Snakes at My House
by Cynthia Owen Philip

This past spring my psyche suffered the most awful crisis. When I lived in Malaysia I was perfectly happy to bring the hollygolly man—a snake charmer—to my house as an entertainment at my children’s birthday parties. Along with the little boys and girls, I was delighted when the cobra rose out of its basket and swayed back to the literally enchanting music of his flute. Moreover, I took in stride the fact that virtually all my neighbors had pickled cobras in jars that had been captured on their premises. Here in Rhinecliff something different happened.

It all began when I was raking last autumn’s leaves along the rocky outcroppings in my back garden. The minute I disturbed their cozy wintering places, large and small snakes slithered out; some, frenetic, even ran over my feet. One, almost two feet long from tip to tail, stood its ground, however. It coiled into a spiral, raised its head, fixed its eye on me and flicked its shining scarlet tongue with lightning speed. All I wanted to do was run. Not a chance. I remained frozen to the spot: deaf, dumb but not blind—just terrified. I did not relax until the intrepid person who was helping me scooped it up and tossed it over the small cliff where, like a released arrow, off it sped.

Why had I behaved so cravenly? In the whole of New York State only three kinds of snakes are poisonous: copperheads and two rattlers, and the latter are in sharp decline. Walking in wooded rocky places you should be wary of copperheads, although they would much rather avoid than attack you. Harmless snakes, however, are everywhere. Some, like black rat snakes, thick and among the longest, scare people far stronger than me as they skitter off to hide. Even tiny snakes can be unsettling. Recently, two little snakes working in parallel, as if in an ancient Egyptian wall painting, gobbled up three of five small frogs that had taken up residence in a puddle pool in my backyard. I was devastated as I struggled to put their demise down to nature’s inexorable ways.

Nevertheless, I have had a long intellectual interest in the mythologies woven by ancient civilizations, and cannot think of one that is not permeated by a profound regard for snakes, especially their beneficent aspects. Take the Indus River town of Mohengodaro, now in Pakistan, where, in 2500 BC, an estimated 40,000 inhabitants enjoyed a high level of urbanity—including spacious brick houses, sophisticated fresh water and sewer systems, and a central bathing pool heated by an immense furnace. Yet the people still worshiped snakes as bestowers of both human and agricultural fertility. (The snakes in this cult, called Nagas, occupy an important position in the bewildering pantheon of the Hindus today).

In Egypt, the snake in the diadem of the pharaohs symbolized their divine power over the annual inundation of the Nile. Some centuries later, snakes were incorporated into Buddhism by the enfolding cobra that protected him during his culminating ecstasy. The classical Greeks enlarged snakes’ range. Apollo, for instance, transformed his enemy, the Python of Delphi, into his famous oracle. Aescelpius, their deified father of medicine, bears a staff with single snake twined upon it—an icon now used by many professional medical associations. Athena, the goddess of wisdom, often bore a sharp-fanged Gorgon, whose hair was a tangle of spitting venomous snakes, on her breast plate. That she was born from the head of her father Zeus, the source of her wisdom, and remained a virgin yet played many domestic roles, makes me wonder whether the stories surrounding her are a reversal of the Old Testament’s saga of the downfall of mankind in the Garden of Eden.

Why have serpents prevailed in sacred iconography? Obviously, their physical identification with the male sex organ gives them great power. (It was not until the 19th century that woman’s role in reproduction was seen as anything more than providing incubation; the life force was believed to come from men.) On a different symbolic level, snakes’ multiple shedding of skins as they grow and develop parallels the way human beings transform themselves at different stages while they remain in essence the same. Equally important, over the ages, snakes have been idolized worldwide as a conduit between the bright everyday world and the dark unknown underworld. Heavy duty stuff, but an unquestionable part of our cultural baggage.

Still, captivating as this lore is to me, it has not saved me from feeling uncomfortable with snakes on the loose. Not long ago a long skinny one that was basking on a rock near the entrance of my house shot over my threshold in the blink of an eye. My overwhelming emotion was to get it out before, hidden and stealthy, it made itself at home. Fortunately, on one side of the door is a cabinet that rests flush with the floor and is heaped with odd things such as scarves, a collapsible umbrella, a defunct flashlight and a flattened cardboard box waiting to be taken to the dump. On the other side, a fancier Chinese cabinet rises four inches above the floor, providing a nice dark nesting place beneath. Horrors! I had no option except to be brave. I stayed rooted to the spot but stretched my arms and legs much farther than I ever imagined they could go and, keeping my eye on the intruder whose eye of course was on me, somehow managed to build a low pen around it with the collection of oddments from atop the cabinet. Makeshift as it was, it halted the snake’s progress into the room, whereupon I put up the umbrella and shooed it back over the threshold. Rather proud of my accomplishment and relieved that no one was around to witness my vaudevillian contortions, I laughed out loud.

In fact, when I was chatting with a snake-fancying friend the other day, I made the episode into what I thought was a comic story. He grew up with snakes. He would pile into the back seat of his parents’ car, and off they would go on snake gathering expeditions. Spotting them wallowing in roadside ditches or sunning on rocks, they captured them and tossing them into a pillowcase, gave them to him to play with. Once home, they took the snakes to the attic. It was, to them, the environmental way to control invading rodents. No match for that story, my tale was a flop. My friend’s sole reply was not mirth, but an explosive: “What in the world did you chase it away for!”

I got the point and vowed internally to mend my skittish ways (I have never liked setting traps for rats and mice.) A test came sooner than expected. I was working on this article. It was the first really hot day and I’d opened all the doors and windows in hopes of catching a breeze. False hope, no breeze. So, to keep myself alert for the remaining paragraphs, I decided to take a little breather outside, ambling out to my compost pile with my vegetable parings. I paused to contemplate three crows chasing each other through the trees, then ambled back to my computer. Help! There, smack in the middle of my workroom was either the same or a twin of the snake that had flicked its red tongue at me in the raking encounter described above.

This time, using my snake-loving friend’s “what in the world did you chase it away for” mantra, I stood my ground and glared right back. That is, for about 20 seconds. Then, possessed to drive that wily snake from my house, I dashed outside to grab a big plastic rake that happily I had neglected to put away. Back in less than two minutes, I had it poised in trembling hands to do the job. Surprise, surprise, the snake had disappeared. I tiptoed around the rooms searching behind, under and above. No snake. I gave it up, hoping desperately it had streaked out in the short time I was gone. But, even now I keep brooms at hand should that snake or any other have a mind to emerge from out of nowhere.

Now, there are three things I want to know. First, which one of us, the snake or me, was more afraid of the other? Second, do you suppose there’s any chance that snakes and frogs and I will all become friends? And could it be that the recently discovered millions-of-years-old fossil of a snake wrapped around and hovering over a dinosaur’s nest of hatching eggs, is the origin of snake worship?