Yara Ma Yha Who: Fairy Tale Flip Ep 19

Forget Dracula. Australia has its own vampire story—and it’s stranger than you think. Have you heard of the bloodsucking creature that hides in Australia’s fig trees? In episode 19 of Fairytale Flip, we dive into the Aboriginal Australian myth of the Yara-Ma-Yahoo: a toothless, red-skinned, frog-like vampire that preys on those resting beneath fig trees, draining their blood and slowly transforming them into the very monster they feared.
We compare this chilling tale to European fairy tales and folktales, uncovering cultural differences in storytelling, the sacred role of fig trees in Aboriginal traditions, and the enduring power of ritual and oral history. We also explore possible origins of the Yara-Ma-Yahoo, from the Malayan tarsier to the long-extinct Australian marsupial lion.
Along the way, we reflect on our own cultural biases and the challenges of interpreting deeply spiritual traditions that carry strikingly different views of time, nature, and community.
TimeStamps

Summary of Yama Yahoo Myth — 1:06
Cultural Significance and Comparisons — 2:03
Australian Culture — 5:16
Aboriginal Connection to the Land — 9:06
Historical Migration and Time Perception — 18:51
Aboriginal Mythology and the Sacred Fig Tree — 22:51
The Significance of Water in Folktales — 29:27
Blood as a Symbol of Life and Death — 32:08
The Rituals and Beliefs of Aboriginal Culture — 34:48
Theories on the Origin of the Yara-ma-yha-who — 42:21
Dreamtime in Aboriginal Culture — 51:08
Reflections on Cultural Differences and Storytelling — 55:58
Conclusion and Upcoming Topics — 1:01:39

Celtic Impulse - Celtic · Kevin MacLeod

Provided to YouTube by http://incompetech.com

Celtic Impulse - Celtic

℗ Creative Commons Attribution 4.0  https://creativecommons.org/licenses/...

Follow us:

Fabric of Folklore website

Youtube channel

Facebook Page

Facebook Group

Instagram

Twitter

Linkedin

Transcript

Yara-Ma-Yha-Who Podcast

Introduction to Fairytale Flip

[00:00:09] Vanessa: Okay, welcome. Welcome to Fairytale Flip. The what month are we in? September episode. And we are talking about Y Ma, Yahoo. I am Vanessa y Rogers, and my co-host is Donna Lee Field. And every month we come together to talk about fairytales and flip them on their heads and understand their underpinnings, understand their historical context and what makes them mean something to our society today.

Why have they stuck around for so long? Uh, there's a reason that these stories have continuously been told through the generations, and that's what we're really getting at today. We're, diving into a very out of our comfort level story today, and we're gonna talk about that a little bit. 

Exploring the Yama Yahoo Myth

[00:01:06] Vanessa: Uh, it's the Yama yahoo.

If you've never heard of this story, definitely you're gonna want to stick around because this is a fascinat fascinating story from the Aboriginal Australian mythology. So you're gonna, you're gonna wanna hear this and Donna is going to give us the summary of the story. 

[00:01:26] Donna: Yeah. And I love this, Vanessa.

I love how you're saying that we're, we're gonna explore why these stories last so long, especially this one. The arm, it's from, it's so cultural, it's so tied to the culture. And so what we're gonna do in this story, and you all can tell us if we do it well or not, we think that we've, uh, researched it pretty clearly is show what I'm gonna do.

I didn't, I I don't think we talked about this, Vanessa. I'm gonna show how in the European tradition, culture is not as tied to the story as in the Aboriginal culture in different ways, I'll say in different ways. And we're gonna talk about whether you believe that or not, whether you, you agree or not.

Cultural Significance and Comparisons

[00:02:03] Donna: And also we wanna say, Vanessa and I both have this experiences. We're typing it in research and we both write, wrote Aborigines. And both of us got our computers saying, no, no, no, you mustn't say that anymore. It's aboriginal. And so apparently the politically correct term is aboriginals and. So we're gonna try to be as respectful as possible and if we um, cross the line, we apologize in advance.

'cause I've spent the last, uh, you know, six dec more than six decades saying Amber Jeanes. Let's talk about the summary of this story. And again, it's very hard to get the actual story. You can get the history of it. But the story itself, Vanessa finally found, and you can find that on her YouTube TAR channel.

I have the history of it that I thought was really fun. This is a quick summary. 

Summary and Visual Depictions

[00:02:46] Donna: The Yama yahoo is a very naci, nasty toothless vampire. He looks like a small red man with enormous head and octopus like suckers for fingers, has no teeth. Again, it's a toothless vampire that may sound harmless, but beware, his gums are deadly.

If you ever sit beneath an Australian fig tree, be very careful. The arm ahu is likely to jump on top of you, suck all your blood out, and then eat you. But wait. It gets a little more interesting. As soon as he's eaten you, he goes to sleep and then vomits you up again. His victims are miraculously reborn, but each time they're a little shorter and a little redder, and actually eventually they turned into a Yama Yahoo themselves.

So that is the story. 

[00:03:39] Vanessa: Yeah, it's a crazy, it's a crazy story. Now, you were the one who originally found this story. Where did you find it and what drew you to it? Donna? 

[00:03:49] Donna: What drew me to it? That's a scary question 'cause I'm not really sure, but what I was just looking for different cultural fairytales. 'cause you know we are, I'm so drawn to the Northern European tradition, I think you are too.

But I tried to branch out and I love different cultures and I just found this and there are a lot of different monsters and the aboriginal mythology. But this is one that I just found was kind of interesting though. The more I studied it, the more I thought wow. Am I ever going to understand this?

So Vanessa and I have tried. Hopefully we are gonna succeed. 

[00:04:21] Vanessa: And, you know, I don't know if you did any Google searches for images, but if you look up images, they are so widespread. I mean, no one can seem to really like hone in on what this creature is supposed to look like. There's just so many different images of what the Yamaha, the YAMA Yahoo looks like.

There's descriptions of it, but there's different descriptions in different regions. And it, it's just a bizarre looking creature. 

[00:04:48] Donna: Yeah, it's very bubbly. It's very bubbly. And so we're gonna talk about the story, but this is also one thing that I told Vanessa right off the bat, this is kind of outta my comfort zone because what I love doing with Vanessa on this podcast is digging into the story and looking at the details and trying to figure out the symbology of the motifs and the, and the themes and all that sort of thing.

But it's such a short story that what we needed to do was really dig into the culture behind it and talk about those sort of themes. 

Personal Experiences and Australian Culture

[00:05:16] Donna: Right off the bat, Vanessa, have you ever been to Australia? And what do you know about Australia aside from I was gonna you the same question. Okay. Got me. So, you know.

Yeah, no, but just so you know, I have been to Australia and so you have, I have, I wanna hear 

[00:05:34] Vanessa: your, what your, I. Your experience, because I've never been, I've met a lot of Australians. I love the Australian cultures that I have come across. A lot of the people that I've come across are very laid back. You know, they use lots of fun language instead of sun sunglasses, they say suns.

They have a very, at least I met a lot of people while traveling. And so a lot of those people were partying quite a bit. But I, I've heard that in Australia there's quite a party culture, at least within. Certain groups of people. The first thing that comes to mind, Donna, when I think of Australia, however, is that everything is out to kill you.

I, uh, used to, I used to love to watch all those Discovery Channel episodes, and it would be like the dead tin deadliest animals and like seven of the 10 deadliest animals came from Australia. And it, it, it was, it's partially because it's so isolated. But there are just so many. Creatures in Australia that are extremely venomous and extremely dangerous.

And I think primarily most of those are found in the desert areas because Australia is the driest, inhabited continent in the world. I think 50% of Australia receives less than, uh, 12 inches of rain per year, and they have extreme evaporation rates sometimes higher than the amount of water that they actually receive.

And so it creates this ex, um, extreme dryness. And so possibly because of that, they have really interesting wildlife that just has developed to kill you. I don't know. What has your experience been in Australia and what took you there? 

[00:07:28] Donna: We're gonna go right back to the water idea because that is really fascinating.

It's in this mythology and it has to do with Australia also. When I was, um, in my late twenties, I decided to hitchhike around the world and you could do this. Then I bought a plane ticket around the world and hitchhiked in. The second place I went was Australia. The first place was New Zealand. And New Zealand they say is kind of, um, a very British atmosphere.

And Australia is very more free, freewheeling, you know, sort of American idea than we hitchhiked across the, the outback into the middle and then south. We didn't go to the western part of Australia, but Australia's just what you're saying. It's, it's 45% desert. It's just, but it's absolutely gorgeous. I mean, red, red Desert is very unusual, but there's not much vegetation, although the aboriginals probably would, would not.

Agree with me. I mean, I grew up in the northeast when, where vegetation is just bountiful and it's a different type of vegetation. So yes, they're really venomous creatures in Australia and you need to be very careful. But what I think that these monsters come out of is the very importance of warning children to be careful when they go out by themselves or with their friends.

Mm-hmm. Because they need to know what's out there. So the stories, we both did this research on different monsters in aboriginal mythology, right? 

[00:08:51] Vanessa: Mm-hmm. And we 

[00:08:53] Donna: have these really scary creatures. Some hide out in the water, some hide out in the trees, some hide out, and you know, who knows? In mountains. It's very intentional so that children are warned not to go to these certain areas.

Aboriginal Connection to the Land

[00:09:06] Donna: And I've seen movies on aboriginals and there I, I guess what we need to get, what I'd like to get into is there. They're inextricable connection to the earth because that has to do with the story. So tell me if that's where you wanna go right now. 

[00:09:22] Vanessa: Yes. I just wanted to throw out a few facts because I find this really interesting.

Australia is actually relatively the same size as the continental 48 states of America. So if you put Australia on top of America, the 48 states, not Australia, not, um, Alaska and Hawaii is almost the same exact size, but the population is so drastically different because of the, you the dryness of the popula of the, the desert.

Um, so there's 28 million people in Australia. 3% of those are Aboriginal people. There's 340 million a Americans in the United States and two point. About 2% of our population are native tribes. So that I, I thought that was really interesting. When you're looking at the landmass and the population, it's so drastically different.

Also another fun fact about Australia is that it was a penal colony. I think most people know about that. That it was colonized by the Dutch originally, and then the British just decided to use it as a giant jail system. And they just sent a bunch of people there and said, here you go. Here's this really dry continent.

Have fun. We're just gonna send you away. So I, 

[00:10:44] Donna: yeah, it wasn't very nice for the aboriginals. Yeah. No, no. And the other thing that's really important, I'm really glad you brought this whole thing up, is that the population also is really evenly dis, it's not evenly distributed at all. It's only on the east coast and on the west coast.

Right? There is some population in the middle, but just think of the United States and think about how we are fairly distributed evenly across the United States, but in, in Australia, this is, um, 66, 70,000 years later when we have humans on that island slash continent. And really the population only on the two sides because as you're saying, it's very isolated for most of the world, Australia is very far away and you have to really want to go there if you wanna live there.

So there are huge farms, you know, thousands and thousands of acre farms in the middle of the outback, but the population are on the co streams. So 

[00:11:36] Vanessa: what kind of farming do they are? They are like, is it like ranching farms or are they growing vegetation? Oh, okay. Should I pause it again here? I pause it. So 

[00:11:43] Donna: we were talking about the outback and what's going on in the middle of the outback, and you know, it's not really nice because it's taking over the aboriginals land.

That's basically it. And, and white people, as we're so awfully good at doing, we trample on the indigenous lands. And so what happened is the British came over and other people came over and started farming camels, for instance. Or now they have cattle and they're doing, you know, industrial things. But for our purposes what they did was they took control over the land where the aboriginals, you have a big question that you faced.

[00:12:22] Vanessa: I had a lot 

of questions. I was like, why are just, why are they farming camels? Are they shipping camels across the sea? What are they doing? I, that was where my brain was. Oh, I, 

[00:12:33] Donna: I, I just saw a documentary on it, and I felt so badly because they're, they're taking these beautiful camels who were free and all of a sudden they're, you know, I, I have a problem with locking animals up.

You know, I'm a vegan, I believe in freedom, and, and all of a sudden, these free camels we're now in farms or doing work or whatever. Anyway, that's my story about camels, but it's all animals. We don't have to go there. But 

[00:12:58] Vanessa: I was gonna ask you, what, what do you, in our, in your research of looking into the aboriginal people of Australia, what did you find the most striking.

[00:13:12] Donna: My research of the aboriginals I, I think that there's no way to go past the fact that they believe that the land is alive, that it's a living being. And so they're stewards of the land. Yeah. And so what they're doing is they're sort of conduits for energy coming down into Earth. And the earth itself is a living being, and all of the plants are part of an expression of this living being, and their existence has to do with making her life easier.

Their life has not been made easier. Mm-hmm. And so what, there's this tremendous angst about not being able to be out on the land and be out there as they want to be and mm-hmm. So these stories are, before they lost a lot of that freedom. These stories are eternal. Uh, the aboriginals are thought to be the oldest tribes in the human, his in human history, even older than a lot of the African tribes.

And so their religious beliefs, their beliefs are about dreaming dream time, about the eternal perspective of life, not just this timeline. And so I was working on the timeline and, and then I was comparing the aboriginals idea of eternity, of everything has to do with eternity. And for instance, European, European fair tales, which have timelines, which has a past, present, and future.

And so I was going there and the only you tell me this because you're such a master researching in all different cultures of fairytales. The only one that I could really think of that doesn't treat time as linear was more the Irish. Time is very, is very mystical, and you can have people captured by fairies and stay in the past or go into the future.

And, and there's, and sort of a feeling of nebulousness. What would you say, and I know we didn't talk about that self a little bit on the spot. 

[00:15:19] Vanessa: I did a little bit of research on that topic because that really challenged me to be honest. The Western timeline is very linear. Whereas the dream time timeline is called ever win.

It's vertical or a circular relationship. And the events of creation and ancestors and dreaming is always accessible, always continuously shaping the. When we as Westerners generally talk about things, we talk about the past, we talk about the present, we talk about the future, but for them it's all kind of combined, which.

In actuality, if you talk to physics physicists, I think that they would probably agree more in line with this concept, but it kind of, for our mindset, it kind of blows our mind and it's hard to picture that it because of the way that we've been raised in our culture. And that was something that really challenged me when I was thinking about the aboriginal culture.

There were a lot of things that challenged me when thinking about this particular Aboriginal culture. But that in particular I find hard to grasp onto. I find the line really easy. I'm really into time. I really like understanding where I am at what time and scheduling my day out.

Specifically. My husband is the opposite. He's very bad at time. Um, I think that's. Part of being a DHD is you're, you have a harder time because I think your brain just works very differently. But I like timelines and so it's hard for me to, to picture it in this circular relationship where past and future.

Are happening simultaneously. Uh, so, that, those are my 

[00:17:18] Donna: thoughts. No, no, that's perfect. Because we are taught, it's so societal. We are taught that, for instance, I'm from the East coast and time is very important. Time is inflexible. When someone tells you that you need to be somewhere at 11 o'clock, you may need to be there at 11 o'clock or you are offending that person.

Then I lived in New Mexico and there's a big Latino influence and, and it's like, ah, you know, you can be there 11, 10, 11 or 15. Don't worry about it. But I realized one time my sister visited me in New Mexico and I said, all right, let's, we'll meet at 11 o'clock, and I was leaving my house at 11, and now all of a sudden I realize, oh my God, to her, that is not acceptable.

I need to be there. When I said I'd be there, not, you know, there's this mm-hmm. We do not on the East Coast generally have a flexible concept of time, but then what we're talking about is the past, present, future. We're not, that's not part of our society. It's not part of Western society. It's more of a control thing.

Teaching you from very, very young. There is a definite past. You're living in the present and you need to think about the future. And that's not what the aboriginals do. And one of the reasons why this is difficult, I'm out of my comfort zone, is because I didn't grow up with that. And to understand these stories, I think it's very, I important to have a perspective of what creation is according to the aboriginals, this whole idea of eternity.

Mm-hmm. 

[00:18:39] Vanessa: Yeah. And I definitely wanna hear all about the research that you did. I wanna talk a little bit about you touched on their migration but I wanted to talk a little bit more in depth about it because I found that really fascinating. 

Historical Migration and Time Perception

[00:18:51] Vanessa: So I, so evidently homo sapiens have been around for about 300,000 years.

They've been migrating outside of Africa. For about 80,000 years. And Australia is one of the very first places that they migrated to. So the aboriginal Australians have effectively been on their, in their country as long as modern human populations have been outside of Africa. They migrated out into the Middle East and into Asia.

And then this particular group migrated across land bridges, and then on some very, uh, short sea crossings. Uh. And this was back when the earth looked very different than it does today. Um, back in, uh, the, the time period that they're migrating Australia, Tasmania, and New Guinea are all connected as a singular landmass.

About 10,000 to 12,000 years ago, the water started to rise and separated them into their own individual islands. And so they became much more isolated, uh, genetically. And and so that I found extremely interesting that they have one of the oldest populations anywhere. So just to give some perspective, native American tribes in the Americas that's north and south, started migrating to the Americas 15 to 20,000 years ago, and we're.

And they found evidence that the aboriginals have been there 50 to 70,000 years ago in the Australian Oceania continent. So that's extremely different. There's tens of thousands of years different in how long they've been there. That was another thing that came up for me is the concept of time. Did this come up for you?

[00:20:53] Donna: Well, we're talking about when the aboriginals first started walking on the planet, you mean? 

[00:20:58] Vanessa: Yeah. Yeah. Like, well, there's what mean? The problem for Americans old is like Abe Lincoln's log cabin. That's like 200 years old. Give it, that's old for us, but we're talking tens of thousands of years is to totally different.

[00:21:18] Donna: You asked me a question. It's a little dangerous because we might get off on a really, really sort of u-turn tangent because the answer to that is that we are controlled with what we were taught when we're young. And we are taught that the Abes, for instance, aboriginals have been around for 300 more than 300,000.

300,000 doesn't, is not a drop in the bucket. We are given information so that governments can control us a little more carefully. The aboriginals have been around for millions of years, really. I mean, in my, what? I know what, what I believe I should say that human humanoids have been on the planet for millions and millions of years.

Millions and millions. But it's threatening for governments to let us believe that or make that general knowledge because they don't have control over that kind of information. So, you know, when we talk about time. Again, if you're, the government is really big on time because it's easier to control us if they have an inflexible timeline.

But the truth is that there's a lot more discrepancy than we might be comfortable thinking about. So I, I would just encourage all of our listeners and you and I both I would encourage us to be a little more flexible about what we believe about what we've been told. How's that? 

[00:22:38] Vanessa: Mm-hmm. Okay. Yes.

[00:22:40] Donna: Okay. Yeah. 

[00:22:42] Vanessa: So let's hear about your, um, the mythology that you've, you've gone into. 

[00:22:48] Donna: Well, let's see. Let's talk about, let's see. 

Mythology and the Sacred Fig Tree

[00:22:51] Donna: Alright, let's talk about the outback, because what I really wanted, what I really saw is the Aus, the Australian Outback is absolutely gorgeous and it has to do with their mythology.

So a lot of their monsters sort of blend into the colors of the outback. And that's really interesting because in Northern European fairytales, colors are also very important, even though we may not even think about it. There's brown and there's maybe some yellow, and there's white, there's always white.

But black is not a natural color in nature, actually. And red is not a natural color in, in, in nature in the European and Western countries. And so if you have black and red in a story, you know, snow white, black is. Um, what is it? Blacks her hair. And red is, is her lip something like that, that it's very it's very important.

It's very it's a very important motif in Australia, this little monster. The Yama Hoya is red. And at first I thought, ah, red, red is really an important color because it's not normal. It's not natural. And yet Australia, if you go look at pictures and I was there, I can tell you the desert is red.

It's an unbelievably beautiful color of red. And so this monster mm-hmm. Isn't so much out of the norm as much as it's what can I say? Just be, be careful about distinguishing the red of the desert from this little monster sitting in the fig tree. How's that? Hmm. Um, you know, we have mm-hmm. Dark forest in, in northern fairy, in northern European fairytales.

Forest, for instance, is very important. And so there's all different types of trees that are in the forest. And when you go through a forest, it's a paradigm change. For instance, in the aboriginal culture, we don't, there are no forests, and so you wouldn't have a monster living in a forest. You have a monster sitting in a fig tree, which is what the yma Yahoo does.

So what, when I say, so for instance, vegetation in European stories, what do you think of, because we're talking about Australia being a desert and the vegetation is, is very specific. What do you think about the Europeans? 

[00:25:04] Vanessa: Do they, do they not have force though? Do they not have force along the coastal sides?

Because I, I was under the impression that the coast had more. Fig. Um, the story that I came across had fig groves, so they had large areas of forest that were native to Australia. So I was reading it at least the one from the southeastern Australia was more forested. 

[00:25:36] Donna: Okay. Really well done because I'm looking now and there are extensive natural forests.

They're eucalyptus, eucalyptus forests covering 131.5 million hectares in, in Australia. And as you said, they're more on the coast. It's a different type of forest. It's a little more open. It's not as dark. The sun comes through, so isn't that canopy that covers the forest as much. So again, to me it's very different.

There are some rainforests which do have a very strong canopy, but it's only 3% of the whole country. 

[00:26:09] Vanessa: And I will say the Yama yahoo is said to stay hang out in fig trees, which confused me because the only fig tree that I'm familiar with is bushy. It's not really a thick tree, but when I was looking up fig trees in Australia, it's very different looking than the fig tree that I'm familiar with are do you have fig trees around where you grew up or where you live?

[00:26:34] Donna: You know, it's really interesting. I'm living on this land with every kind of tree but not fig trees well, yeah, I'm not familiar fig tree that I. 

[00:26:42] Vanessa: I was seeing someone explain the sacredness of fig trees to the aboriginal people. And I can talk about that a little bit more, but it had a very thick trunk.

The fig tree that I have growing in my backyard has like a tiny, like, just kind of has like little branches that grow up and then grow up tall, but it's nothing that someone could sit into. And so I was having a hard time imagining something sitting in a fig tree, but it's just a different breed of trees.

So it's, it's very much a much taller tree and much dirtier branches than what I had been picturing in my brain. 

[00:27:18] Donna: Interesting. Okay. So. How does that sort of add or detract from the story if you have a more barren fig tree with a red, little bubbly monster sitting in it. 

[00:27:30] Vanessa: Right. I was thinking like, how can this thing hide in this tree?

But I will, can I just say that the sacredness of the fig tree is, is important to the story? Because it highlights the connection between the people and the natural settings. It is considered a natural gathering place. So there's a story about having. Women having their newborns leaning against the trunk of the tree and offering the tree the placenta by bearing it under the roots and placing the tree, the baby, the newborn baby, within the grooves of the fig tree roots to, to wash the baby.

And ancestral, there's an ancestral connection because it's believed that these fig trees, house spirits, um, that link to the dream time, which is part of the aboriginal mythology that we're gonna talk about. Um, and it, the, the tree itself represents resilience and interconnectedness. So the fig tree is, is not by accident in this story.

[00:28:36] Donna: Yeah. I can't imagine that it is. But again, what you're describing is another way for the, the aboriginals to show the connection to nature. And the trees are living spirits and each tree has a spirit, its own spirit living inside in. So you're offering the baby to the fig tree as if saying, um, here's another steward for you.

You are, we are inextricably connected to you and we respect, you know, we honor you. We are here for you. Mm-hmm. And so here's another new baby for you that will take care of you. And so all I can, you know, all that comes up for me is that because they need to be very diligent about what's going on above them, below them to the left and to right of them they need to create this little monster sitting in a fig tree to make sure that, you know, bit a snake is not up there about to fall on them, which could very well happen.

Yes. Or spider, for instance. Yep. Yeah. 

The Significance of Water in Folktales

[00:29:27] Donna: So I wanted to talk about the water a little bit because one of these, one of the elements of the story is if the mahu gets a little impatient about falling a victim, it will go to the tribes and drink all the water out of the well. And I thought that was kind of interesting.

Mm-hmm. Because it's very specific. In Australia, living in a desert, water is survival, so water is very literal in the story. Mm-hmm. I don't know if I, I love making things into deeper meaning, and in this case I can just say that it's very literal. Whereas, again, in European fairytales, water has many different meanings.

It's water is more abundant, it's more abundant in the United States, it's more abundant in Europe, and so it's not necessarily as a motif for survival. Water in European fairytales can be, for instance, to purify. There was a, mm-hmm. There's an illustrator that you and I know very well, Gustave Dore, who illustrate a lot of Perot stories.

And for him, water represents feminine purity and also pain. And if we go to the Greek myths with narcissist, water is a mirror and it can represent truth or it can represent what you want it to say. You know, it could also be a portal to something else. So I thought that was really interesting, again, getting to my comfort zone of playing with one, one motif in the story of water and how different it is in different cultures.

So did you come up with it also made that it 

[00:30:52] Vanessa: also think, yeah, it made me think of, um, I didn't think about water in, in that way, but uh, there's a story that I read to my kids. And the, it's the old woman who made rice dumplings and it's this little Japanese folktale where this woman is escaping from Onnie At the end, they're just like these giant monsters and in order to stop her from escaping on a boat, they drink up all of the water, just like the yar, yahoo.

So I feel like this is, uh, something that is seen throughout different folktales where creatures will drink up all of the water to prevent someone from escaping. In that version that you were talking about where the. The, um, Yama Yahoo will drink up all the nearby wells and the watering holes. It's in order to make the human go to the tree, to drink up the tree sap, uh, so that they will more likely be reattached by the Yama yahoo.

[00:31:54] Donna: Ah, nice detail you found there. Okay. Sort of, you know, seducing them into, it's, it's a, it's place of criminal activity. 

[00:32:03] Vanessa: Yeah. Yes. It's forcing them towards the trees again. 

Blood as a Symbol of Life and Death

[00:32:08] Donna: Alright, and so what did you get about blood? Because this is also, first the yahu will suck all the blood out of its victim and then set the person into it and it's to, to his very being and then regurgitate it all.

So it's, it's can walk around, but what did you, how did blood resonate for you? Was interesting. 

[00:32:28] Vanessa: So when I initially think about blood, my initial reaction is bad, right? We think about blood being on the ground if one of my children is bleeding bad, right? If a vampire is sucking your blood bad, but really blood is so crucial.

It's our life force. It's, it represents vitality. And when we don't have blood, that's bad, right? And so it's, it's interesting that, yes, my initial, my initial reaction is blood bad, but really it's the draining of blood. The lack of blood is really what I am. Having that reaction to, and the, the Yar, yahoo.

Instead of being a vampire, like we think in European fairytales, or not fairytales, folk folklore the vampires use fangs, right? And then they, they suck up the blood using the mouth. Instead, the yama has suckers and sometimes has no teeth. This, these suckers have, yeah, no teeth. They have suckers on their hands and their feet and they can cut into the flesh and then from their hands and feet, they suck up the blood, but they leave just enough to keep the person alive so that they can run away and be swallowed by, um, the version that I found and told my YouTube channel is the Queen comes and she swallows the person whole after the colony, has already drained a lot of the blood. Um, and then she's the one who's regurgitating him back out by the water. But I think that this similarity between the European vampire and the Yma yahoo is interesting because both victims can be transformed into the same creature that attached them to initially, right?

Because when a va, a vampire can turn its, prey it into a vampire by performing specific rituals to turn it into a vampire. The same is true for the Yar, my Yahoo. If you were swallowed enough times and attacked enough times, you turn into the predatory creature that you were initially afraid of.

And so it really is this representation. 

The Rituals and Beliefs of Aboriginal Culture

[00:34:49] Vanessa: Of respecting spiritual and social rules. In, in Europe it's more about this religious symbolism and gothic core, whereas in the Aboriginal tribes it has more to do with the being respectful of, uh, the land around you and what is out there to be afraid of.

[00:35:11] Donna: Interesting. Alright. And there's also one other, I didn't, I never read anything about the queen and the colony sucking the blood out. I was always just one little, bubbly red man. But there's also one other part of it, and it's that once he sucks the blood and regurgitates the victim, then the arm ahu will walk away.

And if the person who has been regurgitated moves and jump back on them and, and eat them again but if the person learns to play dead and not move, then the arm Yahoo walks further away. But it's a long process. It walks further away and then it spends a half a day looking at the victim and will walk a little further, spend another half a day.

And to me all that means is that it's to teach the children about discipline. Being really careful about what animals are seen by them because they need to be stone still and they won't be a victim. That's what I got. 

[00:36:04] Vanessa: Yeah, that's really interesting. So I, I found something else on that because there's this really, there's this variation that I came across that is not found in all of them.

Um, and this variation is about the Yama Yahoo not doing its ritual of checking on its victim just right. So there's this pacing away and returning and poking with a stick and tickling under the arms that the army, Yahoo is supposed to perform exactly as prescribed. And if it doesn't, the fig tree will mumble into its ear, mysteriously some sort of secret message, and it transforms the yar yahoo into a glowing, luminous mushroom that is sticks to the fig tree.

And that. That is a form of spiritual repre retribution for not performing the ritual as it's intended to go, which, that's the first I had seen that and I thought that was really interesting and it was really representational of how important ritual is to the Aboriginal people. And that was something that challenged me as well.

Did you come across the importance of ritual in that when you were looking into the aboriginal culture? Yeah, I mean, that's 

[00:37:23] Donna: just an integral part of them. The ritual is fundamental to their belief system in their lives. So even those, those aboriginals that were captured, had kidnapped as young children and brought into western societies still followed the rituals and, and.

If you wanna go so far as that, they were still able to telepath, telepathically communicate with their elders. They were still taught as much as they needed to know so that when they finally were freed, some of them were, they could go back to the outback and continue the rituals. Is that some of the things you found?

[00:37:56] Vanessa: So I kind of looked into the importance of ritual because when I think of ritual, I was trying to think like of what ritual is important for me. And I did like a quick search for like Western ritual. And there's this huge difference between the west seeing it as a symbol or a tradition, not as a process that literally has to be maintained to maintain the world's order or personal wellbeing.

But in Aboriginal society it is very spiritually oriented and everyday life log, land, kinship, community, it's all infused with this spiritual meaning. And the ritual is the means by which the people actively participate in and sustain that order. And so while in the western world, we compartmentalized ritual and we see it as optional.

Even people who are of a religious nature who go to church regularly, you know, the Catholic church specifically is extremely ritual oriented. It is not a requirement. There is a lot of ritual in the Catholic church, but if you don't perform it, there's nothing really that's going to occur that is bad, that happens to you.

But in aboriginal society it is very important that these rituals are maintained for their social order, for their ecological balance and their spiritual law. And for me and I was kind of thinking about that, and for me, I'm not a person who really likes a lot of structure. I like loose goosey structure.

So ritual for me would be really hard. 

[00:39:39] Donna: Yeah. I love that you said the ritual has to do with the practice, not necessarily the belief system, and I think that's true, although I think that one of the problems we have in the United States, and again this may be controversial, is that we don't have enough rituals or that the rituals aren't spiritual necessarily.

I mean, we can have a ritual of going to Chinese food every Sunday. That's a ritual. You know, our family likes to go to Chinese food every Sunday. Or ritual is sitting down and watching TV with a bowl of popcorn. That's a ritual. You know, it's not necessarily a belief system. Um, I think that we had more sort of deep rituals based on spiritual beliefs.

We'd be a happier community, a happier population, and I, I think that we have become a very superficial culture if we ever were deep, if we ever were. Mm-hmm. But, um, I think it, it's becoming individual. So for instance, um, meditation is ritual for me now been I meditate twice a day and that becomes a ritual.

Now. It's challenging because I did not grow up that way, and that's not part of the western society to make meditation a part of your daily life. But, so for me, it's more in the Aboriginal perspective that that is absolutely fundamental. Practice meditation. Am I being kind of clear? Yeah, you know, superficial medi uh, rituals and deep seated rituals, and I think that we both are seeing is that the aboriginals have deep seated belief system in their rituals and they're trying to teach their children the importance of continuing the practice of those rituals.

I agree. Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. And there's just one other thing, Vanessa. I wanted to just go back very briefly, just very briefly to the whole blood topic in the story where the Yama yahoo sucks out the blood. And I, maybe you know this, there's a story I read when I was young, I do not know which it was, and I wish I remembered where there was some character who was who was isolated out in the desert, and he explained that he, he, um, drained some of the blood from his wrists and heated it over a fire and drank heated blood.

And that's what kept him alive. So it's not, it doesn't only what. His own blood. His own blood. It's the only thing he had. He didn't have water, he didn't have food. He kept alive by drinking his own blood, which I found fascinating. It just brings, and he boiled it, survival. He boiled it for some reason. If I knew which story it was, I could remember why he boiled it.

That's crazy. 

[00:42:15] Vanessa: Yeah. That's a really interesting story. 

[00:42:17] Donna: So in other words, blood is, is important on many different levels. Yeah. 

Theories on the Origin of the Yara-ma-yha-who

[00:42:21] Vanessa: I wanted to talk a little bit about the thoughts. Some, there's some theories, two main theories about the origin of the story. Um, I mentioned, I think when we were talking about the Persephone and Hades story about mythic memory or folk memory and I use the Noah's Arc example.

As a time. You know, Noah's Ark is a story that's in the Old Testament, but it's not just found in the Old Testament. It's found in stories in cultures all over the world, which indicates to a lot of people. The Old Testament has the story of Noah's Ark, but it's found the story of an epic flood is found in stories across cultures.

And so it's thought that this is a story that it holds meaning it's based on a natural phenomena or a true event. A Trojan War is an example that I recently found as well. It was found in Homer's Iliad of this 10 year epic saga. And for centuries people thought it was just a story. But they've recently, archeologists recently found in excavations that there is some geographical descriptions of Troy that match a, some findings that they found in tur in modern day Turkey to indicate that this, the city of Troy might have actually existed.

And so all of that to say is that there's two main theories of what the Yar mahu might be based upon. Because there's no actual creature that scientists or anyone has currently seen with their eyes that is alive that matched those, this description. Did you come across anything like that or have any thoughts before?

[00:44:16] Donna: No, no. I mean, of all the mythological, fig, um, fig fi figures that are associated with Aboriginal mythology, no scientist has ever seen any of them. I mean, some of them right? They might have seen an animal that have been like abnormal, but nothing like the actual mythology. Yeah. 

[00:44:33] Vanessa: So the two main theories that exist is one is melee settlers.

So people from Malaysia, uh, came with their stories of the tarzi air. This is a creature that you probably are not very familiar with. They have like giant eyes. They're really tiny. They have suckers on their hands. They're carnivorous, they're purely carnivorous. They jump out of fig trees. And they jump onto people out of fig trees.

They don't, I don't think they actually intend to attack people, but they have jumped onto people. And so it is very scary. Yoda is actually based off of this actual animal they have, um. Uh, and so they can jump sometimes over five meters. And, uh, so there are some people who believe that the Malay settlers stories of this creature mixed with the original story of the yahu to kind of, uh, make it what it is in modern day.

And then the second theory is this extinct Australian lion called the Thiel, CO Carni Effects. It's an Australian marsupial lion. And it's a carnivorous marsupial that lived. 46,000 years ago, and it would drop on its victims from fig trees. And it was a very formidable, powerful tree dwelling creature that would be, have been very frightening.

Um, but neither one of these are reptilian. And we, in the Yama yahoo story, it's described as a frog. Like, although there are some versions where there is, um, hair on the creature, so there it's more ape-like. Maybe 

[00:46:13] Donna: No, no, I love it because, and I'd love our listeners to really look at these, the images of these animals, because there's some that are real, as you're saying, and they're bizarre.

They're, they're bizarre looking because they're so different from what we're used to and the northern hemisphere. And so the aboriginals had a lot of time around sitting around the fire to make a lot of stories about these unusual characteristics. I, I do wanna touch on one other part of this is religious beliefs, and I don't think that the aboriginals, we can call their beliefs religious because religion has, or maybe you can, depending on what your definition of religion is.

Um, when I say religion, I think of church and temple and, and a structure and dogma. You were talking about prac. The practice, the ritual, I say dogma, which has a little bit of a negative connotation, but. Their stories are infused with their beliefs and we can say they're infused with their religious beliefs, if you wanna use that word or not.

Um, European stories are a little bit different. I think it's more societal. I think it's a little more about magic. I think it's more about wishes and dreams. And I'm interested to hearing if you agree with this, Hans Christian Anderson had a lot of religious motifs in his stories. And actually I sometimes find it a little uncomfortable because I love the story, I love the plot.

I'm not that comfortable with the Christian motifs and, but it's not completely common in all Northern European fairytales. So what do you think about using religious motifs in stories? How do you think it adds and may subtract from the effect of the story? 

[00:47:51] Vanessa: I think a lot of these stories are intended to provide structure and provide an understanding of the wider world.

And I think that, that this story does just that, right? It, it, it's told to children to keep them out of areas that will definitely provide harm to them, right? There's lots of dangerous things in Australia that will hurt you in, in any wilderness area, right? There are lots of things that can hurt you when you leave the comfort of your community.

And so wandering alone is always in almost all of these stories across the board, across cultures almost always warn individuals against wandering alone, wandering away from the, the culture straying off of the path. And so this story in particular is used to help to keep its children safe. We talked about Laona several episodes back, and how it's told today to children is a very frightening story, right?

It's, but is told to children to keep them away from water, to keep them from accidentally falling into water and, and drowning. Because if you're afraid of the weeping woman who might grab you from the water, you're less likely to just go into the water on your own without an adult, right? And so, these stories are intended to help set guidelines, and this one is very much within those lines.

[00:49:29] Donna: I, I agree with the, with almost everything you're saying, and I love how you put it. And I also love what you're saying is don't stray off the path because it's so important in fairytales. And again, it's about controls. Don't stray off the path. Do what your, the rest of the society is doing, which is what most fairytales are trying to teach you.

What is, what is acceptable in different societies, in different norm, the norms of different societies. But I've studied and sort of seen different perspectives of northern European fairy tales so much that I see empowerment in going in by yourself. So think of the donkey skin, where the princess left a place, her castle, her home, her father, where it should have been her, her safe place to be.

And it was not. It was a terrifying place to be. And she went off alone and she found her. Her inner strength. Yeah. If you think of Red Riding Hood, she finds a wolf that eats her grandmother. But it, you know, if you look at it from the female pers from the feminine perspective, she was a pretty kind of, uh, she was a strong woman.

She was a strong little girl. Um, I could go through each of them. Mm-hmm. So I guess we need to hold in a balance what the fairytales are saying to be practical and safe. And the other one is find your inner being and find your inner strength, especially if you're a female in a story, believe in yourself.

If you're, if you're inner Australia and you're under a fig tree, be careful. But, you know, if you wanna wander off for yourself and you have to be female, you have as good a chance as a man wandering off by yourself. Yeah. That's what I have to say about that. 

[00:51:06] Vanessa: Yeah. 

The Concept of Dreamtime in Aboriginal Culture

[00:51:09] Vanessa: Uh, did you wanna talk a little bit about the aboriginal like dreaming or the dream time?

I know that you were saying that you had done some research on that. 

[00:51:16] Donna: I've done a little bit of research, but it's one of those things if you'd like to talk about I really would. I, I encourage you to do so. I have not, even if I researched it for a month it would not do it justice if I did it for a year, maybe I could do it justice.

And so I don't want to belie any of their belief systems. So why don't you tell us what we can find if we go on online and find out what dream time is? 

[00:51:38] Vanessa: Yeah. It's, it's basically their origin story of how the world came into being. And as you were saying before, it's, it's, it is encompassed by every win eternal time concept.

And so, basically the idea is that these supreme creators. From the dreaming are responsible for creating the land and the people and the laws and the culture. And then once they finished creating the world in which we currently live in, they imbued the land and the landscape and the trees and the mountains and the animals with their life force, their beings.

And so that is strikingly different than the Christian viewpoint of this omnipresent, omni potent God who created it from far away. And then is, from up high looking down. Whereas the aboriginals see divinity in spirituality in the land. And for me that was a really striking point in, in the, the mythology because the Christian dogma, especially, there's more conservative ones that have this idea in which humans are intended to be dominant over nature. It's intended to be tamed and controlled. Um, and one of the stories that came up for me while I was thinking about this was Walt Whitman has some poetry that he was writing in the 1850s.

And a lot of the people who are coming over are very fearful of the, the woods and of, you know, the natural order and they're trying to tame it and he's saying, no, we need to be respectful of nature. We we can live in harmony. We need to be, see it as, a spiritual democracy, basically.

And I, it's very contrast to this Christian philosophy of taking control of nature and making it, exploiting it and taking everything of value from it so that we can use it for utility purposes. And, um, anyway, so I, that was striking for me. 

[00:54:02] Donna: No, and I love that you brought up Paul Goldman. 'cause he had, he was very, very deeply spiritual.

Most of us don't know that about him. And I studied his poetry because I was a poetry major in college. And it never comes up. I mean, it doesn't come up. He was mystic. He was a mystic. Mm. And so he had deep spiritual beliefs. If you go into some of the poetry that is not so well known, he's very prolific about his, um, deeper beliefs.

And so yes, he saw the land in probably much of the same way the aboriginals did, that it's a living being and we don't need to be fearful of it. We need to respect it and understand it as much as possible. And that's not what we do. I mean, especially when he was here, it's taking control over it. 

[00:54:41] Vanessa: Yeah.

Yeah. And, and you know, putting myself into the mindset of the pilgrims, I can understand that fear. Right. I can understand why they would be scared of the natural world because there's a lot of things that are dangerous in the natural world. So I have a respect for both viewpoints because wandering into the woods, there are lots of things that can hurt you.

So you can have a love and a respect for them. At the same time, you just, like, when you're approaching any wild animal, you can be respect, you can love it from a distance, um, and have respect for it, but not necessarily go up and pet it, right? Because it will probably bite your hand off or attack you.

Um, so I, I, I try and remember that they're coming into this world that is so drastically different from what they are they know and they've experienced. And so I, I see where they would have this deep grained fear. 

[00:55:47] Donna: Right. And I just say, you know, then be educated and, and talk to the indigenous people and find out what they know about it.

But, that's I, I'm wondering if there are any other details you wanna talk about the story? 

Reflections on Cultural Differences and Storytelling

[00:55:58] Donna: 'cause otherwise I'd love to wrap this up and talk about what now that we've, we've talked about this, what your, the highlights of our conversation has been. 

[00:56:10] Vanessa: Yeah.

[00:56:10] Donna: Highlights. 

[00:56:12] Vanessa: What are your highlights?

[00:56:13] Donna: What are your highlights? Yeah, I know. No, go ahead. Put me on the spot. It's good because I just did it to you. I think that what, um, I can answer the question you asked me in the very beginning, what attracted me to the story. And I think that I, I've been sucked into a different, such a different culture that it's definitely pushed me off of outta my comfort zone.

And I got angry. I got angry about it and I got a little nervous about it. And then when I just finally realized. What I could do was, when we learn something new, a fact is that we learn it. We learn it and assimilate it much more easily when we hold it next to something we already know. That's a fact.

Yeah. So when you learn a language, you learn a language by learning the same word in the, in the language you're comfortable with, et cetera, et cetera. And so when you're learning a new concept, you wrap it around something you already know and then twist it into something new. So basically what I've done with this and with your, you know, with your corroboration, is take this story that made me a little bit uncomfortable, more than a little, because it had to do with such a, a vibrant, intensely spiritual culture and make ties to what I'm more familiar with, Western European societies and cultures, and find new respect for both.

How's that? 

[00:57:33] Vanessa: Yeah, I, I had, I didn't have the anger that you were describing Uhhuh, but I definitely had discomfort because there were a lot of elements to the Aboriginal culture that really threw me really were so drastically different than elements that I am familiar with. So for instance, the fact that they had no written language kind of threw me, I, I, you know, they, the Australia was discovered by the Europeans the Dutch travelers in the 17 hundreds, and the Aboriginal society had been there for tens of thousands of years in, in Australia.

And they were, they have tons of traditional knowledge and lots and lots of rich culture in their storytelling and their music and all sorts of elements, but they have no written they have no writing system. And so I had to kind of back my brain up in my bias against cultures and communities that don't develop a writing system because it's so ingrained in our society.

You know, we, you know, it's so important for us to be able to teach our children how to read and to write, because that's how we pass on our story. We think about, the Viking culture. Didn't really have much of a writing system. The Inca Empire, the me, American cultures, they didn't have writing systems like we do, like with an alphabet, but they had large populations and complex governments without that written language.

And so their society was not lesser than ours just because they didn't have a written form. It's just, but it's so hard to conceptualize society that basis its entire traditions and, and knowledge and stories in oral transmission. That's something that I really struggled with because, when we were talking about sleeping beauty last time, we could see how the story transformed throughout all of the different writings.

But we don't have this, we don't have that in this Yama Yahoo story because it's based off of like very small gatherings of stories of, of a few elders. 

[01:00:10] Donna: Right. And I would just say that again, you're accepting the fact that a culture can be pretty sophisticated even without writing. And there's a lot more in the aboriginal culture that we don't know that they're hints of.

For instance, with the aboriginals, if they talk about directions, they don't say right, left, straight, or backwards. They say north, south, east, and west. And so, but this is so ingrained in them that anytime you take an Aboriginal out of Australia and ask 'em which way to go, they will know exactly where North Southeastern West is.

It's just in innate, it's innate in their being. So they're not using their fingers to write things down. They're tuning into the rhythm, the vibration of the earth itself. And so instead of focusing on writing down words, they're focusing on penetrating those vibrations. And again, being stewards to protect the earth as much as as possible and being part of the the mm-hmm.

Cosmic multiverse. Right. It's so, it's so different than how we were brought up and now I'm, I find it fascinating. It is very 

[01:01:18] Vanessa: different, so it's hard to rewire our brain to think of it. And, and you know, we, we can't really think of it in the terms that they think of it as but we can, like you were saying, try and conceptualize it to the best of our ability by attaching it to things that we're familiar with.

[01:01:35] Donna: That's right. So I think we have done pretty well for this topic. 

Conclusion and Upcoming Topics

[01:01:42] Donna: Two people who did not grow up in Australia and are not aboriginals. We've been incredibly respectful because we both respect enormously this, this culture, and we probably would love to know more about it. And so I'm really glad that we share this with our listeners.

And next week, we're, next month we're going back a Northern European story, I think. 

[01:01:59] Vanessa: Yes. Um, and I would like, because it's October, I would like to us to do, find a creepy story of source, maybe a ghost story. Well, we've done laona for and then we also did the fairy the girl who. Danced with fairies.

I think those were our October picks in the past. So I, uh, I think that's how 

[01:02:21] Donna: we got into Yama, Yahoo. I think that's how I found it. Gory monsters. Oh really? This supposed to be October Interesting. 2024. And so a year later we're doing it now. You asked, you asked me how I found it. That's how I found it.

Maybe 

[01:02:36] Vanessa: that's, uh, very interesting. Okay, well maybe we'll find the original list of stories that we were looking at for that October. 

[01:02:44] Donna: Okay, perfect. Alright. Close us up how you do it. So well, Vanessa. 

[01:02:50] Vanessa: Thanks so much for listening. If you know more about this Yar my Yahoo story, or you have thoughts that came to you while you were thinking, or challenges that you came across when trying to re rewire your brain into conceptualizing.

The Aboriginal culture or this particular story, we would love to hear from you. Keep the fairytales alive, and until next time,

[01:03:18] Donna: bye everyone. Thank you.