Vishwaroopam and Florida

We’ve found the culprits. We know who dun it. It’s them Adam and Eve, residents of Eden Gardens, Paradise, PL24 2SG. They inspired the Cruella de Vils slaughtering innocent baby pythons in Florida.

There are serious arguments being made for the extermination of the Florida python. Learned Associate Professors believe that the python is a threat to delicately balanced ecosystems. Yet, I can’t help noticing that other non-native species that are spreading through the American south, like, for instance, wild hogs, are treated differently. Hogs are also large, potentially violent, omnivorous, fast breeding, adaptive, mobile, elusive, and are potentially upsetting the balance of many delicate American ecosystems. But unlike pythons, nobody is trying to wipe them out. Why?

My hunch is that this is simply because pythons are snakes. Snakes have had bad rap, negative symbolic associations, ever since they were cast, through no fault of their own, in the villain’s role in the legend of Adam and Eve. Imagine how easily a magpie, symbolizing excessive attraction to superficial beauty, could have prompted Eve to eat the forbidden fruit. But mythology can't easily be undone, and this slander of serpents has played through to modern pop-myths. Like, in Harry Potter, Gryffindor's emblem is a lion, but Slytherin's is a serpent?

I find this uniformly negative portrayal of snakes hard to relate to, probably because snakes are often portrayed in positive light in Indian iconography. Shiva has a garland of cobras coiled around his neck. The traditional depiction of Maha Vishnu, Vishwaroopam, shows him reclining on his friend and protector Adisesha, the sire of the serpents. In some traditions, Adisesha accompanies Maha Vishnu to earth to be his best friend during his avatars, like Krishna and Balarama or Rama and Lakshmana. Vasuki, the king of the serpents, churns the ocean of milk to find Amrit, the nectar of immortality, which the beautiful Mohini delivers to the good Devas rather than the evil Asuras.

Not all Indian snakes are good; Krishna tames the evil ten-headed Kaaliya by dancing on his heads. But, Indian snakes are more good than bad, and in that context, it feels natural to revere real snakes that live near people. It feels natural for Wildlife SOS, a charity I support, to send me email about how they’ve rescued lost or injured pythons. Or for the Chinese zodiac to associate the snake with wisdom, intelligence and grace.

Once, western cultures also depicted snakes in positive light. The snakes coiled around medicine’s Hippocratic staff represent life itself. The Mediterranean Tree of Life once showed a serpent twined around the trunk of a flowering tree, the fertile and the virile, yin and yang. Much that was beautiful was lost in Adam and Eve’s deadly smear campaign.

But maybe, just maybe, the end is in sight. Maybe the magic of Disney can undo two millennia of defamation and injustice. I watched The Princess and the Frog recently. It features Disney’s first black heroine, Tiana, who is not a princess born into riches but an entrepreneur who shapes her own destiny. The fairy godmother who helps Tiana triumph over evil is not some flitty, flighty pretty little thing. She is a tough old lady who knows a thing or two about using Tabasco sauce, who lives out in the bayou. Her name is Mama Odie, and her constant companion is, yes!, a python. At home and happy in Louisiana. Walt Disney Studios may have intuitively understood and accepted America’s serpentine future in a way that the learned Associate Professors have not.