Rainbow Serpent (34/100)

The Rainbow Serpent — the creator deity of Australian Aboriginal cosmology, the great snake that formed the landscape in the Dreamtime and continues to inhabit sacred waterways throughout the continent. Mayumi Oda's engagement with the Rainbow Serpent places her cross-cultural feminist mythological project in dialogue with one of the world's oldest living spiritual traditions, the Aboriginal dreaming stories that encode ecological knowledge and sacred geography in narrative and visual form. The serpent as a symbol of creative power, of the earth's generative energy, and of the feminine divine appears across multiple traditions — from the Aboriginal Rainbow Serpent to the Hindu Nāga to the European goddess religions Oda has engaged throughout her career.