The Rainbow Serpent in the Aboriginal Pantheon: A Review Article

The actual centre piece - and the volume's raison d'etre - is a lengthy paper by Mountford, originally intended for the IXth International Congress of Anthropological and Ethnological Sciences in Chicago. To Mountford's long list of sites, myths, and drawings connected with the Rainbow Serpent, there is little one could justifiably add, amend or, for that matter, criticize - regardles of the adage de mortuis nil nisi bonum. This is good solid ethnography that draws on Mountford's field notes, his previous publications, and the writings of others. As the subtitle of the volume suggests, it is a truly chromatic piece: the papers are as diverse and colourful as the image of the Rainbow Serpent. Contrasting with Mountford's straightforward ethnography is Buchler's involved piece 'the fecal crone' that deals with (I am quoting) 'shit'. It is not because of the indelicacy of the topic that one finds it difficult to comment on Buchler's dazzling display of brilliant fabrications, breath-taking intellectual contortions and word plays a la mode structurelle. As he goes in a rapid pace through a sheer endless series of structural transformations everyone but the most hardened structuralist is left utterly perplexed. By the expert's magical touch the wondrous world of the species-typical unconscious has once again been throv/n open to behold. Unfortunately the wizardry appears dubious in places, thus casting a shadow of doubt over this all-too-clever argument. Let me isolate just one of Buchler's ideas for closer inspection. For Buchler the Rainbow Serpent is a water python and he suggests it has been chosen by Aborigines because of its fine olfactory capacity. (This is important to his thesis about the foul smells of expulsa such as faeces) Pythons have a keen sense of smell, but their other four senses are less well developed. However, this is not readily observable; in fact, it presupposes a refined knowledge of nature of a kind unlikely to exist among huntergatherers, despite their thorough, empirically based wisdom in other fields. Now folk knowledge sometimes does turn out to be astonishingly accurate in detail, but more often than not contains the most atrocious misconceptions. In fact, symbolism most of the time seems to be thriving on just such 'false' attributes: the noble lion, the wise owl, the cowardly hyena etc. I do not find it convincing that the python became the symbol