Yurlunggur (the Great Copper Python)
Yurlunggur (Yulunggur) is, in the ethnography of W. Lloyd Warner, the Murngin (Yolngu) name of the Great Copper Python, glossed in the comparative literature as 'the great father'. He lay in the sacred waterhole at Mirrirmina until the menstrual and birth blood of the two Wawalag sisters polluted his well; roused, he rose with the wet-season rains, swallowed the sisters and their children, and afterwards disgorged them. The myth and its associated Kunapipi rites, in which the python's swallowing and bringing-up is re-enacted as the death and rebirth of initiates, were documented by Warner and analysed by Ronald M. Berndt. The same rainbow-serpent being is known in feminine form elsewhere in Arnhem Land as Julunggul; among the Yolngu of Warner's account the python is the great father, distinct from that female tradition.
Domains
- rain and monsoon
- initiation
Powers
- to swallow and later disgorge the living
- to raise the flood-waters and the wet-season rains
Epithets
- YurlunggurArthur Cotterell, A Dictionary of World Mythology (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1986), s.v. Yurlungur, 'the great copper python' (secondary)
Relations
- slayer of: Waimariwi (the elder Wawalag sister)The python swallowed the elder Wawalag sister Waimariwi together with her sister and their children.W. Lloyd Warner, A Black Civilization (1937) (primary)
- slayer of: Boaliri (the younger Wawalag sister)The python swallowed the younger Wawalag sister Boaliri in the same act, before disgorging the sisters again.W. Lloyd Warner, A Black Civilization (1937) (primary)
Sources
- Yurlunggur is the great copper python of the Yolngu (Murngin), the 'great father' of the Wawalag myth and the Kunapipi cult, who swallowed the two Wawalag sisters and brought the wet-season rains, embodying initiatory death and rebirth.: W. Lloyd Warner, A Black Civilization: A Social Study of an Australian Tribe (New York: Harper, 1937; rev. 1958) (primary); Ronald M. Berndt, Kunapipi: A Study of an Australian Aboriginal Religious Cult (Melbourne: F. W. Cheshire, 1951) (secondary)