My Life As A Mythic Detective

This class posed several issues for me that made becoming a “mythic detective” extremely difficult.  But the most difficult part for me was probably my major and how my mind works.  I’ve been working on my history degree since before college started, when I took AP history classes in high school.  My passion lies in history and f people spend time around me, they can see that I will talk about the Russian Revolution or the assassination of Franz Ferdinand for no reason.  In everything that I do, I look for historical significance, and I made my opinions and rationales based off of how I see things. 

In this class though, we were asked to look at everything through a mythical lens.  That is something that contradicts the way that my mind is programmed, but I have found ways to work within this differentiation.  My senior capstone became the most random, but effective way of merging history and mythology.  One of the things that I never thought I would be doing as a history major is writing a twenty five page paper on animal history.  The semester started with my entire class having a serious sense of confusion—none of us had any idea how to write about animals and their role in history.  We did not even consider the question of whether they have agency.  But then, towards the beginning of the semester, we talked about the staff of Asclepius and its relation to the goddess Hygenia and the historical significance of the early Roman versions of healing places.  And then we talked about the caduceus and the fact that it has become for medicine.  And to that effect, a symbol of medical associations around the world.  Both of these symbols represent a history of medicine in some manner.  Without even realizing it, I began to form a thesis about the role of snakes as symbols in history. 

I never would have considered the significance of snakes in a historical setting before this class started, mostly because they are the most terrifying creature, ever, to me.  But it seemed like mythology was pushing me to study snakes.  I do not think that this was a coincidence at all.  The fact that I hate snakes is completely rational, as I have learned in the last few weeks, but there were too many situations where snakes came up in conversations—whether in class or in conversations with my friends.  The first was the staff, and the second was the caduceus.  But then, every few days, our conversations in class would veer back to snakes.  Even our midterm had snakes.  When we had to sit down and draw ourselves hugging trees, but our arms all had to be snakes, I was not happy ( I also had not chosen snakes as my capstone topic yet).  I sat there and drew my picture, seeing it as out hug a tree assignment, as well as a really cruel joke.  But then I realized that it’s just a representation of us as the snake, doing something that has been repeated time and time again in different ways, with different snakes, throughout time.  And the origin of this is myth. 

I decided snakes would be my capstone topic about a week after drawing myself as the snake during the midterm, and since then, everything I do, I’m thinking about snakes or seeing them.  The final decision to make that my topic was when my friend Becca told me a story about her and her little brother unwrapping snakes from trees and using them to scare their parents, while they were on a camping trip.  I’ve known Becca for a few years and she had never told me that story before even though we talk about pranks and our families all the time.  That was one more sign that snakes were taking over my life—even in a normal, everyday conversation, I was hearing about snakes being wrapped around trees. So now, I wake up thinking about them, and I fall asleep thinking about them.  And it’s horrible.  Seeing the thing that you fear everywhere is just so wrong on so many levels. 

At the same time though, it’s pretty cool.  This mythological reasoning that is fueling my research is helping me with a lot of things.   I’m finally able to watch all of the Harry Potter movies instead of covering my face and hiding myself when there is a snake on screen.  That is definitely not something that I ever thought I would be able to do.  Seeing snakes everywhere is also making me deal with my larger fear of snakes.  The snakes in Harry Potter are, for the most part, fake.  They’re models and computer generated images.  But I have to look at pictures of snakes and read about attacks every day.   There are two newspaper articles that are from 1904 and 2002, where I was literally picturing the staff of Asclepius in my head while I was reading.  The 1904 article was about a snake wrapped around a piece of driftwood, floating down a river.  The main point of the article was not the snake, but the panic that it caused and the one hundred people that died because of their fear.  But in all reality, this snake was just floating along, without really bothering anyone.  The reality that I saw in this article is that the snake was literally just a mythic representation, maybe it was showing the people in India to not be scared, but it was misinterpreted (like snakes often are) and a disaster happened.  It made me rethink my fear of snakes for a minute.  I’m so used to seeing snakes as this terrible force that can do damage, even when it is a baby snake or it isn't poisonous; but in that instant, I saw the situation from the point of the snake.  It did nothing wrong.  The other article actually had nothing to do with snakes and trees, so I really should not have seen the caduceus or staff of Asclepius in it at all, but I did.  A boa constrictor was found in a park in Queens, NY and a man went up to it, with NO fear, and let the snake slither around his arm until it was completely coiled.  I feel that this is a little bit of a stretch, but anytime the snake wraps around something, I feel like it is a representation of a tree now.  And literally, it was just a man’s arm.  But it was the key point of the story.  And the snake did nothing to the man.  He took it home, fed it, and kept it warm until animal control could come collect it.  Stories like this make me so confused because I have this severe need to make snakes evil and dangerous, but stories like these are making me see the entire species in a different light. 

I know now that less than fifteen percent of snakes are venomous, making my fear more irrational.  I think that my capstone project was myth’s way of helping me with my fears.  A species of animal has never taken up so much space in my brain and my day to day life.  I am a very human-centered historian and I am completely okay with that, but I am coming to terms with the fact that I actually like reading about snakes.  That doesn't mean that I will ever get a snake as a pet, or probably be able to go into the reptile house at the Denver Zoo without freaking out.  But it is becoming easier to see pictures of snakes on paper, or seeing a representation of them in a drawing or in my head before I close my eyes, without going into a full-on panic attack.  I’m not going to stop fearing them because I don’t think that is possible, but there is a chance that I will continue to do historical research on snakes for a longer period in my life.  And I genuinely believe that I can thank mythology for that.  For making me challenge myself and question my reasoning for being scared of an animal because it made me do research and understand my fear, and it is also making me see the caduceus and staff of Asclepius everywhere (which I actually kind of like).