Ophidiophobia
I have men here painting my house. A couple of hours ago one of them came in to tell me that there was a snake in the back yard, a big one, he said, inside a black pipe that takes rainwater away from the house. I managed to get the snake out. It was about a yard long, black with white markings on his belly. It was not aggressive but did take up a coiled defensive stance as I tried to corral it. The men, Hispanics, watched from the other side of the yard, and once when it moved toward them, they took several more steps away. I got it into a large paper bag and brought it into some nearby woods and let it go. I checked on the Internet and found that it was a rat snake, non-poisonous, tree-climbing and feeding on small mammals, birds, and eggs.
I got to thinking about the men’s fears. It could just have been that they aren’t familiar with North American snakes, but it’s also possible that they share what seems to be a very widespread fear of snakes. (Is it universal?) Genesis 2-3 supplies us with an etiology of why snakes crawl on their bellies, and perhaps also helps explain why we don’t like them. My father thought that the only good snake was a dead snake, and that included the garter snakes that are so helpful in the garden. On the other hand, I have nieces and nephews that when they went to our family house in the Catskills, would hope out of the car and run straight toward old pieces of plywood and turn them over in the hope of finding and catching small green snakes. One niece found one snake with newly born little ones, and she came up to the house with the little ones curled around her fingers like rings. Her older brother has a large collection of snakes in his home. So that generation had no fear of them.
Comments? Stories?
One of the things about snakes, in my experience, is that even if you are not particularly afraid of them, they are startling. They move very quickly and sometimes abruptly. There is also something a bit uncanny about the way they move. Even if you understand the mechanics, it still kind of looks like it shouldn’t be happening (like moonwalking). There is something very “other” about snakes.
When I was growing up, we lived at the edge of a wooded area, and it was not particularly rare to see a snake. I remember my father coming into the house once and telling us he had chopped down a small tree but it wasn’t falling over. When he looked up, there was a snake coiled around the tree he had cut and the one right next to it.
The woman who lived next door to us was a true eccentric and a nature lover. She kept geese, chickens, and snapping turtles in her back yard, and every once in awhile she would be keeping a snake in her bathtub. Once she brought a small chicken into the house (it needed to be nursed back to health for some reason) and she kept it as a “house chicken.” Presumably because it was so well cared for, it grew to be the biggest chicken I ever remember seeing. As kids, we used to deliver the scraps from the dinner table to her so she could feed her chickens with them.
Like so many things when we are forced to interpret a snake on our own we often react with fear and loathing. We have vague “knowledge” that translates into us projecting those fears on to the thing itself and we react as if it is all some kind of “truth.”
However, with the guidance of someone who knows what they’re doing, who has the ability to give us helpful information as well as handle the situation with grace and perhaps some kindness, we can reform our thoughts through our experience and come to, perhaps, a different understanding of the snake.
This is not unlike my spiritual life. Funny that.
At our local libraries and nature centers, our children are taught what neat critters snakes are and all the good they do (just like bats.)
We do have rattlers here who tend to show up near moisture, if it’s a drought year. But they give lots of warnings and several locals will quickly come to safely relocate them (though the story goes, about 10 years ago. one was found at the door of the visitor center -several jokes about that!.)
We welcome our garden garter snakes.
Living the country like life means living with the critters around you and knowing how to respect and get along, including bear, deer, and in this neck of the woods, elk, mountain lion and many coyotes and bobcat.
Much has to do with what you’re used to, I think, rather than any culture as such.
I’m with David: there’s something off-putting about the way snakes move. It’s like human lurching, moving sideways in order to move forwards, and unpredictable.
Positively Hegelian, if you ask me.
Have you told your nieces and nephews that they are ophidophiles? It certainly seems that our attitudes toward snakes are learned rather than “hard wired”–to use an overused expression– in us. How about arachnophobia?
I’ll bet the nephews and neices all know “itsy bitsy spider.”
One day, my grandneice came to the door with a large jar and said”do yo uwant to see the black widow we caught?”
Joe Gannon is absolutly right!
Garter snakes are one thing, but some snake-loving kids trade up as they get older. At Pace ‘s Briarcliff Campus we had a student who kept his pet snake in his room until it emerged one night and scared the daylights out of the kids down the hall. It was a rather large boa constrictor. He claimed it was peace-loving and harmless. But it had to go.
AS TO SPIDERS, I can’t stand them, but when I was teaching a children’s lit course and one lit on the desk, I had to steel my nerves and gently put itout on the window sill with a handy index card. Since we had read Charlotte’s Web, any more definitive action would have been out of the question. You do what you have to do, I guess.
My nephew is fearless except for spiders. Once I was walking him to Children’s Liturgy of the Word and he screamed and pointed at a spider I couldn’t see in a tree 20 feet away.
Spiders walk funny, too.
Years ago, for you Westchesterites, at Ward Pound ridge, Nick Shumatoff usually had several programs wherekids encountered and enjoyed snakes – including a neat python who was quite amiable and gentle.
If I remember my Pysch 101, phobia means an irrational fear.
So it is with most of God’s good critters!
I’m with David and Kathy. I can’t trust anything that moves in opposite directions at the same time. Yes, Kathy, very Hegelian :-)
My aunt, a biology teacher, loved snakes. She even had some pet ones till my granmother mde her get rid of them. But once at a family party at my cousin’s house one gave her a fright. My cousin has one of those sort of Georgian chandeliers with curved copper pipes holding up the indiivdual lights. Somebody brought a snake to the party and gave it to my aunt. As she stood under the chandelier it went writing about in her handsand then lifted itself up so that it caught onto the pipes and went writing about them. Then it dipped down and started to wrap itself around her neck. That gave her a rather different estimation of snake, I think. Somebody rescued her. (Yes, I come from a family with lots of biology majors.)
From middle age on my aunt hosted many generations of raccoons under her house in Baton Rouge. When she died at 91 last year they were still there.
Kathy
If you or I had eight legs, we would also “walk funny”. We could, however, also retort by making a charge of octopodism!
When I was too young to know any better, I watched the movie version of Stephen King’s “It” with my little brother, who must have been only 6 or 7 at the time. To this day, he has a paralyzing fear of both spiders & clowns (the technical term for which is coulrophobia, for those who are interested).
This reminds me, of course, of the deep thoughts of Jack Handey: “To me, clowns aren’t funny. In fact, they’re kind of scary. I’ve wondered where this started and I think it goes back to the time I went to the circus, and a clown killed my dad.”
Of course the charge should be either podism or bipodocentrism.
I have a classmate who said he could never relax during a Tarsan movie on a Saturday matinee (remember those?) because he spent the whole film looking for the snake that he knew had to drop into the picture at some point, usually, of course, to terrify Jane, or some other helpless woman, into screams.
Burmese pythons, anyone? :)
http://news.nationalgeographic.com/news/2005/10/1006_051006_pythoneatsgator.html
US map of viability with possible implications from global warming:
http://conservationreport.com/2008/08/21/invasive-species-burmese-pythons-an-invasive-species-in-south-florida-could-spread-to-one-third-of-united-states-2/
More seriously, as with pythons, snake pets are no joke. It’s believed that they were dumped by pet owners into the wild – the Everglades, in this case – and may make their way to northern California by 2020.
http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?f=/c/a/2008/02/21/MNABV5PP3.DTL
Creepy indeed.
“Glaciers, Not St. Patrick, Kept Snakes out of Ireland…
Now, stuffy pants scientists are ruining our St. Patricks day with their ‘reason’ and “legitimate hypotheses backed by research and data’. According to them, Ireland is snake free because of an ice age, not a holy man.”
http://www.environmentalgraffiti.com/offbeat-news/glaciers-not-st-patrick-kept-snakes-out-of-ireland/934
Is nothing sacred? How low will these rationalists sink?
In his book “In Search of Nature”, Harvard professor and noted sociobiologist E. O. Wilson has an interesting evolutionary take on the seemingly paradoxical human fascination with and fear of snakes. (Note the element of “mysterium fascinans et tremendum” here that is also the essential element of religious experience identified by Rudolph Otto. Wilson spends some time exploring why so many religions have snakes as part of their mythology.)
Snakes on a Plane
Enough said.
(REALLY bad movie, by the way.)
A late post from Dr. Pangloss, courtesy of Bernstein:
SNAKES.
‘TWAS SNARE THAT TEMPTED MOTHER EVE.
BECAUSE OF SNAKE WE NOW BELIEVE
THAT ‘THO’ DEPRAVED,
WE CAN BE SAVED
FROM HELL-FIRE AND DAMNATION.
PUPILS.
BECAUSE OF SNAKE’S TEMPTATION.
PANGLOSS.
IF SNAKE HAD NOT SEDUCED OUR LOT,
AND PRIMED US FOR SALVATION,
JEHOVAH COULD NOT PARDON ALL
THE S INS THAT WE CALL CARDINAL,
INVOLVING BED AND BOTTLE
NOW ON TO ARISTOTLE.