Australian Aborigine Creation Stories: Rainbow Serpent and Emus in the Stars
Down under all is still and dark, the spirits of the Earth are sleeping. It is the Dreamtime. There are many different Dreamtime stories that vary from region to region and from people to people. Mostly they are stories that explain life and its peculiarities but there are those that stretch out into the cosmos and talk of stars and supernatural beings. Dreamtime is a difficult concept for many of us to deal with as it is not a linear passage of time but rather an all-encompassing state of being, and so the Dreamtime is both past, present and future all at the same time.
Indigenous Australian art. (CC BY-SA 3.0)
Father of all the Spirits and Sun Mother
All was still in the darkness until the great Father of all Spirits woke the Sun-Mother. As she opened her eyes so the sunlight washed away the darkness that covered the entire Earth. The Earth was a bare flat circular body covered with a concave sky which reached down to the horizon. The sky was the earth of another world above this one, a rich land with a plentiful water supply where many ancestral beings dwelt. The stars are said to be their campfires. The Father of all Spirits told the Sun-Mother to wake the Spirits. She came down from the sky and as she walked around so she gave life to all the plants and grasses. After her work she rested until the Father of all the Spirits told her to go into the caves and wake the Spirits there.
