Kunmanggur (the Rainbow Serpent)

Kunmanggur is the Rainbow Serpent of the Murinbata of Port Keats (Wadeye) in the Northern Territory, and one of the three principal beings of their religion recorded by W. E. H. Stanner alongside Mutjingga and Kukpi. In the beginning he was a beneficent culture-hero, a man of super-human size and power who made the first boy and girl, opened the deep fresh-water pools, and was the reputed source of spirit-children, rain, fish, flying-foxes and the general increase of nature; the brightest, blood-red band of the rainbow was identified with him. The central myth, which Stanner treated as a 'riteless myth', tells how his son Tjinimin the bat violated his daughters and then mortally speared him; gravely wounded, Kunmanggur made his way to the sea, gathering up the fire of the land, and sank beneath the water to become the Rainbow Serpent. Stanner remarked of the tale that 'paradox and antinomy were the marrow in the story's bones'. The myth was further analysed in structural terms by Kenneth Maddock.

Children

• Tjinimin (the Bat ancestor)

Domains

• rainbow and rain
• fresh water
• fertility increase

Powers

• to fashion the first human beings
• to open the deep pools of fresh water in the land

Epithets

• KunmanggurW. E. H. Stanner, On Aboriginal Religion (Oceania Monograph No. 11, 1963) (secondary)

Relations

• parent of: Tjinimin (the Bat ancestor)Father of the bat-ancestor Tjinimin, who in the myth turns on him and spears him to death.W. E. H. Stanner, On Aboriginal Religion (Oceania Monograph No. 11, 1963) (secondary)
• consort of: Kirindilyin (the dark-rainbow ancestress)Paired with Kirindilyin, the dark band of the rainbow, named in some Murinbata tellings as his female counterpart or wife.Ira R. Buchler & Kenneth Maddock (eds.), The Rainbow Serpent: A Chromatic Piece (The Hague: Mouton, 1978), on the dark rainbow-band identified with Kirindilyin alongside Kunmanggur (secondary)

Sources

• Kunmanggur is the Murinbata Rainbow Serpent and ancestral Father, a beneficent culture-hero and maker of the first people and the fresh-water pools who, after being speared by his son Tjinimin, descended into the sea and became the great serpent.: W. E. H. Stanner, On Aboriginal Religion (Oceania Monograph No. 11; Sydney: University of Sydney, 1963; repr. Sydney University Press, 2014) (secondary); Ira R. Buchler & Kenneth Maddock (eds.), The Rainbow Serpent: A Chromatic Piece (The Hague: Mouton, 1978) (secondary)