Uglogical

Reptiles and people have always been important to each other. In the old days the relation was the natural give-and-take of ecology. Today we have the earth in hand, and in the lives of reptiles we loom much larger, while they count for less in ours. But in the time we lived together we were forever marked by these cool, dry creatures. Their sign is still on the human spirit all over the world, in their pervasion of mythology and religion.

In Judeo-Christian tradition the snake is generally assigned to an evil role. The temptation of Adam was instigated by the serpent; and besides getting original man expelled from the Garden of Eden, this turned the mind of the race toward procreation, which will likely one day make the world unfit for both men and snakes. There is some talk of the leviathan that ate Jonah being a crocodile instead of the whale it is usually thought to be, but this seems unlikely to me. A crocodile generally chops up its victuals too thoroughly for them to have much to say if they should ever get out again. A sort of backhanded intrusion of reptiles into Christian history was St. Patrick’s taking credit for the paleogeographic inequity of Ireland’s having no snakes. Actually the snakelessness of Ireland is pretty much the same sort of thing as the lack of elephants there, but I suppose the chance was just too good for St. Patrick’s public relations men to miss. I believe it is not generally known that someone once fetched a lot of snakes into Ireland in an effort to establish them there. I cannot say whether this was done idly or scientifically or in a spirit of iconoclasm. The Edinburgh New Philosophical Journal for April 1835 had only this to say of the event: “We have learned from good authority that a recent importation of snakes has been made into Ireland, and that at present they are multiplying rapidly within a few miles of St. Patrick’s tomb.”

Both turtles and snakes turn up repeatedly in Asiatic mythology. The third incarnation of Vishnu, the supreme god in the Hindu pantheon, was in the form of a turtle. At Vishnu’s suggestion the gods and demons set out to churn the ocean of milk to bring up the amrita, the liquor of immortality. They uprooted Mount Meru and set it in the sea as a churn staff. They somehow persuaded the great snake Vasuki to throw a half-hitch of his body around the staff and to let himself be used as a churn rope. Vishnu took the form of a big sea turtle and placed himself under the foot of the staff as a pivot base. There was some squabbling among gods and demons as tow which would pull the head end of the churn rope and which the ignoble afterend, but after a while they all fell to and churned for a thousand years. At one point the snake grew indisposed and threw up a terrible poison that came close to killing off all the gods, but Siva seized and swallowed it, and that is how his throat came to be blue. After other awesome vicissitudes the goblet of amrita finally came up, and likewise the comely Lakshmi, the goddess of beauty.

Another set of reptilian beings important in Indian mythology was a fabulous race of snakes, or half-snakes, often shown as put together of a human forepart with the back part normal snake. The males of these were called Nagas and their wives Naginas; and their natures were generally irresponsible and ornery. On the other hand, some Hindu snakes were beneficent. During the epochs of his cosmic rest – the times between his incarnations – Vishnu sleeps on the coils of the noble cobra Shesha, whose seven heads rise over the god as shade for his eon-long siesta. This is why Indians are kind to cobras.

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