One of the most famous and powerful Ancestral creatures from Aboriginal Australian Dreamtime is the great Ancestral Being of the Rainbow Serpent. She is known to hold great powers and is believed to have given shape to our planet. Rock art dating back to 6000 years ago, and featuring the Ancestral Being, are known to be one of the oldest continuous religious beliefs in the world.
It is said that long ago in the Dreamtime when the Earth was still flat, and nothing moved or grew, the Rainbow Serpent lived. The Rainbow Serpent came from under the Earth and awoke, refreshing her long slumber by traveling far and wide while leaving wind tracks with her body until she returned to the place she first appeared. Her movements across the Earth formed hills, gorges, creeks and rivers into the once featureless terrain.
Upon her return to her resting place, she called for the frogs to come out of their hiding. With their bellies full of water (stored from their hibernation), the Ancestral Being tickled them, and their laughs provoked water to spill out and fill the wind tracks that she had left over her travels. This is how lakes and rivers across Australia were formed.
The Rainbow serpent traveled all over Australia, inhabiting waterholes and providing water. Once the Rainbow Serpent substantially shaped the Earth, she grew tired and slithered into a waterhole, where she still lies to this very day.
With flora beginning to grow after her great travels across Australia, different animals began to awaken and follow the Ancestral Being across the land. The animals were happy; some of these animals lived in rocks, others on vast plains, and some in the sky and in trees, and each gathered and lived with their tribes.
The Rainbow Serpent created laws for all creatures to obey, however, after a while some began to cause trouble and argue. Those who broke the law were punished and turned to stone; that then added to the vast valleys and hill plains of Australia. However, those who were obedient to the laws were turned into humans and given their own totems of the animals that they morphed from. The tribes knew themselves as the totems of the native animals of Australia. To ensure that the tribes wouldn’t starve, a rule that no man should eat his own totem, but only other totem’s, was created.
Aboriginal people are very cautious and take great caution to not to disturb water sites throughout the country. The Rainbow Serpent is also known to be unpredictable, causing great destruction such as droughts, cyclones and floods. When heavy rain falls it is known that the serpent’s waterhole can be disturbed. However, once the rain has passed, and the sun has once again caressed the serpent’s rainbow body, it rises from beneath the ground to travel through the clouds, in search of another waterhole.
The story of the great Ancestral Being is how the Aboriginal people explain why even during great droughts, some water sources across Australia never dry out. For the Indigenous of Australia, it represents the life-giving power held by water, as well as the cycle of seasons. The Aboriginal tribes lived together, surviving off the beautiful Australian land, which the Rainbow Serpent or Mother of Life had created for them.
However, stories about the great Ancestral Being can vary across the different tribes. An example is that tribes located in the monsoonal areas of Australia, believe that the Rainbow Serpent has a great interaction between the sun, and wind. Whereas tribes in central Australia tell the Dreamtime story through a perspective where seasons experience less shift in weather.
