Tjinimin (the Bat ancestor)

Tjinimin is the bat or flying-fox ancestor of the Murinbata and the central transgressor of their great myth of the Rainbow Serpent, recorded by W. E. H. Stanner. Son of the ancestral Father Kunmanggur, he lusted after his own sisters, the Green Parrot girls, and forced himself upon them; pursued and shamed, he then plotted his father's death. In the long mythic sequence he fitted a stone point to a straightened bamboo shaft, bound it with waxed string, and through a series of dances drew the concealed spear to himself with his toes before hurling it at Kunmanggur. The mortally wounded serpent dragged himself to the sea, taking with him all the fire of the land. Tjinimin's incest and parricide make him a figure of ambivalent creative violence, and Kenneth Maddock treated these acts as the structural engine of the narrative.

Parentage

• parent: Kunmanggur (the Rainbow Serpent)

Domains

• ancestry
• transgression

Powers

• to spear and bring down the Rainbow Serpent

Epithets

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

Relations

• slayer of: Kunmanggur (the Rainbow Serpent)Son and killer of Kunmanggur, whom he speared at the place where the ancestors emerged.W. E. H. Stanner, On Aboriginal Religion (Oceania Monograph No. 11, 1963) (secondary)

Sources

• Tjinimin is the Murinbata bat (flying-fox) ancestor, son of Kunmanggur, who violated his sisters the Green Parrot girls and then treacherously speared his father the Rainbow Serpent, the deed that drove Kunmanggur into the sea.: 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)