Rainbow Serpent

The figure commonly called the Rainbow Serpent in English is one of the most widely distributed creative beings in Aboriginal Australian religious tradition, documented in some form among a very large number of distinct nations across most regions of the continent, generally associated with water, specifically permanent waterholes, rivers and other significant water sources, with fertility and rain, and with the shaping of watercourses and other land features during the ancestral creative period.

Ronald and Catherine Berndt's survey of Aboriginal traditional life is careful to note that "the Rainbow Serpent" is an English umbrella label applied by outside researchers to what is, on the ground, a large number of related but genuinely distinct regional beings, carrying different specific names, different precise characteristics and different bodies of associated Law in each nation and language group that holds tradition connected to a great creative serpent, rather than one single figure worshipped identically from one end of Australia to the other. Because of this English-imposed unification, careful scholarship treats "the Rainbow Serpent" as a comparative category describing a widespread pattern rather than the proper name of one deity.

Deborah Bird Rose's work on Aboriginal views of landscape situates Rainbow Serpent traditions within a wider, still actively significant Aboriginal environmental and legal framework in which the great creative serpents associated with particular waterholes and rivers are understood as continuing to inhabit and hold responsibility for those places, meaning their significance is not confined to a past creative era but remains a live, present consideration in how the relevant communities relate to and care for country today, including in contemporary land and water management contexts where traditional owners are consulted specifically because of this ongoing connection. As with Baiame and Bunjil, the fuller ceremonial and Law content connected to any specific regional Rainbow Serpent tradition is properly the domain of the community that holds it, restricted in many cases by gender, age or initiation status, and this atlas keeps its account at the level of the widely published comparative pattern, water, fertility, land-shaping and continuing custodianship, without describing or summarising restricted material belonging to any one nation's specific tradition.