ADDER'S FORK AND BLIND-WORM'S STING

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CHAPTER 7:

'ADDER'S FORK AND BLIND-WORM'S STING': THE MAGICAL REPTILE

 

It was one of those romantic and magical moments which, as one discovers later, it is impossible quite to replicate – but fear not. The cliché will have been subverted by the end of this paragraph. We had spent a blissful, mutually indulgent weekend in a thatched coaching inn, somewhere near to the heart of the Cotswolds. It was sunny beyond expectation, so we walked to the next village, admiring the crazy-eyed chickens which stood, cock-headed on a stone wall, as though expecting something importune, like the hatching of a Cockatrice. We poked around the church, shadowed at every window by suitably pagan yews, and then walked on by some bucolic alley which promised nothing in particular – only an idyll. At one side of it there was a stream, and at the other, another of those Cotswold walls, embedded in an earthen bank. The path led to an archetypal cottage of rough-hewn stone; wicker archways and roses in the garden. Ivy thrust wormlike roots through the crevices in the stone wall, creating dappled arbours suitable for those who dwelt within. This first warm day of spring, they were sluggish, absorbing the rays of the low sun, slow moving with a constant hiss, sliding viscerally through gaps in the stones. There was only one way to approach them: bare-footed, respectful, with wonder, and not fear. The adjoining stream was evidently their larder: here, frogs would conglomerate to mate, oozing frogspawn. The grass snakes would catch them by their toes, and gulp them down alive, so that the croak could still be heard within the gaping gullets. The struggle would continue awhile, within their guts. Later in the year, the grass snakes would feast on tadpoles, diving in the bubbling gushes, and gobbling them on lush grass. Their skins grown old, they would slide through twigs to slough them, their eyes glazed. The snakes live there to this day. We go back to see them sometimes, just for the sake of it.

 

You may have had any of a number of reactions to the paragraph above. It may have incited fear or disgust; if so, I pity you, and there is little more to be said. Indeed, I am surprised you started reading at all. Or perhaps you will opt for the Freudian interpretation: snakes have no limbs, and the more advanced species do not even possess pelvic girdles – hence they are phallic. Watson wasn’t being romantic at all – he was blinded by his lust, which he was hoping to satisfy behind the hedgerow around the corner. I fear that Freudians are secularised Christians who see a serpent coiled around every tree, and the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil is filled with semen. This is to oversimplify snakes, just as it is to over-exaggerate the difference between eros and agape. The real reason why snakes are intensely romantic creatures for me is that they are entwined with my past; my memories, including the one I have just recalled are all lovingly wrapped in serpentine coils.

 

Growing up in south-eastern Australia, my first encounters with snakes were characterised by one emotion alone: awe. The first snake I remember encountering (I might have been five) was a red-bellied black snake swimming across a pond. As it emerged, my father turned it gently with his walking stick, and the scales on the underside were like a streak of undulating blood in the tussocky grass. It was not stupendously venomous by Australian standards, but well enough equipped to kill a small child. I remember when an expert herpetologist visited our school, commanding our obedient silence as he milked a sinuous taipan, its venom drooling into a plastic phial as he pinched it behind the jaw. It produces more venom than any other snake in the world; enough to make any health and safety legislator blue in the face. My first death adder was encountered on the road to Forbes, the town in the semi-arid zone of New South Wales which was the centre for the daring exploits of the bushranger Ben Hall – a man who must have met innumerable snakes before his life terminated at the end of a rope. It lay flaccid at the side of the road, seemingly too fat to form coils, and too torpid to move as I crouched to photograph it, half camouflaged against the rust-red earth. The poison glands in its head could have killed ten children of my body mass, and then could have killed ten more, as fast as a man can moisten his mouth after he has spat himself dry. And then there was that delicious moment when I was a teenage volunteer at the R.S.P.C.A, and a worried-looking family brought something bulging like blancmange inside a pillow case. I took one look inside, let out a shout of triumph, and delved within, my arms entwined with loving twists of diamond python. Once, years later, I was wearing him around my neck when I answered the door to some Jehovah’s Witnesses: a more effective repellent of intinerant evangelists has never been discovered.

 

Britain has three snake species, and among these, only one is venomous, albeit comparatively mildly so. In common with that of rattlesnakes and other forms of viper, Adder venom is primarily a haemotoxin, attacking the red blood cells and causing haemorrhage, in contrast to the neurotoxic venom of elapid snakes. Adder bites rarely cause human deaths unless they have not bitten for some time, or unless the victim is already infirm, or very young, but these have been enough to gain the snake both notoriety and folkloric significance. Thomas Hardy’s Return of the Native incidentally records much of this folklore when Clym Yeobright finds his mother lying in the furze with an injured foot: “It was swollen and red. Even as they watched, the red began to assume a more livid colour, in the midst of which appeared a scarlet speck, smaller than a pea, which was found to consist of a drop of blood, which rose above the smooth flesh of her ankle in a hemisphere.” The immediate diagnosis, “She has been stung by an adder”, reflects the old country belief that the adder “stings” with its tongue. An adder’s fangs hinge backwards when not in use, and so are not immediately obvious in dead specimens, so that the “adder’s fork” used by the witches in Macbeth was long considered to be the origin of the poison. (Oddly, the Adder’s tongue fern, which was considered efficacious in the treatment of snakebites, is not forked at all, and the “blind worm” or slow worm, whose “sting” they also throw into the cauldron, is in fact a harmless, legless lizard.) Yeobright’s acquaintance Sam tells him, “There is only one way to cure it. You must rub the place with the fat of other adders, and the only way to get that is by frying them.” Sam accordingly goes out with his lantern, and returns with three adders hanging from his walking stick. Two of them are already dead, for – tellingly – he has killed them earlier that day whilst at work furze-cutting, and the third is still alive, for the fat is, apparently, only efficacious when fried from an adder which has just been killed. However, Sam is well-versed in adder lore, for he knows that the fat of the dead ones may still be potent: “as they don’t die till the sun goes down they can’t be very stale meat”. The assumption that adders cannot die until sunset is no doubt a reflection of the snake’s resilience, for a mortally wounded adder will often writhe and make its escape, dying some hours later. Another onlooker at Mrs Yeobright’s bedside, Christian Cantle, thinks that the serpent of the Garden of Eden lives on in the adder, and cries, “Look at his eye – for all the world like a villainous sort of black currant. ‘Tis to be hoped he can’t ill wish us! There’s folks on the heath who’ve been overlooked already. I will never kill another adder as long as I live.” In fact, whilst the grass snake and the smooth snake both have rounded pupils in their eyes, the adder’s pupils are elliptical, narrowing to slits in bright light. Elliptical pupils are normally characteristic of nocturnal creatures such as cats and geckoes, and therefore perhaps more suggestive of the Evil Eye. The three adders are duly chopped and fried, and their fat used to anoint the wound. When the doctor arrives, he affirms that the remedy is recommended by the medical experts, “Hoffman, Mead, and I think the Abbé Fontana”, but Mrs Yeobright dies in any case, the poor adder being deemed only partially responsible. Modern adder bites are treated with antihistamines and blood transfusions, although the affected area may also be treated with witch hazel – an update, perhaps, on the viper’s bugloss treatment recommended by Dioscorides in the first century.

 

Other aspects of adder-lore are similarly attributable to the doctrine of signatures: if an adder is poisonous, it must also be medically efficacious. Thus the shed skins of adders are sometimes tied around the forehead to relieve headaches. Further aspects of the folklore are probably inspired by flawed observation. Country folk have often maintained that baby adders will climb into their mother’s mouth and hide in her stomach when threatened. As adders bear their young alive, being ovo-viviparous, it is possible that this myth arose when heavily gravid females were killed and cut open to reveal the living young inside. Female adders do also form protective associations with their young, and it has been suggested that the disappearance of the young into the mother’s mouth is merely an optical illusion: they are in fact crawling underneath her belly and hiding themselves there whilst the mother’s mouth is open in self-defence.

 

An even older myth concerning the live-bearing adder was first recorded by Herodotus, and survived in a variety of forms into the medieval bestiaries: in the act of mating, the female was supposed to bite off the male’s head, only to be repaid in kind by her young, who eat their way out of her body, killing her. According to Pliny the coveted adder-stone of the druids was supposedly obtained when adders congregated and joined their heads together, and somehow extruded the stone encased in bubbles of froth. Adders do indeed meet and join their heads together; the beautiful “dance” of the adders is in fact a ritualised combat between two males for the possession of a mate, but the snakes do not froth at the mouth. Perhaps the dance of the adders was once observed on a coastal heath, and the cluster of bubbles was a whelk’s egg case which chanced to be blown there by the wind – a likely candidate, given that Pliny described the end result as pock-marked and cartilaginous. Another congregation of adders occurs when they entwine themselves together in clumps in order to hibernate. They sometimes remain intertwined when they emerge in spring, making them easy targets for the butt of a gamekeeper’s gun: perhaps this, too, gave rise to the idea that the snakes congregated in order to produce the adder-stone.

 

More difficult to explain is the insistence that adders can kill airborne skylarks by spitting at them and causing them to plummet to the ground; this, one fears, is an example of folklore inspired by pure malice. Never mind. The adder got his own back on human beings long ago, when he caused the battle of Camlann. Both Arthur and Mordred told their men not to charge unless a sword was drawn by the opposing side, but “Ryght so cam out an addir of a lytyll hethe-buysshe, and hit stange a knight in the foote. And so whan the knyght felte hym so stonge, he loked downe and saw the addir; and anone he drew his swerde to sle the addir, and thought none other harme.” The rest, of course, is history, or something very like it, and we leave Arthur and Mordred to assail each other with stings of their own. It was not, in any case, the adder’s first experience of battle. Hannibal had appreciated the martial potential of venomous snakes long before, and his method was absurdly simple: imprison them en-masse in earthenware jars, shake them up a bit, and throw them at the Romans.

 

The modern fear of snakes is a degenerate form of the awe with which they were once regarded: an awe which is admirably communicated in D.H. Lawrence’s poem, ‘Snake’, in which the serpent is recognised as “one of the lords/ Of life.” One of the adder’s greatest defenders, W.H. Hudson, suggested that the Judeo-Christian hatred of snakes was a reaction against polytheistic religions which invariably regarded them as sacred. The adder itself was a living mystical sigil, a writhing wyrm whose markings suggest written characters or ogham script. Occasionally one finds an adder whose underside is as plainly marked as the zigzag-patterned dorsal side, and it is said that these markings form the words: “If I could hear as well as see/ No man of life would master me”. Snake-handling goddesses are regarded with awe the world over, from the Babylonian Lamashtu, through the Aztec Coatlicue (Lady of the Skirt of Serpents) to the Hindu triple goddess Kali, whose hair was composed of snakes, like that of the Gorgon Medusa. Isis began her career as a snake-goddess – a cobra goddess to be precise – and her most eloquent convert, Apuleius, describes her rising out of the sea with the moon hanging above her forehead, and “Vipers arising from the left-hand and right-hand partings of her hair supported this disc”. Hecate carried two snakes, one symbolising healing, and the other sickness and death; perhaps it is her image – or one of her priestesses - that we see in the beautiful Cretan figurine of a woman, bare-breasted in a fashionable bodice and layered skirt, who holds two snakes in her upraised hands. According to Seneca, the much-maligned Medea, another beautiful priestess of Hecate, also bared her breasts and tossed her hair when she handled snakes, and in order to make her potion, which could either heal or kill, she evoked “everything snakelike”. It is a pity that her memory has been besmirched by Appolonius of Rhodes, who made her betray her people and the serpent-guardian of the golden fleece to that brazen pirate Jason, and by Euripides, who made her murder her own children in revenge for his subsequent faithlessness. Awe of venomous snakes, combined with a reckless handling of them, was characteristic of the Bacchic and Orphic mysteries immortalised by the murals of Pompeii; indeed, Orpheus’s descent into Hades was an attempt to retrieve his beloved, who had been killed by snakebite. Combat with snakes is also invariably imbued with religious significance: the lamentable ophidiophobia of St. George the dragon-slayer, and St. Patrick, who allegedly drove all of the snakes out of Ireland, has a more spiritually significant pedigree in the battle between Apollo and Python, and Thor’s wrestlings with the Midgard Serpent – conflicts which perhaps represent the overthrow of female deities by male ones. Even Moses was not averse to a bit of snake shamanism, for it was he who erected the brazen serpent, and following his example, Christian sects such as the Gnostics and the Ophists have depicted Christ crucified as a snake, and consecrated the Eucharist with live serpents. It comes as no surprise that they were soon condemned as heretical, although the caduceus, a serpent entwined around a staff associated with Asclepius, the god of healing, remains to this day a symbol of medicine. Asclepius himself carried two phials of blood from the gorgon Medusa: one to kill, and the other to resurrect – a pagan eucharist indeed.

 

Perhaps the most beautiful and most subtly erotic snake-myth of all is the story of Cadmus, described in Ovid’s Metamorphoses. Cadmus once killed a gigantic serpent, and raised an army by sowing its teeth into the soil. Now, he has grown old, and wonders whether the gods are annoyed with him: “If this is what the gods are angry over, may I become a serpent, with a body stretched full-length forward.” The words have barely left his lips before he begins to transform. His legs are the first to disappear, and whilst he still possesses arms, he urgently embraces his wife. In her desperation, she pleads with the gods to transform her too, whilst Cadmus, now thoroughly ophidian, glides silkily between her breasts and entwines his body about her neck. She reaches to stroke her serpent husband’s scaly skin, and as she does so, she too is transformed, and they make for the woods before the horrified onlookers can beat their brains out or use their vital organs as ancient equivalents to Viagra. Touchingly, Cadmus and is wife are non-venomous; they are indeed “most gentle serpents” who never harm human beings. Perhaps they are pythons, retaining their vestigial pelvic girdles where their legs used to join their bodies. Would that all human beings were given the choice between advancing senility and an eternity as a loving serpent; I know which I would choose. Cleopatra must have been groping towards the same conclusion when she grasped the asp.

 

In any case, it is the snake’s own physiology which is the source of the religious awe it inspires. Anyone who has ever handled a snake knows that it is a creature of exceeding grace and dignity: its scales are smooth as polished jewels, and its undulating mode of locomotion is reminiscent of the movement of flowing water. This fluidity has made it the embodiment of a creator spirit. Even the spirit of Elohim, the creator in the book of Genesis, is first envisaged as moving on the face of the waters, as only a snake can do – an insight which was clearly understood by William Blake when he created his image of a serpent-bodied ‘Elohim Creating Adam’. Snakes can dislocate their jaws at will, enabling them to swallow prey which seems impossibly large: a creature which can engulf lesser beings in this way (anacondas have been known to swallow grown men), is bound to be regarded with awe. Snake venom is not only lethal; it also has psycho-active properties, although the reader is advised not to try this at home. It is amazingly durable: a stuffed snake is as venomous as a live one. Male snakes have a double penis, just like the devil, and female snakes have a paired clitoris – a notion which opens up all sorts of possibilities. A snake discards its skin when it has grown old; it even becomes blind and doddering like a geriatric when the scale which covers the eyeball turns opaque immediately prior to sloughing. It is therefore a metaphor for death and resurrection. When a snake strikes, it often does so with a speed undetectable to the human eye, so it is imbued with mystical power. If one approaches it in the right way, one may handle an adder without retribution – they have indeed been kept as pets by stalwart individuals – but one false move precipitates the lightning strike. Thus snakes are capricious, like the gods. Oviparous snakes like the grass snake, whose young do not hatch in the process of parturition, lay leathern eggs, and there is something mystical about these too; perhaps they, and not the whelk’s egg-case, are in fact the ovum anguinis of the druids.

 

Anguis is not, however, the generic name of a snake, but of the lowly slow-worm: not a venomous snake, but a legless lizard. Formerly, it was known as a blind-worm, presumably because its eyes, which have closable lids, are relatively smaller than those of snakes. It is quite harmless, and as its name suggests, rather sluggish in comparison to an adder or smooth snake energised by the sun. Its English relatives, the viviparous and sand lizards, are equally benign, and indeed frequently fall prey to our snakes. It is perhaps more difficult to ascribe magical significance to the Squamata, but the Romans seem to have done so, for they sculpted mystical hands out of bronze, with toads, snakes, tortoises and lizards crawling up towards the fingertips. No one knows their significance; perhaps they were fertility or healing charms, or wards against the evil eye. It is noteworthy, perhaps, that all of the animals depicted are cold blooded – but beyond that there is little to be said, save that the hands are clearly objects of power.

 

On the whole, however, if the snake’s biology makes it a likely metaphor for the divine, lizards are clearly earthy and mortal. With some notable warm-weather exceptions, they are not venomous; nor can they dislocate their jaws. They change their skins as snakes do, but slough them in flakes and ribbons rather than slipping them off like gloves. To the uninitiated, they seem altogether prosaic, but any inquisitive crow will tell you a different story. If you would capture a lizard, you must seize it by the head or the body. Grasp it by the tail, and the entire appendage will detach itself by splitting down the middle of one of the vertebrae, whilst the frenzied animal makes its escape through the undergrowth. More perplexing still, the severed tail will continue to undulate and squirm after it has been severed from the spinal column, as energised and frantic as one of Galvin’s frog-legs probed with an electrode. Your quarry is safe, and will soon grow a false tail – albeit one without vertebrae – and you have nothing to show for your pains but this threshing bit of scale and bone and gristle. In short, all of the English reptiles are object-lessons for the witch: the grass snake and the smooth snake are her images of occult beauty and erotic power; the adder is her psychopomp and her defense; but the lizard is her most practical guide of all, for he will provide her means of escape should the witch-finder seize her by the tail.

 

Done