Koa Character Inspiration

Crow Totem: 
Throughout history, the crow has been associated with both positive and negative symbolic meanings. The most common are:

• Life magic; mystery of creation
• Destiny, personal transformation, alchemy
• Intelligence
• Higher perspective
• Being fearless, audacious
• Flexibility, adaptability
• Trickster, manipulative, mischievous

Other traditional meanings associate the crow with bad omen, death, and dark witchcraft. The crow also carries the power of prophetic insight and symbolises the void or core of creation.

Wandjina (or Wondjina) are the Spirits (or gods) of Creation in Aboriginal mythology.

Origins ( This is to do with the origin of my game too)

There are many myths recalling the activities of the Wandjina and their creation of the world. In Aboriginal mythology, the wandjina are said to have lived during the creation period. The Aborigines believe that the world originated in what they call Lalai the Dreaming — a primordial state which is not confined to the past but stands outside time.during Lai Lai (the creation time or Dreaming), Wallungunder, the "big boss" Wandjina, came from the Milky Way to create the Earth and all its inhabitants.

 Generally the Wandjina figures that have been found are connected with the sky by most indigenous tribes. 

The Australian Aborigines believe that long, long ago the earth was soft and had no form. The features of the landscape were created as the result of the acts of ancestral spirits. It was they who made the rain and dug out the rivers and water holes, who built the mountains and levelled the plains. At a time when the stones were still ‘soft’, they built themselves ‘houses’ of stone.

There was a time when he (Wandjina) made Earth and Sea and everything. He made people. These first people were the Gyorn Gyorn. The Gyorn Gyorn had no laws or kinship and wandered around lost. 

Wallungunder, the enterprising Big Chief of the Wandjina gods, saw that he could do good with these people, so he went back to the Milky Way and brought many other Wandjinas to help him bring laws and kinship to the Gyorn Gyorn people. On the whole, the activities of Wandjina are believed to set the prototypes for each district's religion, law, customs, rites, songs and dances.

Dreamtime mythology has it that the Wandjina emerged from the clouds, and returned in that same manner.

Walaganda, one of the Wondjina, became the Milky Way. In a similar vein, certain tribesmen say the Wandjina have returned to the sky, and can now be seen at night as lights moving high above the earth.

With the completion of their earthly tasks, they disappeared into the rocks and sacred water holes in different parts of the country. As they disappeared they left pictures of themselves on the rocks. Each Wandjina wandered until he reached the place where he was to die. Although the paintings are said to represen the bodies of the dead Wandjinas, the spirits of the Wandjinas live on in much the same way as the Aborigines believe the spirits of human beings continue to exist after their death. When they died, they lay down on the soft rocks and left the imprint of their bodies on the surface; these marks are the rock paintings which can be seen today. 

At the exact spot where they left their ‘shadow’, the Wandjinas descended into the earth; since then, they have lived on at the bottom of the water source associated with each of the paintings. There, they continually produce new ‘child-seeds’, which are regarded as the source of all human life. Aboriginal people, in the Kimberley believed that even after they disappeared, the Wandjina continued to control everything that happens on the land and in the sky and sea. He gave Man to live in this Earth, this World, this Tribal Country. He put the Wandjina in the cave for him to remember this Wandjina, to follow his laws, to go about the right ways ...

(me:) But man recently has not followed the laws, and gone about the right way, which in my game has lead to the the rising darkness in the world, that has infected the spirit realm itself. Koa is the crow spirit but is also a type of Wandjina, as our many of the spirits within my dreamtime world. I feel that maybe I should stay away from the topic of Wandjina's as they are sacred figures. However I do not intend any disrespect, and always have them in a positive light. The protagonist Koa lives in the spirit world and is himself a spirit, he is based upon the Native American Crow Totem as well as the Aborigine Australians Wandjinas, he was designed with Australian cave paintings, and tribal paint as inspiration.The protagonist Koa is based around two animistic belief systems, that of some Native Americans & Aboriginal Australians.