How and where did snake worship originate?

Some animals have been worshipped from ancient times in various cultures in different parts of the world, but only in isolated pockets and with only half-hearted veneration. What is most remarkable about the worship of the snake is that it is universal and transcends geographical and cultural boundaries. It also takes on a fervour not seen in the worship of other animals.

Right from pre-historic times, man has attributed divine aspects to all forces of nature which he cannot understand or comprehend or which he has held in fear and awe. Hedged in by seemingly malevolent forces all round, man, in primitive times, found that worship of such forces gave him a level of comfort that made existence tolerable. The perceived omnipresence of snakes – more pronounced in times when the wilderness was pervasive and untamed – and their ability to appear out of nowhere almost at will and disappear equally suddenly, their many inexplicable features and habits and, more than anything else, their ability to deliver death with a single strike, much in the manner of a bolt shot by a god, left primitive man with little else to do but propitiate them and pray for protection.

Some scholars hold the view that snake worship had a common source somewhere in the East or the Near East from where it spread to Asia, Africa, Europe and the Americas. Other scholars hold the view that snake cults in different parts of the world developed independently, the parallels that have been noticed being explained by the tremendous power that the snake as a basic image exerts over the human psyche everywhere. Joseph Campbell (1904-1987), the American mythologist, points out in The Masks of God: Oriental Mythology (1962), though not about snake worship in particular, that while, during the 19th and early 20th Centuries, scholars held the view that analogous mythologies developed independently in different parts of the world in accordance with common psychological laws, subsequent archaeological discoveries have promoted the view that it could have been more a case of diffusion, radiation and dispersal from a common source. Where the truth lies, we do not know for sure.

In many cultures such as India and other parts of Asia, the Aztecs and Mayas of South America, the Red Indian tribes of North America, and the aborigines of Australia, the snake is the symbol of fertility. The ‘snake dance’ of the Hopi Amerindians of northern Arizona, US, is a particularly eloquent tribute to snakes as messengers sent to propitiate the rain god. The Australian aborigines associated snakes with rain and water sources. In ancient Japan, the god of thunder was a snake. The ancient Egyptians identified the snake with the River Nile and fertility.

Other people revered the snake in other manifestations. To the African tribals, python was the god of war. The early Greeks associated the snake with Askelepios, or Aesculapius, the god of medicine, who they believed was originally a snake; later, when god assumed a human form, he had snakes in his motif. Both the ancient Greeks and the ancient Romans encouraged snakes to be present near their temples and homesteads. This was so also in parts of India, especially Kerala and Bengal. Snake worship also existed in Egypt, Indonesia, Southeast Asia and China.

As Ramona and Desmond Morris in Men and Snakes (1965) point out, “Snake worship reached its peak of development in India.”

In Indian mythology, snakes are manifestations of divine forces. They keep guard over the fortunes of the home and the village. The spirits of long- departed ancestors dwell in them. They keep company with the most powerful of the gods of the Hindu pantheon. Lord Vishnu reclines on the coils of a gigantic snake, Anantha. Lord Siva has snakes for his adornments. Lord Ganesha has a snake for a girdle.

The serpent cult developed in India over a period of some three millennia. From the confines of religion, the cult permeated into folklore, literature and art, and held such sway over people’s imagination as little else has done. Serpent-lore found a significant place in the Brahminical and Buddhist literature of India from Vedic times. Though there is no reference to serpent worship in the Rig Veda, there are many references in the Yajur Veda and the Atharva Veda and in Vedic literature in general. The chief ­repositories of serpent lofe are the Mahabharata, the Jatakas tales in Buddhism, and Kalhana’s Rajatarangini.

Ancient literature in India refers to serpents as Nagas. Who or what were Nagas? Scholars have subscribed to different theories. One of the earliest expositions on this is found in James Ferguson’s Tree and Serpent Worship (1868). Even though, the Sanskrit word Naga denotes serpent, he believed that the Nagas were not originally serpents but serpent-worshippers, an aboriginal race of Turanian stock inhabiting northern India, who were conquered by the Aryans. He was of the view that neither the Aryans nor the Dravidians worshipped the serpent and that references to serpent worship in the Vedas, or similar early writings of Aryans, must have been subsequent interpolations – not an unusual feature attributed to many ancient texts.

C.F. Oldham, in The Sun and the Serpent: A Contribution to the History of Serpent Worship (1905), believed, just as Ferguson did, that the Nagas were not serpents but serpent-worshippers, but differed from Ferguson on who these people were. His view was that Nagas were people who claimed descent from the sun and had the hooded serpent for their totem. They were deified humans or demi-gods. They had Tak­shasila, now Taxila in the present Pakistan, as their capital and the serpent Takshaka as one of their chiefs. According to Oldham, the Asuras, and the Sarpas of the Rig Vedas, the Asuras and Nagas of Manus and the Asuras or Demons of Brah­minical literature, all represented hostile tribes who opposed the Aryan invasion of India.

Hendrik Kern (1833-1917), the Dutch orientalist, had a totally different take on the subject. He was of the view that Nagas were essentially water spirits and personified forces of Nature. This was much in line with beliefs elsewhere in the world associating snakes with water sources.

Kern also believed that there was a possibility that serpents were worshipped by the aboriginal tribes of Southern India.

But Oldham, earlier, had held the view that the veneration of the serpent in India was not handed down by the aboriginal tribes but that “it was intimately connected with the worship of the sun, and is thus closely related to the orthodox Hindu religion.”

J.Ph. Vogel in his Indian Sepent-lore or the Nagas in Hindu Legend and Art (1926), discredited Oldham’s thesis. Vogel, incidentally, believed that there was basis for the assumption that, in ancient India, deceased rulers were, sometimes, worshipped in the form of snakes.

In between, other theories had sprung up, such as the one of the German scholar and Indo­logist, Hermann Olden­berg (1854-1920), that Nagas were demonical beings who were really snakes but could assume human form at will.

Even a cursory examination of the forms of snake worship in different cultures will show that various legends and beliefs had, over time, come to be woven together into a complex matrix. Adoration of the snake as a creature because of its many inscrutable features, so unlike all other animals, terror inspired by its very appearance because of its terrible potential to deliver death in a trice, belief that, with its perceived power over life and death, it could, in mysterious ways, exercise a certain judgement over man’s conduct and dispense justice accordingly, worship of the deitites of rivers and other water sources for their life-sustaining power and the association of the snake with these, probably because of its wavy form, the many shapes that the snake assumes even as the ever-changing contours of rain-bearing clouds that herald the sprouting of life in the parched earth, worship of ancestors whose spirits dwelt in snakes or with whose spirits snakes living in some equally unknown subterranean realm held communion, its psycho-sexual body imagery, the fact that, for complex reasons, it is the most frequently occurring creature in dreams of men in all cultures – all these coalesced into a focussed worship of the snake as a divine force invoking awe, fear and veneration, all at the same time, as indeed is the case with most divinities. But, as regards the exact origin of this body of beliefs and the related practices, the evidence available, be it in India or elsewhere, is so fragmentary and so fractured that ethnologists have not been able to convincingly reconstruct its history. Such history as has been pieced together is as fragile as the skeleton of the snake itself which has made the fossil evidence of the ancestry of snakes speculative to an extent.