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SNAKES AND DEATH

Sepulchres of antiquity
When the Trojan hero Aeneas secretly left his mistress Dido, queen of Carthago, he set off with his warriors to the island of Acestes, where the dead body of his father had rested for a ‘year ring of months’. Aeneas used this occasion to visit the grave of his father and to celebrate this anniversary. Here in due libation he pours on the ground two goblets of unmixed wine, two of fresh milk, two of the blood of victims. Then he calls his father. So had he spoken, when from the foot of the shrine a slippery serpent trailed seven huge coils, fold upon fold seven times, peacefully circling the mound and gliding among the altars; his back chequered with blue spots, and his scales ablaze with the sheen of dappled gold, even as in the clouds the rainbow darts a thousand shifting tints athwart the sun. Aeneas saw the snake slide along crockery to the sacrifices and lick them up and withdraw into the sepulchre.
The future spouse of Lavinia observed this event with particular pleasure. This sort of pleasure is not so understandable for modern readers at first. This has to do with the following ancient conception. In olden times one presented ones ancestors, in particular the valorous amongst them, as snakes (also dragons). Also after their death these ancestors had to be fed One could do this in the same way that Aeneas used, as described above, by putting the sacrifice on the altar. But a liquid sacrifice was also sometimes poured in a passage that had been dug in the sepulchre hillock. In the past it was believed that the dead could only take the sacrificed food and drinks if they manifested themselves in another form. That they did this in the form of a snake was easier to understand. The snake was considered as a chthonic animal, this means, as belonging to this earth. They appear unexpectedly from holes and rock formations and disappear just as mysteriously. In this way they could be easily given the title of messenger between those above and underground.

‘Modern sepulchres’
Sepulchres of a Christian deceased will rarely be seen decorated with pagan icons. For this reason it seemed nice give some attention to the image here taken, which I found on a sepulchre on the Cimetière de Montparnasse in Paris. On a vertical stone next to the information about the deceased there was a metal plate attached. This shows how a snake coils itself around the sacrifice and seems to drink from it. Or is this perhaps an ash urn, and the dead who is metamorphosed into a snake that has just finished consuming a sacrifice, retreating back into the urn to become ash yet again?

First published in Litteratura Serpentium, 24 (2004).