Darana (the rain-maker)
Darana is the best-attested of the named Diyari mura-mura, the ancestral being to whom the making of rain and the increase of food belong. In the aetiological legends recorded by the missionary Otto Siebert and the anthropologist A.W. Howitt, Darana sang the rain down upon the parched gibber country, brought up the nardoo on which the desert people depended, and raised great swarms of insects; killing a female caterpillar, he scattered her wings in every direction so that increase spread across the land. The dried body of that caterpillar became the stones that the Diyari were charged to keep and guard, and which must on no account be scratched, lest famine come, nor broken, lest the order of the world itself be undone. Howitt connects Darana with the Diyari rain ceremonies and records the people's belief that red ochre, karku, is the blood of the mura-mura. Reuther, whose vast Diyari dictionary names well over a hundred mura-mura, preserves further detail of Darana and of the stones associated with him.
Domains
- rain making
- plenty and increase
Powers
- to call down rain upon the desert country
- to make the nardoo and the swarming insects multiply after rain
- to turn the body of the slain caterpillar into the guarded sacred stones
Epithets
- mura-mura