The Rainbow Serpent: The Great Creator Snake of Aboriginal Australia
The oldest god still worshiped on earth is, by a strong scholarly argument, a snake. The Rainbow Serpent —the name is the anthropologists' umbrella, coined in the early twentieth century, for a being the hundreds of Aboriginal nations of Australia know under their own names: Ngalyod to the Kunwinjku of Arnhem Land, Wagyl to the Noongar of the southwest, Yurlunggur, Kanmare, Goorialla of the great Lardil telling, and many more—coils through the rock art of the continent in an unbroken iconographic tradition that the archaeologists trace back some six thousand years and more in Arnhem Land alone: the same great looped body, the kangaroo-eared or crocodilian head, repainted and repainted at the galleries as the generations renewed their relationship with what the paintings are —not depictions, in the traditions' own understanding, but presences. The Serpent belongs to the Dreaming —the Tjukurpa , the Everywhen: the foundational epoch that is not past but underlying , present ben...