Why's It Always Have to Be Snakes?
I'm in the finishing touches stage of putting together a cryptid guidebook, a project that's been downright fun on a bun to put together. In this particular book I limited my focus to cryptids from Appalachia, an area with a high concentration of critters lurking high up in the mountains, deep in the woods, or down in the hollers. And as much as I knew about local cryptids before I started this research, there were still some surprises along the way. One of them, for me, was the number of serpentine or snake-like creatures, and not just down south where things stay tolerable for large reptiles all year. Even up in New York, Pennsylvania, and Ohio, they have reptilian monsters with recurring sightings year after year.
Now, I know—reptiles can survive in northern Appalachia, which has plenty of snakes and turtles that call it home, along with amphibians like frogs and salamanders. But large reptilian predators tend to stick to warmer climates, especially the types of predators sometimes reported in northern Appalachia's lakes and rivers. Of course, that type of thing has never been a concern for mythological creatures. Norse mythology prominently features a serpent, after all, and that comes from another landscape where reptiles aren't exactly happy in the winter. Really, the prevalence of serpent-like monsters in Appalachia is refective of a much larger pattern. No matter the origin of the folklore or mythology, odds are, it has a snake.
Which naturally made me wonder just why snakes—specifically giant snakes—are so universal. I did a post on the prevalence of dragons a little while back, and I think some of those same explanations could probably apply here. Massive snakes could be attempts to explain discovered dinosaur bones or a record of encounters with now-exctinct species. While that could be the source of their appearance, though, the core role of snakes in many cultures' perceptions of the world, and the meaning assigned to them, goes well beyond this idea.
The snakes that started everything
Many mythologies include one or more primordial creatures, beings that existed before humanity—and often even before the gods who created humanity. Their fate typically falls into two camps. One group are killed in process of creating the world (frequently so their body can be used to form the landscape), while the other continue to live on, either asleep underneath the earth or in some way supporting the earth or the universe. The legends of beasties in this latter group may include an prophecy that the beast will someday wake up and cause all kinds of havoc, potentially up to and including the end of the world as we know it.
And you've probably guessed by now the reason I'm bringing this up: a lot of these creatures are snakes. To give a non-exhaustive list of examples, some of these include:
- Ayida-Weddo – the “Rainbow Serpent” of the Fon people of Benin that was also adopted into Vodou, which helped creator goddess Mawu-Lisa shape the world and now coils under the world to keep it from collapsing. Earthquakes are caused by its movements, and it's said that someday it will eat its own tail, causing the Earth to sink into the abyss
- Andndayin oj – the Armenian “Abyssal Serpent” that lives in the black waters around the world tree
- Antaboga – The first being that existed in the mythology of Java in Indonesia. It created the world turtle that all other life sprang from, along with Dewi Sri, the rice goddess
- Bobbi-Bobbi – a sea serpent Dreamtime ancestor for the Binbinga people of Australia, who created bats for them to hunt and gave them boomerangs to hunt with
- Naga Padoha – giant serpent from the mythology of the Batak of Sumatra who guards the underworld. The goddess Sideak Parujar created the world on his back, and earthquakes happen when he struggles
- Pakhangba – powerful serpentine god of the Meitei in India, considered the ultimate ancestor as the father of the seven dragon ancestors of the Meitei clans
- Shesha – or Ananta, the king of the nagas in Hindu mythology, who holds the entire universe on the hoods of his many heads
- Ungud – snake god from the Wunambal people of Australia, who lived underground at the start of the world and helped the sky deity Wallanganda to create life through their dreams
- Unhcegila – Lakota and Dakota horned serpent who flooded the land when she emerged from the primordial waters, the proceeded to terrorize early humans until a warrior finally slays her, leaving her body to form the rocks of the Badlands
...and there are more that follow in a similar vein, often in the Rainbow Serpent archetype in Australia and the Horned Serpent model in American myths. To be fair, snakes certainly aren't the only animals to be given this status; turtles and birds are other recurring figures in this role. But snakes were commonly seen as embodying a kind of primordial force, even beyond the examples given here. The ancient Greeks, for instance, saw snakes as symbolizing an energy that can both create and destroy, and used snakes broadly in their mythology even though, as one scholar put it, snakes played “no meaningful practical role in the lives of the anicent Greeks.”
Scholars often cite some of a snake's unique attributes as the reason behind this. Shedding its skin is a big one. This makes it a logical symbol of renewal, rebirth, and transformation, things that are often heavy themes in mythologies. There's also the fact that snakes slither on the ground. They're connected to the earth, and through it to the ancestors and the underworld. Other snakes can transcend boundaries, moving both in water and on land or climbing trees, giving them a natural place as intermediaries between humans and the sky, water, and earth that are seen as realms of the divine.
Snakes as creators
Another sizeable sub-set of mythological snake figures are those that are portrayed as creators or culture heroes. In part because they seem to contradict some of the prevailing wisdom about where snake monsters in folklore come from. One theory that came up a lot in my research was that giant snakes in folklore represented early humans' fear about encountering poisonous or dangerous snakes in the wild. That makes sense when the snakes are framed as monsters, but doesn't track quite as well to them teaching humans, or even creating them in the first place.
Some examples of mythical creatures in this category include:
- Amaru – double-headed serpent said by the Inca to live at the bottoms of lakes and rivers. Its ability to transcend worlds makes it a conduit for spiritual knowledge
- Awanyu – horned serpent of the Tewa Pueblo who taught humans rituals related to rainfall, which he is said to control
- Degei – the creator god of Fijian mythology, who hatched an egg that produced the first humans
- Fuxi – culture hero with a serpent body in Chinese mythology, seen as the first emperor of China who invented music, cooking, hunting, fishing, and writing
- Kukulkan- the feathered serpent of Maya myth (later reprized by the Aztec as Quetzalcoatl) seen as a mediator between the heavens and earth, and representative of cyclical time
- Nuwa – mother goddess from Chinese mythology who molded humans out of yellow clay. She has the head of a woman with the body of a snake
...and there are certainly more. The snake is also associated as a familiar or symbolic animal with an array of helpful deities, like Wadjet from Egyptian mythology or the Rod of Asclepius from ancient Greece, which is the image of a snake circling a staff that's associated with medicine and healing. That seems particularly counterintuitive, but it again gets back to that idea of snakes as symbols for renewing life. Some alchemists even thought they knew the secret to immortality.
It's also worth noting that even helpful snakes in folklore and mythology often have a dangerous side. Serpent deities are often connected to weather, meaning they can bring helpful rains but also devastating floods. Primordial beings that created the world can also ruin cities with earthquakes just by shifting a coil, or even destroy the earth entirely. The source of that snake around staff imagery used by the Greeks was an older Sumerian god, Ningizzida, who was often depicted as a horned serpent and took a seasonal descent into the underworld to represent the changing seasons. This is another example of the serpent in mythology linked to the earth, which makes it a source of both sustenance and fear.
Snakes as monsters and destroyers
This is the role most modern folk tales cast snakes into, and it's a common one across mythology, too. It's also the one that makes the most logical sense, like I alluded to in the last section. Most humans have an instant fear and/or ick reaction to snakes. Stories about encounters with dangerous snakes are just as prone to the fish-story effect as anything else, with the offending animal getting just a bit bigger with every telling, or the snake's dangerous attributes might get intentionally exaggerated to turn the story into a cautionary tale for kids about why not to mess with the colorful thing making the rattly noise with its tail.
The question of why snakes persist in cold-weather places is probably another one that has two answers. Some could stem from encounters or stories brought back by travelers in warmer landscapes. These kinds of stories would seem particularly fantastic and noteworthy to someone who's used to the more reasonably sized snakes found in temperate climates. The other answer, I think, is that the implausibility of a giant snake in a place like Pennsylvania is part of its appeal. It adds to a being's mystique if it's living somewhere it's not supposed to be. When animals do this, it breaks the rules you know for them, and that makes them seem even more powerful and terrifying.
I suppose, when you stop to think about it, it isn't so strange that snakes are so common in myths and folklore. They live on every continent except antarctica, meaning humans have been living alongside snakes from their earliest days. I suppose it's no wonder they'd work their ways into our stories.
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