WAWALAG

WAWALAG . The most important myth and ritual constellation in Australia's north-central Arnhem Land belongs to the Dua moiety. (Everyone and everything in this entire region belongs through patrilineal descent to one or the other of the two moieties, Dua and Yiridja.) The myth focuses on two sisters in human form who were swallowed by the Great Python, Yulunggul. The sisters are known in northeastern Arnhem Land as the Wawalag and in north-central Arnhem Land as the Wagilag. The dramatic story line, told in narrative or song form or in a combination of both, is now a popular subject of bark paintings created for sale to non-Aborigines.

Summary of the Wawalag Story

The two sisters leave their home near the Roper River in Wawalag country for their long journey toward the north coast. In some versions the elder, Waimariwi, is pregnant and in some versions already has a small child (or two). The younger, Boaliri, has just reached puberty. (In one version, she is pregnant.) Along with digging sticks and long food-collecting baskets (signifying a feminine domestic role) and one or two dogs, they bring heavy baskets of stone spear blades (also of the Dua moiety) from the stone-chipping quarries in Ridarngu-language territory, home of the Yiridja moiety, a source of eligible spouses for Dua moiety Wawalag people. The sisters give names to the places along their way, as well as to all the vegetable foods and small creatures they collect. They are tired when at last, late one afternoon, they come to a quiet water hole shaded by paperbark trees and cabbage palms. They do not know it is the home of the Great Python. They collect stringybark to make a small hut, paperbark for comfortable sleeping mats, and firewood to cook their meal.

At this juncture the emotional tone of the myth changes sharply. Either shortly before the sisters arrive at the complex of named sites centering on the water hole (Mirara-minar, or Muruwul), or soon after that, the elder sister (or the younger, according to which version is followed) gives birth to a child; in some versions, one of the sisters is menstruating. Now, blood (or the smell of blood) comes close to the water hole or falls into it.

The sisters begin to worry about the possible proximity of a Snake, but since it is too late to move on, they settle down to eat their supper. However, every item of food, as they reach out their hands for it, jumps from the hot coals and makes for the water hole. Dark clouds gather, and rain begins to fall, lightly at first, then heavily, with wind, thunder, and lightning engulfing the hut in a fierce storm sent by the Great Python. During the night the sisters, in turn, dance, sing, and call out ritually in an attempt to calm the storm. In one version the younger sister performs in men's singing style, using two clapping sticks. The elder sister's efforts are more successful. They sing songs with increasingly greater sacred power: songs about the Great Python, about circumcision ritual, about blood, Kunapipi (Gunabibi) songs, secret-sacred songs. Then, thinking all is quiet, they fall asleep while the Great Python, who has emerged from his water hole, sings. Finally, he coils around the hut, puts his head inside, bites their noses, drawing blood, and swallows them—along with the stone spear blades, the baskets, the child(ren), and the dog(s). Later, when an ant bites him, he jumps and vomits them but then he swallows the sisters again.

He raises himself, with his head toward the sky, and talks with other great snakes to the east and southeast about what each of them had been eating. He mentions other food, but finally admits he has eaten the Wawalag and their stone spear blades. Lowering himself to the ground again, he sinks into his water hole with the sisters still inside him. An additional section in versions recorded by William Lloyd Warner (1937, pp. 257–259) tells how the women and children are revived. Then Yulunggul kills them again, swallows them, and takes them back along an underground watercourse to Wawalag country, where he leaves the women, who turn to stone, but keeps the boys inside him because they are of the Yiridja moiety and he is Dua. Then come the linking episodes between the myth as such and its ritual counterparts, including dreams in which the Wawalag sisters teach men the secret-sacred songs and rites that become the responsibility of men of appropriate ritual and territorial status.

Comments and Interpretations

The Wawalag myth is usually long and quite detailed, covering small as well as large events, conversations, songs (referred to by name or included within the text), names of places and foods, brief descriptions of the environmental setting, and symbolic and ritual allusions. This simplified outline constitutes merely a set of clues to the content of the myth. As far as Aboriginal people in north-central and northeastern Arnhem Land are concerned, the range of acceptable versions—and therefore of acknowledged and potential meanings—hinges on factors of sex, age, ritual status, and regional perspectives. This last includes recognition of priority of rights and priority of ownership of the myth, accorded to a cluster of clans in north-central Arnhem Land.

The most extensive published account of the myth and associated rites derives from Warner's field research in the region, conducted in the late 1920s (Warner, 1937, e.g., pp. 248–259, pp. 376–411). He notes a number of differing versions but adds that "all the fundamental features and most of the secondary ones were always present, no matter how poor the narrator." Ronald M. Berndt (1951) studied the myth from the northeastern Arnhem Land side, with special reference to the Kunapipi complex. In both accounts, the principal meaning to local people lies in the dynamic interrelationship between the myth and three major ritual complexes: the initiatory Djunggawon, the Kunapipi, and the Ngurlmag; Warner adds (p. 249) a fourth, which he calls the Marndiella (Mandiwala). But these ritual meanings themselves include social implications and ramifications that are noted or hinted at in the myth. For example, in some versions the Wawalag sisters would have circumcised their son(s) if the Great Python had not intervened.

In men's versions (Berndt, 1951; Warner, 1937), the sisters commit incest before they begin their journey northward, and it is this "wrongdoing," as well as the "polluting" of the water hole with blood, that is responsible for their being swallowed by the Snake. Women's versions, however (Berndt, 1970), do not mention incest. They imply that, if there had been incest, it would have taken place at the Snake's water hole. Warner actually mentions that "incest" had occurred, in the sense that the women and children swallowed by the Snake are called "sisters" and "sisters' children" by him (pp. 193, 253). In the subsequent conversation between the Snakes (p. 257), when the Wessel Island Snake hears the truth, he is "disgusted. 'You've eaten your own [sisters and sisters' children],' he said. This was a terrible thing." Men's versions do not dwell on this point; instead they blame the women for their earlier "sin."

In regard to the blood in the water hole, the situation is less straightforward than it seems. Men's versions, reported by men, tend to emphasize pollution, uncleanliness, or the "profaning" effect of menstrual or afterbirth blood. In many versions, and in associated discussions, the expressions used include "attraction" as well as "anger" and "repulsion," an approach that is certainly compatible with "eating" rather than with more direct killing; moreover, the terms for "eating" in these dialects can apply to sexual intercourse as well as to the ingestion of food. Attitudes toward blood are a central feature in definitions of sacredness in this region. Distinctions between men's blood and women's blood in relation to ritual and natural circumstances of bloodletting or blood emission have been associated with an arbitrary division between sacred and profane that needs much more rigorous scrutiny.

Nancy D. Munn (1969) is concerned with the general issue of the nexus of the Wawalag myth and its ritual interconnections; taking "collective symbolic forms as instruments for transforming subjective experience," says Munn, "the myth conveys body destruction images saturated with negative feeling which the rituals convert into feelings of well-being" (p. 178). She also comments specifically on the importance of blood in the combination of myth and ritual. Basing her analysis on Warner's material, Munn notes that ritual swallowing by the Snake in contemporary settings is a men-only affair. Women's biological association with menstruation, for instance, aligns them closely with the Wawalag sisters, so that mythically they have already been swallowed: To be swallowed again in a ritual context would lead to their physical death, as it did for the Wawalag. Men's ritual bloodletting is symbolically equivalent to the emission of blood by the Wawalag, but in real life the two are incompatible. In terms of seasonal renewal, Munn says, it is men's blood, drawn and applied in the course of specific rites, that revitalizes the creatures who left the Wawalag sisters' fire and that "swings the wet season back into the dry, while women's blood regenerates the cycle of food loss and death and so turns the dry season into the rainy one." (p. 198). In its nonsymbolic state women's blood is too close to natural physical reality; it must be transformed and brought under men's control in its ritual equivalent. On the other hand, Munn has already referred to "the significance of blood as a symbolic inheritance binding the two sexes as parties to an exchange: the two women gave men their blood and naming powers (or lost these powers through their death) and men, in return, memorialize the two women" (p. 184).

The theme of blood as an important but contentious issue in myth-based rites and relations between men and women, with special reference to the Wawalag myth, is also treated by Chris Knight, who suggests that "the symbolic potency of the menstrual flow was central to the establishment of culture itself." He argues (1983, pp. 42, 43) that women, because of their basic natural periodicity, have a life potency that is far stronger than that of men. And he asserts (1984, p. 154) that such myths have to do with women's ability to synchronize their menstrual cycles in a natural process used by men as a basis on which to construct their own ritual models.

Natural blood from women and ritual blood from men can be powerful in different ways—and mutually dangerous. They represent different kinds of sacredness, a possibility that Émile Durkheim began to explore in his distinction between "positive" and "negative" sacredness but did not carry through to a more comprehensive conceptualization. The Wawalag story has as its central focus a powerful mixture: blood, water, and the Snake. It is this mixture that produces the wet season, crucial for human beings and all other living things in the natural environment. The fertility of the land and all its inhabitants could not be achieved either by the Wawalag alone or by the Snake alone. It came about as a result of the conjunction between them. And it can be ensured, in local belief, only through regular ritual reenactment of the event and its mythic and symbolic interconnections.

See Also

Australian Indigenous Religions, overview article; Gadjeri; Yulunggul Snake.

Bibliography

Berndt, Catherine H. "Monsoon and Honey Wind." In Échanges et Communications: Mélanges offerts à Claude Lévi-Strauss, edited by Jean Pouillon and Pierre Maranda, vol. 2, pp. 1306–1326. The Hague, 1970. Summarizes information from several northeastern Arnhem Land women, including their versions of the Wawalag myth, and suggests differing interpretations from those of Warner, as restated by Lévi-Strauss, as well as the need to take into account closely related myth constellations in any analysis and interpretation.

Berndt, Ronald M. Kunapipi: A Study of an Australian Aboriginal Religious Cult. Melbourne, 1951. Mainly concerned with content, performance, and spread of this religious complex, together with participants' statements, songs, and the relevance of the Wawalag myth.

Berndt, Ronald M., and Catherine H. Berndt. The World of the First Australians (1964). Rev. ed., Adelaide, 1985. Includes one version of the Wawalag myth and discusses its links with other local myths and associated rituals.

Knight, Chris. "Lévi-Strauss and the Dragon: Mythologiques Reconsidered in the Light of an Australian Aboriginal Myth." Man 18 (March 1983): 21–50. An enthusiastic but in parts empirically careless discussion, which includes (p. 41) a parallel between Lévi-Strauss's contrast between the "raw" and the "cooked" and the creatures who jumped from the Wawalag's fire; Knight sees this as illustrating the sisters' ability through "the power of blood to negate or invert the cooking-process, defining meat as sacred/taboo on account of its being raw."

Layton, Robert. "Myth as Language in Aboriginal Arnhem Land." Man 5 (1970): 483–497. On the Wawalag, using Warner's account.

Layton, Robert, and Chris Knight. "Correspondence." Man 19 (March 1984): 150–157. Layton's criticism of Knight's views and Knight's response. Specifically in regard to the Wawalag, part of the argument hinged on the equivalence of snakes and women in creation myths, rather than rigid contrasts between them; on "underlying logic" as opposed to "superficial separateness"; and on alternating motifs and images in "cyclical alternation," including "menstrual cyclicity."

Lévi-Strauss, Claude. La pensée sauvage. Paris, 1962. Translated into English with the unfortunate title The Savage Mind (London, 1966). The Wawalag reference is on pages 91–94, and 96. Lévi-Strauss accepts not only Warner's account of the Wawalag myth but also his interpretation.

Munn, Nancy D. "The Effectiveness of Symbols in Murngin Rite and Myth." In Forms of Symbolic Action, edited by Robert F. Spencer, pp. 178–207. Seattle and London, 1969. An ingenious interpretation of the Wawalag myth in relation to its sociocultural setting: for example, sorcery narratives, mortuary rites, "symbolic space" as "time," and male initiation rites as ritual transformation in the context of social hierarchy. Munn uses diagrams to illustrate her main contentions. Her chief source of data is Warner's volume.

Warner, William Lloyd. A Black Civilization: A Study of an Australian Tribe (1937). New York, 1958. Includes a very detailed discussion of versions of the Wawalag myth (Wawilak, in his spelling) told to him by men and of the rituals connected with it, as well as men's interpretations of all of these. A remarkably full and sympathetic study, considering Warner's admitted difficulty in coming to terms with the local dialects (for example, he apparently did not hear initial "ng" sounds), but his treatment of the Wawalag constellation exemplifies his negative view of women's religious roles in that region.

Catherine H. Berndt (1987)