Robert Blust †: The Myth of the Rainbow Serpent “Myth”
Abstract
From the time that A. R. Radcliffe-Brown provided the first detailed description in 1926, the Rainbow Serpent culture complex has been regarded, either explicitly or implicitly, as the exclusive domain of Aboriginal Australia. An extensive survey of the ethnology of the rainbow fails to support this view, since elements of the same belief system appear in animistic societies around the world. These typically represent the rainbow as an enormous spirit snake that guards springs and other water sources when not in the sky and is particularly offended by the approach of menstruating women, while in other cultures rainbow and serpent have been decoupled, but both retain clear signals that they descend from a coherent and presumably ancient Rainbow Serpent culture complex. In those parts of the world where agriculture first took hold, leading to urbanization, literacy, and the abandonment of an animistic worldview, the serpent survived as an independent entity that we know as the dragon.
