The Snake Kept the Skin

TL;DR

• From Vanuatu to Sulawesi, people say they once cast their skins like snakes and came out young. An old woman’s renewal was not recognised, she put the old skin back on, and death began (Frazer 1918, I, pp. 68–71).
• In Gilgamesh, Greece, New Guinea and the Amazon the life-medicine, the plant or the drink goes to the snake, and the snake has sloughed off old age ever since.
• In East Africa, Borneo and the Amazon God offers renewal and only the serpent is awake to answer. In East Africa, New Britain and Vietnam God’s message of renewal is garbled in the serpent’s favour.
• The Targum dresses Adam and Eve in the skin the serpent shed. The Veda says the knower leaves his body “even as a snake frees itself from its skin.”
• Read through the Eve Theory of Consciousness, this is one old story. The serpent holds the secret of a self that outlasts its skin, and humans paid for that knowledge with death.

“The locusts cast their skins, but ye men shall die from this day forward.”
— The Kai grandmother, Huon Peninsula, Papua New Guinea, in J. G. Frazer, Folk-Lore in the Old Testament (1918), vol. I, p. 69

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Why do snakes shed their skin and people die? #

A snake grows old, splits its skin at the lips, and crawls out of it bright and new. The empty skin lies in the grass with the eyes still in it. Anyone who has seen this can see what it looks like: the snake has taken off its old age and left it behind.

The Greeks had a word for it. A snake’s slough was its γῆρας, its “old age”. Frazer noticed this in 1918 and drew the conclusion: “The use of γῆρας (“old age”) in the sense of “cast skin” is a clear indication that the Greeks shared the wide-spread belief in the renewal of an animal’s youth by the casting of its skin” (Frazer 1918, I, p. 50 n. 1). The Phoenician Sanchuniathon, as quoted by Eusebius, said the serpent was the longest-lived of all animals “because it cast its skin and so renewed its youth” (Frazer’s paraphrase, p. 50).

A story told all over the world says people were meant to do the same, and lost it. Since then the snake renews itself and we die. Frazer gathered more than forty tellings of it in the chapter “The Fall of Man” of Folk-Lore in the Old Testament. They reach the same end by a few routes, and the routes repeat across oceans:

1. The old woman is seen. She sheds her skin and comes home young. Her child does not know her, and she puts the old skin back on.
2. The snake gets the medicine. The plant, the drug or the drink of life meant for people goes down the snake’s throat.
3. Only the snake was awake. God calls out an offer of renewal. The people sleep through it, and the serpent answers.
4. The message is garbled. God sends word that people will shed their skins and snakes will die. The messenger delivers it the other way round.

Frazer thought Genesis 3 was “an abridged version of this savage myth” (p. 76). The serpent was the one creature in the garden that knew how to come out of its own skin. This essay goes through the best tellings, with the people, the place and the source for each, and then asks what the serpent was keeping.

What did the old woman do at the stream? #

The Banks Islands: Change-skin of the world #

The Banks Islands lie at the northern end of Vanuatu. R. H. Codrington, the Anglican missionary who knew them best, had this story from the islanders and their neighbours in the New Hebrides. Frazer gives it from Codrington:

“at first men never died, but that when they advanced in life they cast their skins like snakes and crabs, and came out with youth renewed. After a time a woman, growing old, went to a stream to change her skin ; according to some, she was the mother of the mythical or legendary hero Qat, according to others, she was Ul-ta-marama, Change-skin of the world.”
— Frazer 1918, I, p. 68, after Codrington, The Melanesians (1891), p. 265

“She threw off her old skin in the water, and observed that as it floated down it caught against a stick. Then she went home, where she had left her child. But the child refused to recognize her, crying that its mother was an old woman, not like this young stranger. So to pacify the child she went after her cast integument and put it on. From that time mankind ceased to cast their skins and died” (pp. 68–69).

Her name says what she was: the Change-skin of the world, the keeper of the technique. When she put the old skin back on, she put it back on for everyone.

The Kai grandmother: “ye men shall die” #

The Kai live in the hills behind Finschhafen on the Huon Peninsula of north-eastern New Guinea, in present-day Papua New Guinea. The missionary Christian Keysser recorded their version. At first people did not die. “When their old brown skin grew wrinkled and ugly, they stepped into water, and stripping it off got a new, youthful white skin instead” (Frazer, p. 69).

An old grandmother “bathed in the river, cast off her withered old hide, and returned to the village, spick and span, in a fine new skin.” Her grandson “wept and squalled, and refused to believe that she was his granny.” So “she at last went back in a rage to the river, fished her wizened old skin out of the water, put it on, and returned to the house a hideous old hag again.” The child was glad to see his granny back. She said to him: “The locusts cast their skins, but ye men shall die from this day forward” (p. 69).

The Admiralty Islands: “she shall be my wife” #

On Manus in the Admiralty Islands, Papua New Guinea, the missionary Josef Meier wrote down a darker telling. An old woman’s two sons went fishing while she bathed, and “she stripped off her wrinkled old skin and came forth as young as she had been long ago.” “The one said, " It is our mother " ; but the other said, " She may be your mother, but she shall be my wife.”"

She heard them. “You are liars,” she said, “I heard you both. If I had had my way, we should have grown to be old men and women, and then we should have cast our skin and been young men and young women. But you have had your way. We shall grow old men and old women, and then we shall die.” She fetched her old skin and put it on (Frazer, pp. 69–70).

Her son looks at her young body and wants her as his wife. She takes back age and death for the whole human race sooner than that.

The To Koolawi grandmother and the Aneityum old man #

The To Koolawi, a mountain people of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, told the Dutch missionaries Adriani and Kruijt that people once had, “like serpents and shrimps, the power of casting their skin”. A grandmother bathed, “laid aside her old skin and hung it up on a tree”, and came home young. Her grandchild “kept on saying, " You are not my grandmother ; my grandmother was old, and you are young.”" She went back and drew on her old skin, “But ever since that day men have lost the power of renewing their youth and must die” (Frazer, p. 70).

On Aneityum, the southernmost island of Vanuatu, an old man took his skin off to work in his garden, and his grandchildren pierced it full of holes. Shivering in it, he said: “I thought we should live for ever and cast our skins and become young again ; but as you have done this we shall all die” (pp. 70–71). Frazer adds the Shortland Islands of the Solomons (p. 69).

The pattern is exact. The old one knows how to renew. The young one cannot see that the renewed person is the same person. The renewal fails at the moment of recognition.

Did the Kiwai hero Sido try to shed his skin like a snake? #

The Kiwai live on the delta of the Fly River and the coast beside it, in the Western Province of Papua New Guinea. Their great culture hero is Sido, whose death made the road the dead now walk. The Finnish ethnographer Gunnar Landtman wrote down dozens of tellings in 1910–12, each tagged with the narrator and village. Frazer, writing at the same time, never had them.

In Iku of Ipisia’s telling, Sido lay down in grave-like holes so that his spirit could “leave him body, walk about, he no dead”, and “Sido he want all people do same behind.” Each time some boys saw him and spoiled it: “You fellow make him people no good, every people, every place” (Landtman 1917, pp. 109–110). Námai of Mawáta told it plainer:

“He wanted to change his skin in the same way that a snake does. The skin opened at the top of his head, and just as he was coming out he was seen by some boys and girls, who said, „Oh, Sido he come out now!” Immediately he drew himself back, not wanting to be seen, and returned to his mothers."
— Landtman 1917, p. 110

Later he went back to the same point and died there. His two mothers buried him, then dug up the grave, “took out his skull, which they wore by turns round their necks” (p. 110).

On the same page Landtman gives a woman who knew the trick and taught it. Móle-ége lived alone in the bush at Glülu and made people out of worms. “By and by you me (we) no die, stop all time. You fellow look me.” Then “she showed them how to open the skin over the nose, „Skin he break here, chuck him away old skin, man he come out, new skin he come, no more old.”" The people spoiled it by killing a pig she had told them to keep alive (p. 110).

The same pig leads into the men’s cult. Marunogere, founder of the Kiwai moguru initiation, made a pig to be caught alive for the rite, and his youngest son shot it. “Suppose you kill him that pig, by-and-by everybody he dead … I been make you fellow life-thing, I want you fellow keep him all time: man no dead” (Landtman 1917, p. 342). Before the pig, in another version, he had tried “a live snake which after the ceremony was let loose in the bush”, because his intention was to “make people come long life” (p. 344). Marunogere and his wife died after the dance. He came back to life long enough to have the people cut up the woman and the pig and dry their flesh “till it was hard as wood” into a “good poison” (p. 343). When he died for good they cut up his body too, and “in some places they have preserved small pieces or dried human flesh which is said to be that of Marünogére’s body” (p. 343). The rite that was meant to make people deathless kept a dead man’s flesh as its medicine. The Bullroarer Atlas essay The First One Didn’t Work follows that failed first rite.

So the Kiwai have the whole set. A hero tries to slough like a snake and is seen. A woman teaches people to break their skins and come out new. A cult founder tries a snake, then a pig, to make people live, and fails, and founds initiation on the failure.

Who stole the plant of youth from Gilgamesh? #

The oldest written telling comes from Iraq. Tablet XI of the Standard Babylonian Epic of Gilgamesh ends with a plant. Utnapishtim, the flood survivor, will not give Gilgamesh eternal life, but at his wife’s urging he tells him of a thorny plant at the bottom of the sea.

Before he is told of it, Gilgamesh is washed. In R. Campbell Thompson’s 1928 verse translation, the boatman is ordered to “let him cast off his pelt(s) that the sea may remove (them)”, and to dress him in a mantle such that “No (sign of) age shall the mantle betray, but preserve (all) its freshness” (Thompson 1928, p. 55). The man takes off his skins, and is given clothes that will not age.

Then the plant. Gilgamesh ties stones to his feet, sinks, grabs it, and cuts himself free. He tells the boatman he will take it home to Uruk:

“‘Greybeard-who-turneth-to-man-in-his-prime’ is its name and I[’]ll eat it
I myself, that again I may come to my youthful condition.”
— Thompson 1928, p. 56

On the road he finds a pool of cool water and goes down to bathe. “(But here was) a serpent who snuff’d the plant’s fragrance, / Darted he up “from the water (?)”, and snatch’d the plant” (p. 56). Gilgamesh sits down and weeps.

What the snake does next turns on one word. In 1928 Thompson, like Jensen before him, read it as a curse: the snake goes off “uttering malison”. By 1930, in his edition of the cuneiform, he had changed his mind. On line 289 he wrote: “Kulultum, perhaps kuliptum, with Albright, RA. 1919, 189, ‘it shed a skin’, that is, exhibiting a fresh youth after eating the plant … I am now more inclined to agree with it” (Thompson 1930, p. 89).

The man got new clothes that would not age. The snake got the plant, and a new body.

Why did the ass give the snake the drug against old age? #

Greece told the same story with a donkey in it. Aelian, writing in Greek in the early third century AD, tells it in On Animals 6.51, under the dipsas, the “thirst-snake” of Libya. Its bite, he says, sets the victims burning with thirst, so that they drink without stopping and “very quickly burst”. Then he gives the myth that explains it. The translation is mine, from Hercher’s Greek text:

“Report says that Prometheus stole fire, and the myth says that Zeus was angry and gave to those who informed on the theft a drug that wards off old age (φάρμακον γήρως ἀμυντήριον). They put it, I am told, on an ass. The ass went on carrying the load. It was summer, and the ass, thirsty, came to a spring to drink. The snake that guarded the spring held him back and drove him off, and the ass, in torment, paid it for the drink with the drug he happened to be carrying. So an exchange took place: the one drinks, and the other strips off its old age (τὸ γῆρας ἀποδύεται), and takes on besides, so the story goes, the ass’s thirst.”
— Aelian, De natura animalium 6.51 (Hercher 1864, pp. 162–163)

“Am I the maker of this myth?” Aelian asks. No: “before me Sophocles the tragic poet, Deinolochus the rival of Epicharmus, Ibycus of Rhegium, and the comic poets Aristias and Apollophanes sing it.” Ibycus was singing in the sixth century BC.

A god’s gift of renewal was meant for people, a careless carrier lost it at a spring, and the serpent guarding the water has stripped off its old age ever since. It took the thirst as well, and its bite passes that thirst to the people who should have had the drug. The gift of youth went into the snake, and what comes back out of the snake is venom.

How did the snake get the medicine meant for the dead boy? #

The Marind-anim live on the south coast of New Guinea, in South Papua, Indonesia. Paul Wirz, who lived among them in 1915–16, printed their myths in 1921. The coconut was once a boy, Jawi, raised by the dema Aramemb. Jawi seduced Aramemb’s wife, and Aramemb brought death-sorcerers from Kurkari to kill him by kambara. They drugged the boy in the men’s house and cut his body “inwardly under the skin, so that no wound could be seen from outside.” By morning he was a corpse.

Aramemb repented and ran into the forest for healing herbs, but the boy was already buried when he came back.

“Da nahm Aramemb die Schale mit der Flüssigkeit der ausgekauten Heilkräuter und goß sie einer Schlange (Kuria) in den Rachen. Die Schlange blieb ruhig liegen, wurde kalt und häutete sich. Seither sterben die Schlangen nicht.”
— Wirz 1921, p. 49

“Then Aramemb took the bowl with the juice of the chewed medicine herbs and poured it into the throat of a snake (kuria). The snake lay still, went cold, and shed its skin. Since then snakes do not die. When they are sick or unwell, they only shed their skins. Had Aramemb been able to give Jawi the medicine in time, Jawi would not have died, and people would not die at all, but only shed their skins, like the snakes when they are sick” (p. 49). The next night a coconut palm grew out of the boy’s grave, or out of his cut-off head, already bearing ripe fruit.

The Marind are a bullroarer people, and their great rites, the Mayo and the Sosom, were held in secret from women. The medicine that would have let a boy shed his death went into a snake’s mouth.

Who answered when God asked, “Who wishes not to die?” #

Lake Tanganyika: only the serpent was awake #

The Wafipa and Wabende live on the south-eastern shore of Lake Tanganyika, in Tanzania. Bishop Lechaptois recorded their account:

“one day God, whom they name Leza, came down to earth, and addressing all living creatures said, " Who wishes not to die?” Unfortunately man and the other animals were asleep ; only the serpent was awake and he promptly answered, " I do." That is why men and all other animals die. The serpent alone does not die of himself. He only dies if he is killed. Every year he changes his skin, and so renews his youth and his strength."
— Frazer 1918, I, p. 66

Borneo and Sulawesi: “I can” #

The Dusun of Sabah, Malaysia, across the Indian Ocean, tell it almost word for word. The Creator asked, “Who is able to cast off his skin? If any one can do so, he shall not die.” “The snake alone heard and answered, " I can.”" The Dusun did not hear the question, “or they also would have thrown off their skins, and there would have been no death” (Frazer, p. 66).

The Todjo-Toradja of Central Sulawesi, Indonesia, say God called men and animals together to set their lots. One lot was “We shall put off our old skin.” Mankind was represented that day “by an old woman in her dotage, who did not hear the tempting proposal. But the animals which slough their skins, such as serpents and shrimps, heard it and closed with the offer” (p. 66).

The Solimões: the old woman slept through the serpent’s cry #

Between 1872 and 1887 the botanist João Barbosa Rodrigues collected tales in Nheengatu, the Tupí-based common language of the Amazon. One, from the Rio Solimões in Amazonas, Brazil, is called Boia açu, “The great snake, or the Serpent-bearer”, the constellation. A girl got with child by the aiua, the shadow or demon, bore a great snake that would not leave her, and she tricked it up a tree and fled. The snake child begged its grandmother for its mother, and she would not say where she was. “I am going, grandmother,” it said. “Listen when I cry out, and answer me.” It flew up into the sky, and deep in the night it cried out. “The old woman was asleep and did not hear. When for the third time the voice was about to die away, the old woman woke.”

Arecé cuité mira etá timaan u iupiruca
“That is why people do not peel.”
“É por isso que a gente não perde a pelle e só isso acontece com aquillo que respondeu, como lagartos, cobras e arvores.”
— Barbosa Rodrigues 1890, pp. 234–235

“That is why people do not lose their skin, and it happens only to the things that answered, like lizards, snakes and trees. Today he appears in the sky.” The serpent called out the offer of renewal. The ones who answered got it. The old woman slept, and so we die.

The Orinoco: an old woman’s “Oh!” #

The Tamanaco, a Carib people of the Orinoco in Venezuela, said their Creator left them by boat across “the great salt water”. As he pushed off he called back, “You will change your skins.” An old woman cried out “Oh!” in doubt, “which so annoyed the Creator that he changed his tune at once and said testily, " Ye shall die.”" (Frazer, p. 67).

The post She Who Brings Death collects these women. In each of these stories the offer is made aloud, and the creature that hears and answers is the creature that sheds.

How was God’s message of immortality garbled? #

Africa tells the loss as a message gone wrong. In Frazer’s census all nineteen tellings of the “perverted message” are African. The Moon sends the hare, or God sends the chameleon, to say that men will die and rise again. The messenger dawdles or lies, and death arrives first. Among the Namaqua of Namibia the old men said, “We are still enraged with the hare, because he brought such a bad message, and we will not eat him.” So “from the day when a youth comes of age and takes his place among the men, he is forbidden to eat hare’s flesh” (Frazer, p. 53). The story of lost immortality is the charter of a rule that begins at a man’s initiation.

In three places the message and the skin come together, and the serpent ends up with the renewal.

The Oromo of Ethiopia and Kenya, Frazer’s Gallas, call a crested bird that wails in the treetops holawaka, “the sheep of God.” God sent it “to tell men that they should not die, but that when they grew old and weak they should slip off their skins and so renew their youth.” On the road it met a snake eating carrion and wanted the meat. “Give me some of the meat and blood, and I will tell you God’s message.” "" The message," then said the bird, " is this. When men grow old they will die, but when you grow old you will cast your skin and renew your youth." That is why people grow old and die, but snakes crawl out of their old skins and renew their youth." God punished the bird with a painful sickness inside, “that is why he sits wailing on the tops of trees” (Frazer, pp. 74–75, after Alice Werner, Man, 1913).

The Tolai of the Gazelle Peninsula, in East New Britain, Papua New Guinea, say the good spirit To Kambinana told his brother: “Go to men and take them the secret of immortality. Tell them to cast their skin every year. So will they be protected from death, for their life will be constantly renewed. But tell the serpents that they must thenceforth die.” But To Korvuvu “commanded men to die, and betrayed to the serpents the secret of immortality. Since then all men have been mortal, but the serpents cast their skins every year and never die” (Frazer, p. 75).

In Vietnam the Annamese say the Jade Emperor, Ngọc Hoàng, sent a messenger to say that old men should cast their skins and old serpents die “and be laid in coffins”. The messenger said it right. But a brood of serpents heard, and said: “You must say it over again and just the contrary, or we will bite you.” He said it again the other way round. “That is why all creatures are now subject to death, except the serpent, who, when he is old, casts his skin and lives for ever” (Frazer, pp. 75–76).

The Tolai name what was lost: a “secret of immortality”, carried in words, that the serpents got. The Vietnamese serpents take it with the threat of their bite.

Why did Old Age swap skins with a Tukuna girl? #

The Tukuna (Ticuna) live along the upper Amazon where Brazil, Colombia and Peru meet. Curt Nimuendajú worked among them from 1929 to 1942. His monograph, published in 1952, puts the loss of immortality inside a girl’s first-menstruation seclusion. The first people were i’ne, “the immortals.” The difference between them and us

“arose in ancient times through the error of a girl who was in seclusion for her puberty festival at the time when dyoi’, in the company of the immortals, called for everyone to follow him. The girl did not answer, but shortly after, when the spirit dya: [Old Age] was announcing his coming with shouts … she responded, “May dya: come!” dya: entered her cell and, pulling at his hair, stripped off his own skin. Then he took off the girl’s skin in the same way and exchanged them.”
— Nimuendajú 1952, p. 135

Old Age walked off a youth, whistling on his fingers. “The girl remained an old, decrepit woman, without strength even to stand up.” In the morning her mother “saw in place of the girl an old crone with a wrinkled skin. The festival was called off, and since then men grow old and die” (p. 135).

A second story follows. Another secluded girl answers the immortals’ call, and the whole festival rises into the sky on a tapir hide; it is the ring around the moon. A jilted suitor smashes the beer jars, and the festival drink spills on the ground. “Ants and all other creatures that shed their skins licked it up, and for this reason they never grow old” (p. 136). The way back to the immortals’ creek is guarded by the hook that fished up the first people, “transformed into snakes and rays which guard the entrance” (p. 135). And “to become one of the immortals one must partake of their beverage” (p. 136).

The Tukuna put it all in one place: the girl’s first blood, an answered call, a stolen skin, a drink of immortality that went to the creatures that shed, and snakes at the gate. A museum card from Nimuendajú’s own collection puts a bullroarer in the masked dance of this same girls’ feast.

What does Genesis say about the serpent’s skin? #

Read Genesis 3 with these stories in mind. The serpent tells the woman: “Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:4–5, KJV). They eat. “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked” (3:7). God tells the man, “for dust thou art, and unto dust shalt thou return” (3:19). Then: “Unto Adam also and to his wife did the LORD God make coats of skins, and clothed them” (3:21). And God says: “Behold, the man is become as one of us, to know good and evil: and now, lest he put forth his hand, and take also of the tree of life, and eat, and live for ever” (3:22).

Every element of the cast-skin story is here: a talking serpent, a woman, a gift of knowledge, a sentence of death, new skins for the humans and a guarded way back to life. Only the serpent’s renewal is missing. Frazer: “The principal, almost the only, omission is the silence of the narrator as to the eating of the fruit of the tree of life by the serpent” (p. 76). His reconstruction of the lost original ends: “That is why men have been mortal and serpents immortal ever since, for serpents cast their skins every year and so renew their youth” (p. 52).

The Jewish Aramaic paraphrase did not leave it out. The Targum of Palestine, known as Pseudo-Jonathan, has God curse the serpent with “thy skin thou shalt cast away once in seven years; and the poison of death shall be in thy mouth” (Etheridge 1862, p. 166). The coats of skins become: “the Lord God made to Adam and to his wife vestures of honour from the skin of the serpent, which he had cast from him, upon the skin of their flesh, instead of that adornment which had been cast away; and He clothed them” (p. 168).

The humans wear the serpent’s slough, and the serpent keeps its power to shed, with “the poison of death” in its mouth.

What is the serpent keeping? #

Read together, the stories agree on what renewal is: the same person coming out of an old body. The Kiwai hero lies in a grave so that his spirit can “leave him body, walk about, he no dead.” The Banks Islands mother comes back young and is still the mother. The skin goes downstream; she remains. What the stories call immortality is a self that survives the loss of its skin.

That is also how the renewal fails. The child looks at the renewed woman and cannot believe she is the same person. “You are not my grandmother; my grandmother was old, and you are young.” The son sees a young stranger and wants her as his wife. In Kiwai the boys and girls see Sido coming out of his skin and cry out. In every Melanesian and Indonesian telling the break comes from someone who sees only the body and does not see the self inside it.

The Dieri of Cooper Creek in South Australia tell of a being who finished the change. The missionary Otto Siebert recorded it for A. W. Howitt. The Mura-mura Ngura-wordu-punnuna swallowed a great animal whole and “noticed, when he turned himself round, that his body was becoming longer and longer, until at length he had become an animal.” The tail struck him blind. He found his way home by the smell of the west wind, moving in the serpentine bends that made the course of Cooper Creek:

“Directly the scales had fallen from his eyes, his sight became stronger and clearer, and the markings on his body were brighter and more distinct. Thus it was that at Kalyumaru he became covered with a new skin from head to tail, beautifully marked and shining, and he saw himself as he had never seen himself before.”
— Howitt 1904, p. 805

A man becomes a serpent, sheds into a new skin and sees himself for the first time.

India put this most plainly of all. The Śatapatha Brāhmaṇa says that the “self-offerer” is the one who knows his new body is made by the sacrifice: “And even as a snake frees itself from its skin, so does he free himself from his mortal body, from sin” (ŚB 11.2.6.13, Eggeling, SBE 44, p. 38). The Bṛhadāraṇyaka Upaniṣad says the body lies “as the slough of a snake lies on an ant-hill, dead and cast away” while the “disembodied immortal spirit” goes on (Müller, SBE 15, p. 177). And the gods made a treaty with Death: “no one shall be immortal with the body”, but he who becomes immortal “either through knowledge, or through holy work, shall become immortal after separating from the body” (ŚB 10.4.3.9, Eggeling, SBE 43, pp. 357–358).

The Pañcaviṃśa Brāhmaṇa goes further. The serpents themselves once held a sacrificial session, a sattra, with their own kings as priests. “By this the serpents won death away; they win death away who undertake this. Therefore they leave behind their worn-out skin and creep out beyond it” (PB 25.15.4). Caland’s commentary, from the Baudhāyana ritual manual, says the serpent kings performed it in human form, “desirous of obtaining poison” (Caland 1931, pp. 641–642). The snake’s renewal is a rite. Knowledge is its price, and venom comes with it. People who know the rite can undertake it too.

This is what the Eve Theory of Consciousness predicts the serpent would be holding. EToC holds that the inner self was discovered, that women discovered it first, and that it was taught to men in initiation. The serpent stands for that knowledge, and the snake cult used venom as its sacrament. A being who can say “I” can see that it will die, and can imagine a self that leaves the body like a slough. Genesis puts the two together: the eyes are opened, and dust returns to dust. The immortality the serpent keeps is the other face of that knowledge, a self that goes on after the skin is shed.

Look at who holds the renewal at the start of these stories. It is an old woman, again and again. She is Ul-ta-marama, the Change-skin of the world. She is the Kai grandmother and the Admiralty mother, and the To Koolawi grandmother who hung her old skin on a tree. In Kiwai it is Móle-ége, who teaches her worm-people where to break the skin. In the Amazon it is a girl at her first menstruation, and an old woman who should have answered the serpent’s cry. The men who carry the secret onward get it wrong: To Korvuvu, Marunogere and his son with the bow. Women had the technique first, and its passage to men went badly. That is the order EToC proposes for the self.

The serpent’s renewal also comes back as venom. The Greek snake took the ass’s thirst along with the drug against old age, and its bite now passes on the thirst. Aramemb’s medicine went down a snake’s throat. Pseudo-Jonathan’s serpent sheds every seven years with “the poison of death” in its mouth. The Vedic serpents held their rite “desirous of obtaining poison”. The Tukuna drink of the immortals was licked up by the creatures that shed, and anyone who wants to join the immortals must drink. The post Venom Is the Fruit of Knowledge argues that the serpent’s gift was a real sacrament. The stories say that what the snake took from us went into its mouth.

Did one story spread around the world? #

It looks very much like it. The tellings cluster. The old woman who sheds her skin and is not recognised runs in an unbroken chain through Melanesia and Island Southeast Asia, from Vanuatu and the Solomons through New Guinea and Manus to Sulawesi. These are the shores of the Austronesian voyages and of the older Papuan peoples they met. Frazer called it “this widely diffused tale” (p. 70) and concluded, “Tales of this sort are widely diffused throughout the world” (p. 76). The garbled message fills Africa from the Cape to the Gold Coast. The Oromo version joins the message to the skin, and the Tolai and Vietnamese do the same on the far side of the Indian Ocean. The serpent that alone answers God’s offer speaks nearly the same words on Lake Tanganyika and in North Borneo: “I do”; “I can”.

Language carries the idea under the stories. Greek calls a snake’s slough its “old age”, and the Vedic slough is the jīrṇā tvac, the “worn-out skin” (PB 25.15.4), from the same root for growing old. Babylon wrote the story down, Ibycus sang it in the sixth century BC, and the Targum dressed Adam in the serpent’s skin, while South American tellers were still giving their versions to visitors in the twentieth century.

A story this widespread, with turns this specific, is best read as one very old story that travelled and was retold, with the serpent always at its centre. The post The Crone and the Origin of Death traces the phylogenetic work on its branches. The essay Language Breaks Eden argues that the Fall is a memory of speech and the self arriving. The cast-skin story is the part of that memory that explains death.

The tellings at a glance #

The case #

Put the tellings side by side and the case is simple. From the Pacific islands to Africa, Asia, the Mediterranean and the Amazon, people say that renewal was ours and the serpent has it now. They tell how it was lost in a few fixed ways: a woman seen and not recognised, a medicine poured into the wrong mouth, an offer slept through, a message turned around. The same turns recur from Vanuatu to Lake Tanganyika and from the Solimões to Sulawesi. The oldest written telling, in Gilgamesh, ends with a snake shedding its skin. The most famous, in Genesis, has a serpent that gives knowledge, humans told they will return to dust, and coats of skins, which the Targum says were the serpent’s.

The serpent is chosen for a reason. It is the one creature that visibly leaves its old self behind and goes on, and that is the one thing a self-aware mind most wants to do. The stories agree that the secret was once in human hands, often an old woman’s. They agree that it was lost at the moment someone failed to recognise the self inside the changed body. They agree that the serpent kept it, along with the poison in its mouth.

The Eve Theory gives that agreement a history. Somewhere in the deep past people learned that they had selves. Knowing that, they knew they would die, and they began to hope that the self could leave the body as a snake leaves its skin. That knowledge was taught, women first, and handed to men in rites that strip the novice, kill him in play, and bring him out new. Marunogere founded such a rite to make people live and kept a dead man’s flesh as its medicine. The Vedic serpents ran the rite themselves. Genesis kept the bargain and dropped the shedding: the serpent gave knowledge, and humans got death with it. Everywhere else, people remembered that the serpent kept the skin.

Sources #

1. Frazer, J. G. Folk-Lore in the Old Testament: Studies in Comparative Religion, Legend and Law, vol. I. London: Macmillan, 1918. Ch. II, “The Fall of Man”, pp. 45–77.
2. Landtman, Gunnar. “The Folk-Tales of the Kiwai Papuans.” Acta Societatis Scientiarum Fennicae 47. Helsingfors, 1917. Pp. 109–110, 341–344.
3. Thompson, R. Campbell. The Epic of Gilgamish: A New Translation. London: Luzac, 1928. Pp. 55–56.
4. Thompson, R. Campbell. The Epic of Gilgamish: Text, Transliteration, and Notes. Oxford: Clarendon, 1930. P. 89 (note to XI 289).
5. Aelian. De natura animalium 6.51. In Claudii Aeliani De natura animalium libri XVII, ed. R. Hercher, vol. I. Leipzig: Teubner, 1864. Pp. 162–163.
6. Wirz, Paul. Religion und Mythus der Marind-anim von Holländisch-Süd-Neu-Guinea und deren totemistisch-soziale Gliederung. Inaugural dissertation, Basel, 1921. Pp. 47–49.
7. Barbosa Rodrigues, J. Poranduba Amazonense ou Kochiyma-uara porandub, 1872–1887. Rio de Janeiro: Leuzinger, 1890. Pp. 233–235 (“Boia açu”).
8. Nimuendajú, Curt. The Tukuna. Ed. R. H. Lowie, tr. W. D. Hohenthal. University of California Publications in American Archaeology and Ethnology 45. Berkeley, 1952. Pp. 135–136.
9. Etheridge, J. W., tr. The Targums of Onkelos and Jonathan Ben Uzziel on the Pentateuch, vol. I: Genesis and Exodus. London: Longman, 1862. Pp. 166, 168.
10. Howitt, A. W. The Native Tribes of South-East Australia. London: Macmillan, 1904. Appendix, pp. 803–805 (“Ngura-wordu-punnuna: A Dieri Legend”, after O. Siebert).
11. Eggeling, Julius, tr. The Satapatha-Brâhmana, part IV and part V. Sacred Books of the East 43–44. Oxford, 1897–1900. SBE 43 pp. 357–358 (ŚB 10.4.3.9); SBE 44 p. 38 (ŚB 11.2.6.13).
12. Müller, F. Max, tr. The Upanishads, part II. Sacred Books of the East 15. Oxford, 1884. P. 177 (Bṛhadāraṇyaka 4.4.7).
13. Caland, W., tr. Pañcaviṃśa-Brāhmaṇa: The Brāhmaṇa of Twenty Five Chapters. Bibliotheca Indica 255. Calcutta, 1931. Pp. 641–642 (PB 25.15).
14. The Holy Bible, King James Version. Genesis 3.