A case of collective memory

EUGENE KAELLIS

While the death of children always arouses significant emotion, a recent report of the tragic killing of two young brothers, while they slept in their bed, stimulated a special kind of terror and revulsion, undoubtedly in large measure occasioned by their having been asphyxiated by the lethal constrictions of a non-venomous serpent, an African rock snake of the family Pythonidea. The incident occurred in New Brunswick, in the bedroom of an apartment situated above an exotic pet shop, from which the snake had escaped, making its way through ventilation ducts.

The police destroyed the reptile. What purpose that served, except perhaps to satisfy a primitive thirst for revenge is not clear. We simply cannot expect animals to abide by human precepts. We have enough trouble doing that ourselves. What is remarkable, however, is that so many animals, especially mammals, show (documented) signs of sympathy for other creatures, even those not of their own species. What is also unclear is why anyone should want to buy or sell such a “pet” as a python, especially when all snakes eat live (or recently killed, by themselves) prey only.

All this is in the context of the unique fascination and revulsion people feel toward ophidia (limbless reptiles). There is scarcely an ancient culture, Eastern or Western, in which snakes do not occupy a prominent place in mythology, almost invariably as fearsome, sometimes as wise – note the caduceus with its two intertwined snakes, the ancient symbol of Aesculapius, the ancient god of healing.

Many people are familiar with this near-universal revulsion and signs of fear (ophidiophobia) that humans and other primates (especially monkeys) exhibit when confronted with snakes for the first time, although relatively few people will have direct contact with them – even then largely with small, relatively harmless species, like the garter snake. The only real danger from their bite is developing tetanus, the bacterial spores of which many ground snakes carry on their teeth. The fear by humans of snakes is, nonetheless, so intense and primordial that lowering the insane into a snake pit (an experience that is perhaps analogous to more recent electro-shock therapy) was a pre-Enlightenment “treatment” of psychosis. And, myths about the evil reputation of (reptilian-type) dragons were widespread in the ancient world.

Snakes have a highly charged reputation, and they can elicit an almost irrational fear. When I was an admittedly mischievous child in New York City, I performed a prank in the snake house of the zoo. It was summer and people had bare forearms. As they were observing snakes behind a glass partition, I would move my own hairless arm against their exposed skin in synchrony with the slow serpentine movement they were witnessing until some correlation built up unconsciously. They would suddenly scream with terror, followed immediately by embarrassment and a hasty departure, while I looked as innocent as I could. Indubitably wicked.

The special attraction/fear elicited by snakes may, at least in part, be both reflected in and accounted for by the familiar Fall from Grace narrative of Genesis 3. Actually, some sources say that the reptile that enticed Eve was not a serpent, but rather a four-limbed Saurian (lizard), the presumed ancestor of snakes. The creature Eve encountered was apparently deprived of its limbs by God as punishment. Indeed, evolutionary herpetologists believe that snakes evolved from limbed ancestors. Some genera of contemporary snakes, including Pythonidea, have vestigial internal limbs attached to an equally vestigial pelvis, seemingly supporting the biblical account. (Although, that event took place long before the advent of even our earliest ancestors, raising some interesting questions about possible ultra-Jungian primordial memory, perhaps reflected in other biblical narratives, like the Flood, for which evidence has been uncovered with ark remnants found on Mt. Ararat.)

What is important to relate now is the mythical ambivalence primordial cultures have displayed vis-à-vis snakes. Much of it is negative, even in non-biblical sources, e.g., Laocoön killed by a sea serpent, but not all. And, consider the caduceus, the near-universal symbol for medicine, consisting of two intertwined serpents. That the reptile of Genesis is seductive but knowledgeable, and significantly prognosticative as well, did not escape the notice of our ancient ancestors.

Serpents have always occupied a unique position in Western bestiaries. Some of this is phallic. One does not have to be an orthodox Freudian to note that in Yiddish (and German) slang, the snake (schlang) is a penile figure. In fact, there is such an explicit reference in an Austrian art song by Hugo Wolf.

It is now widely accepted among animal behavior experts that some fears are innate, that is, transmitted by heredity. Experiments with very young birds and juvenile mammals, for example, show that they will demonstrate fear reactions specific to the silhouettes of raptors, to which they had never been exposed. In 1928, two American psychologists placed children of various ages in an enclosure with a large, recently fed and, hence, (presumably) harmless, non-venomous snake to observe their reactions. Sated snakes, it should be noted, are aggressive only if they feel threatened. The investigators found that expressions of ophidiophobia by children peaked between the ages of two and four. Infrahuman primates also exhibit a great fear of serpents.

The mythic aspect of snakes appears in cultures as geographically widespread as Tennessee (note the “holy roller” rattlesnake handlers) and India (note snake “charmers”). In the West, it is best exemplified by Chapter 3 of Genesis in which an originally four-limbed reptile induces Eve to eat the fruit explicitly forbidden by God, and she is followed by Adam in the so-called Fall from Grace, a metaphor, in part, representing the acknowledgement of the relationship between sex and procreation (marking what Christians call Original Sin), obviously disobedience toward God, yet qualitatively (and uniquely) distinguishing the human condition.

The conflict between obedience to God and the increasing knowledge and power of humans appears in many classical literary forms. Eve’s behavior is much later echoed in what is perhaps the most penetrating episode of the Jewish Testament – Jacob’s wrestling with an Angel of the Lord at Peniel (Genesis 32), again marking an acknowledged contention between people and God that remains, in spirit at least, unique to Judaism. Who else but Jews would place God “on trial”? In the West, this is absent in Christianity, which demands total obedience; the closest non-Judaic concept is the story of Prometheus and Zeus. The difference is that in the Greek myth, Prometheus is condemned to eternal and indescribable punishment for his temerity, whereas in Judaism, the chutzpah of Eve is at the heart of our relationship with God, precisely because it offers the promise of slowly, painfully and with many reverses, expanding our inherent God-like qualities, treating “Godness” as a kind of asymptote we can never reach but can increasingly approach. What could be more inspiring and hopeful?

Chapter 3 of Genesis exhibits a remarkable, albeit a presumably unconscious, appreciation of some aspects of evolution. Rabbinic lore attributes both significant intelligence and guile to the (originally limbed) reptile, eventually “punished” with the loss of its legs. That Pythonidea still have vestigial, internalized hind limbs lends credence to the narrative and raises profound questions about the (perhaps Jungian) collective unconscious of human beings and just how far back in our primordial history it extends. Was this reference to a limbed precursor of the snake a “lucky guess” by the biblical scribes or was there some deep-seated occult, even pre-anthropoid, memory residing somewhere in the primitive parts of the brains of our (biblical) ancestors?

As the reader knows, anthropologists and geologists have found evidence for many unusual events described in the Bible, including the Flood, and explanations for the Ten Plagues of Egypt (and the order in which they allegedly occurred) and the parting of the Red Sea. In critiquing biblical narratives, as modern scholarship has evolved, it is almost intellectually more prudent to assume their fundamental qualitative veracity, while critically examining their numbers and seeking naturalistic explanations for unusual phenomena. As the narrative of the Jewish Testament proceeds, it takes on elements of modern historiography, with the events described becoming less figurative and more credible, whereas the opposite is true of the Christian Testament, which consequently, from an epistemological viewpoint, is retrogressive.

The rational and historical approach to the Bible started, primarily among German scholars, in the 19th century and was (and is) called New Criticism, a reflection of the remarkable growth of scientific thinking of that period as manifested in the origin or growth of geology, organic evolution, organic chemistry, early concepts of atomic structure, indeed, all the sciences, many of which simply did not exist before that period. As the intellectual framework expanded and changed under the influence of science, a more penetrating and critical approach to theology and the biblical narrative took hold, and it still affects contemporary religious thought. Moreover, in spite of a reactionary revival of biblical literalism, especially in the United States, retrogression to pre-scientific thinking becomes increasingly less likely. However, on the “other side,” as science advances, the more evidence it accumulates for what can be called “Divine Wisdom,” the basic and awe-inspiring characteristic that can increasingly pervade our thoughts (in a “pre-logical,” i.e., intuitive, way) the more we discover about nature.

Eugene Kaellis has written a novel, Making Jews, on the theme of the current basic problem of Diaspora Jewry, which is available from lulu.com.

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