The Rainbow Serpent
Great being of creation who carved rivers and mountains, also tied to fertility, law, and the balance of life.
In the beginning, the land lay flat and still, the earth bare beneath a sky without song. Life slept within the soil, waiting. Then from the ground rose the Rainbow Serpent, shimmering with colors of dawn and storm. It stretched across the plain, vast as the horizon, its scales glistening with water and light.
As the Serpent moved, the world awoke. Its body carved deep valleys and channels, which filled with flowing rivers. Where it coiled, mountains rose; where it passed, billabongs spread wide. The people, the animals, and the plants stirred from the earth, drawn forth by its breath. To each it gave a place and a path, weaving the laws of kinship and survival.
The Rainbow Serpent was both nurturer and enforcer. When honored, it brought rains to swell the rivers, fertility to the soil, and harmony among creatures. But when disrespected — when laws of sharing and balance were broken — it could unleash floods, storms, or withhold water, leaving land dry as stone. Its presence was gift and warning, love and discipline bound together.
The people learned from it the sacred patterns: when to hunt, when to gather, how to care for waterholes, how to honor the spirits of place. They painted its image on rock shelters, sang its songlines across deserts and forests, keeping alive the paths it carved in the Dreaming. In those stories, the Serpent remained not only a memory of creation but a living presence in every river’s curve and every rainbow arching across the sky.
Some nations told that the Rainbow Serpent brought fertility by joining with other ancestral beings, male and female, embodying both. Others said it guarded the waterholes jealously, demanding offerings and respect. In all versions, it was tied to life itself, the flowing of water and the continuity of the people.
So the tale was passed down, painted in ochre and sung in ceremony. The Rainbow Serpent was not just a story but law, binding earth, sky, and water to the people who walked the land. It reminded all that love of country was sacred, and that to honor the Serpent was to honor life itself.
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