nechushtan wrote:

“I'm preparing a talk on the Sacred Serpent in Early Western Mythos and am really hoping to provide scientific connections to current species for the Aesculapian and Moses Stories (eg. Staff of Aesculapias and Firey serpents/Brazen Serpent) so any relevant info on what species were most likely revered enough by the people of the time to fold them into their legends would be much appreciated.”

My idea starts from the fact that Sacred Serpents (including ‘dragons’) in Europe, the Americas and Australia are frequently portrayed with a beard, wings, or prominent ears, which I think all represent that peculiar feature of COBRAS that we call a ‘hood’.

Where people coexist with cobras (throughout Africa and southern Asia) they are not only a threat to personal safety but ecologically important in other ways such as rodent control (without which agriculture might never have started), and their behaviour (especially the upright threat display and visual orientation mirroring distinctive human features) is magical enough. Of course they’re involved in mythology and ritual in India, ancient Egypt, etc. (major players in creation myths, companions of deities and kings). Moses’ staff trick is supposedly still done by ‘hypnotising’ an Egyptian Cobra into rigidity.

What Europe, America and Australia have in common is NO cobras; the real human relationship with these snakes was mythologised when people and traditions moved into areas that had none. Artistic portrayals of sacred serpents in these areas retain the upright stance, prominent eyes, ‘beard’ or ‘wings’, and large size characteristic of cobras, and the association with creation myths, law and fertility. But in morphological details, they are either highly stylized or based on animals native to the artist’s own country, such as rattlesnakes in the Americas; vipers or Ophisaurus in Europe; pythons, file snakes or pipefish in Australia.

I wrote something about this idea in the Australian Museum’s magazine Summer 2001-02 issue (Scanlon and Lee, 2001. The Serpent Dreamtime. Nature Australia 27(3): 36-45); the rest of the article concerned snakes of the extinct family Madtsoiidae, several of which have scientific names based on Aboriginal Rainbow Serpent names (starting with Wonambi, named by Meredith Smith, 1976). The link between Rainbow Serpents and pipefish was proposed by Paul Tacon et al. 1996 (Archaeology in Oceania 31(3): 103-124), but that only explains a pictorial tradition and not the underlying mythology. I’d be interested to hear if anyone else has discussed the idea of cobras as the source of ‘extralimital’ traditions, and would welcome discussion of other aspects of the idea. – Getting away from taxonomy a bit, but I can’t think of a better forum.
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John D. Scanlon
Riversleigh Fossil Centre
Outback at Isa
Mount Isa, Queensland, Australia

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