Yurlungur

Yurlungur Oceania
The great copper python of the Murngin in northern Australia. Once two young women who had slept with men from a forbidden clan arrived at the auwa, the sacred place belonging to Yurlungur. It was a water hole called Mirrirmina, ‘rock python's back’, and in the deep subterranean waters below this water hole dwelt the ancestral snake spirit. When the older girl started to cook the animals they had caught, these creatures leapt out of the fire and ran to the sacred water hole and jumped into it. Next the older girl went out to gather bark for the younger girl's new-born baby. She approached the Mirrirmina well, and it happened that her menstrual blood fell into the water hole and was carried down to the abode of Yurlungur. The head of ‘great father snake’ was lying quietly on the bottom of the pit, but he opened his nostrils and smelled hard as the polluted blood drifted downwards. Yurlungur then raised his head and slowly crawled...

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