portions of North America that all domestic animals, excepting the
pig, have an instinctive dread of the rattlesnake; that they know its
whirring sound, and are also able to smell it at some distance, and
instantly come to a dead halt, trembling with agitation. The fear is a
fact; but why _instinctive_? Some time ago, while reading over again a
very delightful book of travels, I came to a passage descriptive of the
acute sense of smell and sagacity of the native horse; and the writer,
as an instance in point, related that frequently, when riding at a
swift pace across country on a dark night, over ground made dangerous
by numerous concealed burrows, his beast had swerved aside suddenly,
_as if he had trod on a snake_. His sense of smell had warned him in
time of some grass-covered kennel in the way. But that image of the
snake, introduced to give a more vivid idea of the animal’s action in
swerving aside, was false; and because of its falseness and the want
of observation it betrayed, the charm of the passage was sensibly
diminished. For not once or twice, but many scores of times it has
happened to me, in that very country so graphically described in the
book, while travelling at a swinging gallop in the bright daylight,
that my horse has trodden on a basking serpent and has swerved not at
all, nor appeared conscious of a living, fleshy thing that yielded to
his unshod hoof. Passing on, I have thrown back a glance to see my
victim writhing on the ground, and hoped that it was bruised only,
not broken or fatally injured, like the serpent of the Roman poet’s
simile, over which the brazen chariot wheel has passed. Yet if the
rider saw it--saw it, I mean, before the accident, although too late
for any merciful action--the horse must have seen it. The reason he
did not swerve was because serpents are very abundant in that country,
in the proportion of about thirty harmless individuals to one that is
venomous; consequently it is a rare thing for a horse to be bitten; and
the serpentine form is familiar to and excites no fear in him. He saw
the reptile lying just in his way, motionless in the sunlight, “lit
with colour like a rock with flowers,” and it caused no emotion, and
was no more to him than the yellow and purple blossoms he trampled upon
at every yard.
It is not the same in the western prairies of North America. Venomous
serpents are relatively more abundant there, and grow larger, and their
bite is more dangerous. The horse learns to fear them, especially the
rattlesnake, on account of its greater power, its sluggish habits
and warning faculties. The sound of the rattle calls up the familiar
ophidian image to his mind; and when the rattle has failed to sound,
the smell will often serve as a warning; which is not strange when we
consider that even man, with his feeble olfactory sense, is sometimes
able to discover the presence of a rattlesnake, even at a distance
of several feet, by means of its powerful musky effluvium. The
snake-eating savages of Queensland track their game by the slight scent
it leaves on the ground in travelling, which is quite imperceptible
to Europeans. In the same way the horse is said to smell wolves, and
to exhibit instinctive terror when they are still at a distance and
invisible. The terror is not instinctive. The horses of the white
settlers on some frontier lands, exposed to frequent attacks from
savages, smell the coming enemy, and fly in panic before he makes his
appearance; yet when horses are taken from the savages and used by the
whites, these too after a time learn to show terror at the smell of
their former masters. Their terror is derived from the horses of the
whites. The hunter Selous, as a result of ten years of observation
while engaged in the pursuit of big game in the heart of Africa,
affirms that the horse has no instinctive fear of the lion; if he has
never been mauled or attacked by them, nor associated with horses that
have learnt from experience or tradition to dread them, he exhibits
no more fear of lions than of zebras and camelopards. The fact is the
horse fears in different regions the lion, wolf, puma, red-skin, and
rattlesnake, just as the burnt child dreads the fire.
But here is an incident, say the believers in Darwin’s notion, which
proves that the fear of certain animals is instinctive in the horse. A
certain big-game hunter brought home a lion’s hide, rolled up before
it was properly dried and wrapped up in canvas. It was opened in the
stable where there were several horses, and the covering was no sooner
removed and the hide peeled open than the horses were thrown into a
panic. The true explanation is that horses are terrified at any strange
_animal_ smell, and a powerful smell from the hide of any animal
unknown to them would have had the same effect. That fear of a strange
animal smell is probably an instinct, but it may not be. In a state of
nature the horse learns from experience that certain smells indicate
danger, and in Patagonia and on the pampas, when he flies in terror
from the scent of a puma which is imperceptible to a man, he pays not
the slightest attention to the two most powerful mammalian stenches in
the world--that of the skunk, and that of the pampas male deer, _Cervus
campestris_. Experience has taught him--or it has come down to him as
a tradition--that these most violent odours emanate from animals that
cannot harm him.
So much for this view. On the other hand, our enmity to the serpent,
which often exists together with a mythic and anthropomorphic belief in
the serpent’s enmity to us, might be regarded as purely traditional,
having its origin in the Scriptural narrative of man’s disobedience and
expulsion from Paradise. Whether we believe with theologians that our
great spiritual enemy was the real tempter, who merely made use of the
serpent’s form as a convenient disguise in which to approach the woman,
or take without gloss the simple story as it stands in Genesis, which
only says that the serpent was the most subtle of all things made and
the sole cause of our undoing, the result for the creature is equally
disastrous. A mark is set upon him: “Because thou hast done this thing
thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field;
upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of
thy life: and I will place enmity between thy seed and her seed; and it
shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise its heel.” This prophecy,
so far as it tells against the creature, has been literally fulfilled.
The Satanic theory concerning snakes--that “destructive delusion,”
which Sir Thomas Browne shrewdly remarks, “hath much enlarged the
opinion of their mischief”--makes it necessary for the theologian to
believe not only that the serpent of Paradise before its degradation
walked erect on two legs, as the Fathers taught--some going so far
as to give it a beautiful head as well as a ready tongue--but also
that after the devil had cast aside the temporary coil something of
his demoniac spirit remained thereafter in it, to be transmitted by
inheritance, like a variation in structure or a new instinct, to its
remotest descendants. There is the further objection, although not
an important one, that it would be unjust to afflict the serpent so
grievously for a crime of which it had only been made the involuntary
agent.
Believers in an instinct in man inimical to the serpent might
still argue that the Scriptural curse only goes to show that this
reptile was already held in general abhorrence--that, in fact, the
feeling suggested the fable. That the fable had some such origin
is probable, but we are just as far from an instinct as ever. The
general feeling of mankind, or, at any rate, of the leading men during
the earliest civilised periods of which we have any knowledge, was
one of veneration, even of love, for the serpent. The Jews alone
were placed by their monotheistic doctrine in direct antagonism to
all nature-worship and idolatry. In their leaders--prophets and
priests--the hatred of the heathen and of heathen modes of thought was
kept alive, and constantly fanned into a fierce flame by the prevalent
tendency in the common people to revert to the surrounding older and
lower forms of religion, which were more in harmony with their mental
condition. The proudest boast of their highest intellects was that
they had never bowed in reverence or kissed their hand to anything in
nature. In such circumstances it was unavoidable that the specific
object--rock, or tree, or animal--singled out for worship, or for
superstitious veneration, should to some extent become involved in the
feeling first excited against the worshipper. If the Jews hated the
serpent with a peculiarly bitter hatred, it was doubtless because all
others looked on it as a sacred animal, an incarnation of the Deity.
The chosen people had also been its worshippers at an earlier period,
as the Bible shows, and while hating it, they still retained the old
belief, intimately connected with serpent-worship everywhere, in the
creature’s preternatural subtlety and wisdom. The priests of other
Eastern nations introduced it into their sacred rites and mysteries;
the Jewish priests introduced it historically into the Garden of Eden
to account for man’s transgression and fall. “Be ye wise as serpents,”
was a saying of the deepest significance. In Europe men were anciently
taught by the Druids to venerate the adder; the Jews--or Jewish
books--taught them to abhor it. To my way of thinking, neither blessing
nor banning came by instinct.
Veneration of the serpent still survives in a great part of the world,
as in Hindustan and other parts of Asia. It is strong in Madagascar,
and flourishes more or less throughout Africa. It lingers in North
America, and is strong in some places where the serpents, used in
religious serpent dances, unlike those of Madagascar, are venomous, and
it has not yet wholly died out in Europe. The Finns have a great regard
for the adder.
It may be added here that there are many authenticated instances
of children becoming attached to snakes and making pets of them.
The solution of a question of this kind is sometimes to be found in
the child-mind. My experience is that when young children see this
creature, its strange appearance and manner of progression, so unlike
those of other animals known to them, affect them with amazement and
a sense of mystery, and that they fear it just as they would fear
any other strange thing. Monkeys are doubtless affected in much the
same way, although, in a state of nature, where they inhabit forests
abounding with the larger constrictors and venomous tree-snakes, it
is highly probable that they also possess a traditional fear of the
serpent form. It would be strange if they did not. The experiment of
presenting a caged monkey with a serpent carefully wrapped up in paper
and watching his behaviour when he gravely opens the parcel, expecting
to find nothing more wonderful than the familiar sponge-cake or
succulent banana--well, such an experiment has been recorded in half a
hundred important scientific works, and out of respect to one’s masters
one should endeavour not to smile when reading it.
A third view might be taken, which would account for our feeling
towards the serpent without either instinct or tradition. Extreme fear
of all ophidians may simply result from a vague knowledge of the fact
that some kinds are venomous, that in some rare cases death follows
swiftly on their bite, and that, not being sufficiently intelligent to
distinguish the noxious from the innocuous--at all events while under
the domination of a sudden violent emotion--we destroy them all alike,
thus adopting Herod’s rough-and-ready method of ridding his city of one
inconvenient babe by a general massacre of innocents.
It might be objected that in Europe, where animosity to the serpent is
greatest, death from snake-bite is hardly to be feared, that Fontana’s
six thousand experiments with the viper, showing how small is the
amount of venom possessed by this species, how rarely it has the power
to destroy human life, have been before the world for a century. And
although it must be admitted that Fontana’s work is not in the hand of
every peasant, the fact remains that death from snake-bite is a rare
thing in Europe, probably not more than one person losing his life from
this cause for every two hundred and fifty who perish by hydrophobia,
of all forms of death the most terrible. Yet while the sight of a snake
excites in a majority of persons the most violent emotions, dogs are
universal favourites, and we have them always with us and make pets of
them, in spite of the knowledge that they may at any time become rabid
and inflict that unspeakable dreadful suffering and destruction on us.
This leads to the following question: Is it not at least probable that
our excessive fear of the serpent, so unworthy of us as rational beings
and the cause of so much unnecessary cruelty, is, partly at all events,
a result of our superstitious fear of sudden death? For there exists,
we know, an exceedingly widespread delusion that the bite of a venomous
serpent must kill, and kill quickly. Compared with such ophidian
monarchs as the bush-master, fer-de-lance, hamadryad, and ticpolonga,
the viper of Europe--the poor viper of many experiments and much, not
too readable, literature--may be regarded as almost harmless, at all
events not much more harmful than the hornet. Nevertheless, in this
cold northern world, even as in other worlds where nature elaborates
more potent juices, the delusion prevails, and may be taken in account
here, although its origin cannot now be discussed.
Against sudden death we are taught to pray from infancy, and those
who believe that their chances of a happy immortality are enormously
increased when death comes slowly, approaching them, as it were,
visibly, so that the soul has ample time to make its peace with an
incensed Deity, have not far to look for the cause of the feeling.
It is true that death from hydrophobia is very horrible, and,
comparatively, of frequent occurrence, but it does not find its
victim wholly unprepared. After being bitten he has had time to
reflect on the possible, even probable, consequence, and to make due
preparation for the end; and even at the last, although tortured to
frenzy at intervals by strange unhuman agonies, however clouded with
apprehensions his intellect may be, it is not altogether darkened and
unconscious of approaching dissolution. We know that men in other times
have had no such fear of sudden death, that among the most advanced
of the ancients some even regarded death from lightning-stroke as a
signal mark of Heaven’s favour. We, on the contrary, greatly fear the
lightning, seldom as it hurts; and the serpent and the lightning are
objects of terror to us in about the same degree, and perhaps for the
same reason.
Thus any view which we may take of this widespread and irrational
feeling is at once found to be so complicated with other feelings
and matters affecting us that no convincing solution seems possible.
Perhaps it would be as well to regard it as a compound of various
elements: traditional feeling having its origin in the Hebrew narrative
of man’s fall from innocency and happiness; our ignorance concerning
serpents and the amount of injury they are able to do us; and, lastly,
our superstitious dread of swift and unexpected death. Sticklers for
the simple--and to my mind erroneous--theory that a primitive instinct
is under it all, may throw in something of that element if they
like--a small residuum existing in races that emerged in comparatively
recent times from barbarism, but which has been eliminated from a
long-civilised people like the Hindoos.
For my own part I am inclined to believe that we regard serpents with
a destructive hatred purely and simply because we are so taught from
childhood. A tradition may be handed down without writing, or even
articulate speech. We have not altogether ceased to be “lower animals”
ourselves. Show a child by your gestures and actions that a thing is
fearful to you, and he will fear it, that you hate it, and he will
catch your hatred. So far back as memory carries me I find the snake,
in its unwarrantable intrusion on the scene, ever associated with
loud exclamations of astonishment and rage, with a hurried search for
those primitive weapons always lying ready to hand, sticks and stones,
then the onset and triumphant crushing of that wonderfully fashioned
vertebra in its scaly vari-coloured mantle, coiling and writhing for a
few moments under the cruel rain of blows, appealing not with voice but
with agonised yet ever graceful action for mercy to the merciless; and
finally, the paean of victory from the slayer, lifting his face still
aglow with righteous wrath, a little St. George in his own estimation;
for has he not rid the earth of another monster, one of that demoniac
brood that was cursed of old, and this without injury to his sacred
heel?
XVII
THE SERPENT IN LITERATURE
PREAMBLE
Among the thousand and one projects I have entertained at various times
was one for a work on snakes, with the good though somewhat ambitious
title of “The Book of the Serpent.” This was not to be the work of one
who must write a book about something, but a work on a subject which
had long had a peculiar fascination for the author, which for years had
cried to be written, and finally had to be written.
As it was a work requiring a great deal of research, it would take
a long time to write, long years, in fact, since it would have to
be done at odd times, when hours or days or weeks could be spared
from the hard business of manufacturing mere bread-and-cheese books.
Collecting material would have to be a slow process, involving the
perusal or consultation of a thousand volumes, and probably ten
thousand periodicals and annals and proceedings and journals of many
natural history societies, great and small, of many countries. And
all this research, with the classification and indexing of notes,
would be exceeded by the task of selection to follow--selection and
compression--since “The Book of the Serpent” would be in one volume and
not in half-a-dozen. And after selection, or let us say deglutition,
there would ensue the dilatory process of digestion and assimilation.
If properly assimilated, the personal impressions of a hundred
independent observers, field-naturalists and travellers, and of a
hundred independent students of ophiology, would be fused, as it were,
and run into one along with the author’s personal observations and his
deductions.
Now, even if all this could have been done, and the best form hit upon,
and the work eloquently written, it would still fall far short of the
ideal “Book of the Serpent” on account of insufficient knowledge of a
particular kind--I don’t mean anatomy. And had I been a person of means
I should, before beginning my work--getting a pale, wan face through
poring over miserable books--have gone away on a five or ten years’
serpent quest to get that particular kind of knowledge by becoming
acquainted personally with all the most distinguished ophidians on the
globe. The first sight of a thing, the shock of emotion, the vivid and
ineffaceable image registered in the brain, is worth more than all
the knowledge acquired by reading, and this applies to the serpent
above all creatures. There is indeed but little difference between
this creature dead and in confinement. It was the serpent in motion on
the rock that was a wonder and mystery to the wisest man. In one of
my snake-books by a French naturalist in the West Indies there is an
account of a fer-de-lance which he kept confined in order to study its
habits. He watched it hour after hour, day after day, lying prone on
the floor of its cage as if asleep or stupefied, until he was sick and
tired of seeing it in that dull, dead-alive state, and in his disgust
he threw open the door to let it go free. He watched it. Slowly the
head turned, and slowly, slowly it began to move towards the open
door, and so dragged itself out, then over the space of bare ground
towards the bushes and trees beyond. But once well out in the open air
its motions and aspect began to change. The long, straightened-out,
dull-coloured, dragging body was smitten with a sudden new life and
became sinuous in form; its slow motion grew swift, and from a dragging
became a gliding motion; the dangerous head with its flickering tongue
lifted itself high up, the stony eyes shone, and all along the body the
scales sparkled like wind-crinkled water in the sun: watching it, he
was thrilled at the sight and amazed at this wonderful change in its
appearance.
And that is how I, too, would have liked to see the fer-de-lance in its
dreadful beauty and power; the cribo too, that gives it battle, and
conquers and devours it in spite of its poison fangs; also its noble
relations, the rattlesnakes and pit-vipers, led by the Surucurú, the
serpent monarch of the West; and the constricting anacondas, with
the greatest of them all, the giant Camudi, “mother of the waters”;
also the bull snake and the black snake, and that brilliant deadly
harlequin, the coral snake. These all are in the New World, and I
should then go to the Old in quest of blue sea-snakes and wonderful
viridescent tree-snakes, and many historic serpents--the ticpolonga,
the hooded cobras, and their king and slayer, the awful hamadryad.
A beautiful dream all this, like that of the poor little pale-faced
quill-driver at his desk, summing up columns of figures, who falls
to thinking what his life would be with ten thousand a year. All the
thorny and stony and sandy wilderness, the dark Amazonian and Arawhimi
forests, the mighty rivers to be ascended three thousand miles from the
sea to their source, the great mountain-chains to be passed, Alps and
Andes, and Himalayas and the Mountains of the Moon, the entire globe
to be explored in quest of serpents, from the hot tropical jungles and
malarious marshes to the desolate windy roof of the world--all would
have to be sought in the British Museum and one or two other dim stuffy
libraries, where a man sits in a chair all day and all the year round
with a pile of books before him.
Alas! in such conditions, without the necessary precious personal
knowledge so much desired, “The Book of the Serpent” would never
be written. So I said and repeated, yet still went on with the
preliminary work, and after two or three years, finding that so far as
material went I had got almost more than I could manage, I thought I
would begin to try my hand at writing a few chapters, each dealing with
some special aspect of or question relating to the serpent, and about
a dozen were written, but left in the rough, unfinished, as all would
eventually have to go back into the melting-pot once more. By and by
I took up and finished three or four of these tentative chapters just
to see how they would look in print; these appeared in three or four
monthly reviews and are all that is left of my ambitious book.
It could not be done, because, as I tried to make myself believe, it
was too long a task for one who had to make a living by writing, but a
still small voice told me that I was deceiving myself, that if I had
just gone on, slowly, slowly, like the released fer-de-lance, until I
had got out into the open air and sunshine--until I had a full mind and
full command of my subject--I too might have gone on to a triumphant
end. No, it was not because the task was too long; the secret and
real reason was a discouraging thought which need not be given here,
since it is stated in the paper to follow. There’s nothing more to say
about it except that I now make a present of the title--“The Book of
the Serpent”--to any person who would like to use it, and I only ask
that it be not given to a handbook on snakes, nor to a monograph--God
deliver us! as Huxley said. Or if he did not use that particular
expression he protested against the multiplication of such works,
and even feared that we should all be buried alive under them--the
ponderous tomes which nobody reads, elephantine bodies without souls;
or shall we say, carcasses, dressed and placed in their canvas
coverings on shelves in the cold storage of the zoological libraries.
As to the paper which follows, it was never intended to use it as it
stands for the book. It is nothing but a little exercise, and merely
touches the fringe of a subject for a great book--not an anthology
(Heaven save us!), but a history and review of the literature of the
serpent from Ruskin back to Sanconiathon, and I now also generously
give away this title of “The Serpent in Literature.”
* * * * *
When the snakists of the British Museum or other biological workshop
have quite done with their snake, have pulled it out of its jar and
popped it in again to their hearts’ content; weighed, measured, counted
ribs and scales, identified its species, sub-species, and variety;
and have duly put it all down in a book, made a fresh label, perhaps
written a paper--when all is finished, something remains to be said;
something about the snake; the creature that was not a spiral-shaped,
rigid, cylindrical piece of clay-coloured gutta-percha, no longer
capable of exciting strange emotions in us--the unsightly dropped coil
of a spirit that was fiery and cold. Where shall that something be
found? Not assuredly in the paper the snakist has written, nor in the
monographs and Natural Histories; where then?--since in the absence of
the mysterious creature itself it might be interesting to read it.