A Being Found Across Most of the Continent

The figure commonly called the Rainbow Serpent in English is one of the most widely distributed creative beings in Aboriginal Australian religious tradition, documented in some form among a very large number of distinct nations across most regions of the continent, generally associated with water, specifically permanent waterholes, rivers and other significant water sources, with fertility and rain, and with the shaping of watercourses and other land features during the ancestral creative period.

Ronald and Catherine Berndt's survey of Aboriginal traditional life is careful to note that "the Rainbow Serpent" is an English umbrella label applied by outside researchers to what is, on the ground, a large number of related but genuinely distinct regional beings, carrying different specific names, different precise characteristics and different bodies of associated Law in each nation and language group that holds tradition connected to a great creative serpent, rather than one single figure worshipped identically from one end of Australia to the other. Because of this English-imposed unification, careful scholarship treats "the Rainbow Serpent" as a comparative category describing a widespread pattern rather than the proper name of one deity.