives and symbols in a metaphysical system of thought (Maddock, Introduction 10), it is necessary to not disregard the Indigenous Australians’ own lived fear that the Rainbow Serpents actually existed, perhaps as cryptozoological survivors of Australia’s ancient mega-fauna. Even the earliest European settlers seemed to have some real belief in these mythological monsters (Mountford 26). As Riceour notes on the process of interpretation, “You must understand in order to believe but you must believe in order to understand” (9).
A morphological comparison of distinct Rainbow Serpent beliefs reveals that this symbol was generally connected with water and often feared by the Indigenous Australians unless certain rites were performed, but for the Gunwinggu tribe the Rainbow Serpent nearly achieves the status of a supreme being (Mountford 76, 94). Ngaljod was connected to their location on the hospitable and accessible northern coast, their focus on matrilineal descent and economic division of resources, and their interest in ritually maintaining the seasonal and social landscapes. As one of her names, Ngalmud, referred to the Indigenous Australian concept of the Dreaming that underscored their whole existence, it is possible to see how the Gunwinggu conceptualization of the rainbow, as an overarching and omnipotent serpentine mother, allowed them to articulate and organize all of the multifaceted aspects of their life into one vividly striking symbol.
However, even recognizing the Rainbow Serpent’s ability to unify the various levels of reality for the Gunwinggu tribe is not enough to offer a thorough hermeneutic interpretation (Riceour 8). The Indigenous Australian way of life, in which the Dreaming served to interconnect the past and present of their land, myths, and socio-cultural contexts, is radically different from the modern Western conception of reality. Due to the sheer depth with which this symbol is rooted in the interconnectedness of Gunwinggu life, an adequate interpretation of the Rainbow Serpent may require a much more thorough analysis of their culture than is possible with the amount of information available. Even then it may not be possible to bridge the cultural gap, and truly enter into the kind of emotional and critical relationship that Riceour suggests is necessary in order to understand how a symbol was actually lived. Furthermore, European contact essentially stripped the Indigenous Australians of their land and traditional way of life (Berndts, World 497-8) so that many of the myths and rituals surrounding the Rainbow Serpent may no longer be available for further anthropological study. Though such studies have recorded these oral beliefs and made them available to the rest of the world, this was only possible due to European contact, and has come at the expense of the entire culture under question.
In the traditional perspective, if the sacred rituals were neglected, the world would regress into the chaos that existed before the Dreaming and the ancestral beings, which is precisely the crisis faced by the Indigenous Australians in the present era (Eliade 65). What was once a distinct and vibrant way of life, that allowed the Gunwinggu tribe to articulate such a colorfully multivalent symbol as the Ngaljod Rainbow Serpent, has been all but decimated by policies of assimilation, Methodist missionaries, and the modern world-view in general (Berndts, Man 199-200). Though there is some current interest in reviving the ancient traditions, and Gunwinggu mythology had always adapted to outside influences in the past, these stories may no longer be relevant to a people who have lost their spiritual connection to their land (Berndts, Man 205-7). The Rainbow Serpent may have represented the vital and dynamic connection that the Gunwinggu had between their sacred history, physical environment, socio-economic structures, religious rituals, and whole manner of being in the world; but as that traditional world-view passes out of existence, so too does that vivid living symbol of the Rainbow Serpent become yet another mythological landmark in the static burial grounds of religious history.
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