Yingarna (the original mother Rainbow Serpent)
Yingarna (also Yingana) is the senior, female Rainbow Serpent of the Kunwinjku of western Arnhem Land, the original ancestral mother from whom the people descend. In Kuninjku and Kunwinjku accounts she is the 'biggest' and first of the Rainbow Serpents. She came out of the sea bearing woven dilly-bags filled with spirit-children and the first yams; travelling across the land she set down the people at different places, planted the yams, and gave each group its own language and its own country, so accounting for the linguistic diversity of the region. She is the mother of Ngalyod, the transforming Rainbow Serpent who succeeds her as the active serpent of the waters. Her image, often a large maternal serpent disgorging or carrying the first people, is a major subject of escarpment rock art and of bark painting recorded and analysed by Luke Taylor and by the Berndts.
Children
Domains
- creation
- motherhood
- language and law
Powers
- to bring forth the first people from her dilly-bags and settle them across the land
- to assign to each group of people its distinct language and country
Epithets
- YinganaRonald M. Berndt & Catherine H. Berndt, Man, Land and Myth in North Australia: The Gunwinggu People (Sydney: Ure Smith, 1970) (secondary)
Sources
- Yingarna is the original, female Rainbow Serpent of the Kunwinjku, the ancestral mother who emerged from the sea carrying the first people in dilly-bags, dispersed them across western Arnhem Land with their separate languages and lands, and is the mother of the Rainbow Serpent Ngalyod.: Luke Taylor, 'The Rainbow Serpent as Visual Metaphor in Western Arnhem Land,' Oceania 60, no. 4 (1990): 329-344 (secondary); Luke Taylor, Seeing the Inside: Bark Painting in Western Arnhem Land (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996) (secondary)