Mar’rallang

by Dr Anthony E. Smart

 
This Aboriginal story recounts the marriage of two sisters, so alike they bore the same name, to one man. The sameness of the sisters may allude actually to a two-season year, a two-sun cosmology, a dual-ruler system, the dichotomy/unity of life and death, and so on. In Greek mythology, the opposite is common: twin brothers (or a father and son, or uncle and nephew) marrying the same woman.