There is no doubt that in the impression of ordinary people, snakes are the epitome of poison, evil and ugliness, and they are terrible "bugs" that everyone dare not avoid. So, would you be surprised if it is sometimes endowed with the factors of goodness and beauty? It sounds as if it contradicts our life experience. However, as long as we put the image of snake in the background of Chinese and western cultures, we will find that it is indeed like this: snakes also have two sides.
First, the contradiction of snakes is the most concentrated and prominent in people's daily life customs.
It is an obvious fact that the deadly power of snake venom and people's fear of snakes have caused snakes to become a vicious and terrible symbol in western vocabulary. For example, the Spanish "two-headed snake" is a famous allusion based on this symbolic meaning. In Agamemnon, one of the trilogy of King Orestes, the father of ancient Greek tragedy, Clytemy Stragin cheated on her husband Agamemnon and killed him with her lover, so she was cursed as a "two-headed snake". There are still many western allusions that use snakes as symbols to reveal negative features. For example, "Medusa's head" is a metaphor for something terrible or ugly. The so-called "frozen snake" comes from Aesop's fable, warning people that evil people (or animals) will never change their nature anyway. If good people pity the wicked, they will only be hurt by the wicked in the end. From the later literary works, we can also see the language habits of westerners in this regard. For example, in Shakespeare's representative tragedy Hamlet, Claudius lied to the people of China to cover up the truth of his usurpation, saying that a poisonous snake killed the old king who was sleeping in the garden, and the ghost of the old king cursed and said, "The snake that poisoned your father wore a crown."
At the same time, the habits and customs of westerners also affirm the positive characteristics of snakes. According to the legend of ancient Greece and Rome, the Acropolis is guarded by a giant snake, which is said to symbolize the soul of the old king of Athens and the snake man Erechtheus. It is also popular in Greece to sprinkle milk on the graves of the dead and turn them into snakes. The custom of "jumping snakes" is still popular there, and big snakes are often worshipped in temples to show gratitude to snakes.
In China people's life customs, on the one hand, in their own vocabulary system, especially in their daily language, China people regard snakes as a symbol of sinister and sinister, an embodiment of ugliness and terror, an endless representative, and an embodiment of hostile forces to use, warn or curse. Such as: startle the snake, lure the snake out of the hole, ghosts and so on. Folks even call beautiful women whose words and deeds are not praised by ordinary people "beautiful snakes" and women's slender limbs "water snake waist" ... and so on, which can be described as colorful.
On the other hand, snakes have a positive symbolic significance in China people's living habits. For example, the snake is one of the 12 zodiac animals, and it ranks among the 12 animals representing the twelve branches of the earth to remember the year of birth. In this folk custom, the negative factors of snakes are undoubtedly excluded or deliberately ignored. "The Book of Songs Four Dry" says: "Wei Wei snake, auspicious woman." It means that dreaming of snakes is a good sign for giving birth to a daughter. Among all snakes, the "two-headed snake" is a concrete mascot. It is said that whoever sees this strange snake, which looks like a purple robe, is as thick as a wheel and as long as an axis, and holds its red head high when it hears thunder, will become an emperor. In ancient China, the theory of Yin-Yang and Five Elements was about the origin of the universe. It connects the five elements (gold, wood, water, fire and earth) with the four seasons, and then with the folk gods. Four symbolic animals seem to represent four directions: Qinglong represents the East, Suzaku represents the South, White Tiger represents the West, and Xuanwu represents the North. Xuanwu is a combination of tortoise and snake, which is not only the god of the north, but also the god of water. Here, snakes are regarded as sacred objects together with several other animals. They represent the four sides of the universe and have a far-reaching impact on the prosperity and territorial integrity of the country.
2. As early as 6000 BC to around 1600 BC, a natural religion (nature worship) worshipped two kinds of gods-the goddess of family and the goddess of nature. The symbol of the former was a long snake.
Ancient Greek mythology also depicts that both the goddess of wisdom and the goddess of victory hold a snake-shaped shield in their hands, the hair of the vengeance itself is like a snake, and Asclepius, the god of medicine, is leaning on a crutch coiled by a long snake, and so on. Obviously, snakes were signs and symbols used by people at that time to show off and deter the enemy. As Marx said: "Any myth uses imagination and imagination to conquer, dominate and visualize the forces of nature." We have reason to believe that at that time, when the level of productivity was extremely low and the ability of human beings to resist natural disasters was extremely poor, the supremacy of snakes was entirely caused by human fears and worries about it.
The following situation has changed a little. In the Middle Ages, people's attitudes and feelings towards snakes turned more into disgust and disgust. A classic example is that in the west, the snake in the Bible, the main classic of Christianity, gives people the first impression that it is a villain. It was the snake that made Eve violate God's forbidden law, ate the forbidden fruit secretly, and was finally driven out of the Garden of Eden, and was punished for enduring pregnancy and childbirth forever. Therefore, snakes are described as "more cunning" creatures than all creatures in the wild. In fact, in the Bible, the snake has another symbolic meaning. In Numbers, although the salamander sent by God killed many Israelis, it is precisely because of this that the "chosen people of God" themselves were reborn: under the punishment of poisonous snakes, the living Israelis were greatly afraid of death and sincerely repented of blaspheming God and Jesus, so God told Moses to make a salamander.
It can be said that ancient westerners' worship and belief in snakes was formed and maintained for a long time under this complex mentality of hate and fear.
In ancient China, people's attitudes towards snakes were also complicated. First of all, fear is inevitable, which can be seen from the earliest greeting "There is no snake (it)". In the harsh natural environment of ancient times, although wild animals are fierce and can be guarded against, poisonous snakes are hard to prevent. For the ancients who had not yet established a fixed residential village at that time, being bitten by a snake could be disabled or even dead at any time.
But on the whole, snakes have never been so bad in the eyes of China people as in the eyes of westerners. For example, The Classic of Mountains and Seas records that there was a totem-believing tribe in ancient China, among which "snakes were totems". In addition, the gods in the stories in the book, such as Kuafu, Adults, Zai Tian, Yan Huai, etc. All of them are snakes or are surrounded by snakes.
Third, literature is a reflection of life. Social culture and collective consciousness determine the basic characteristics of snake images in literature.
Judging from the description of western literature, the prominent characteristics of snakes are, of course, its threat to human beings and people's aversion to it. Roman poet Ovid's Metamorphosis also said that after Oedipus got married, his bride and fairies walked on the grass and were bitten by a snake on their ankles and died. Virgil's Enid describes the story of laocoon and his two sons being strangled by a python, which shows that the snake is also deadly and terrible. In western fables, from Aesop's fable in ancient Greece to La Fontaine's fable in France in the classical period to krylov's fable in Russia at the beginning of the 9th century, there are all fables about farmers and snakes, which embodies the despicable "villain" characteristic that snakes can only harm people without reporting.
These descriptions further show that the corresponding relationship between snake and ugliness, poison and evil is relatively fixed in the consciousness and concept of westerners. This is basically consistent with the dominant characteristics of snakes described in Chinese literature. In China's myths and legends and other literary descriptions, snakes are often regarded as monsters and ominous things that bring misfortune and disaster to human beings. For example, the legendary god of flood is Xiang Liu, and there are "nine poems with a face and a snake body". Wherever this evil spirit goes, the land becomes Zeguo.
At the same time, there are also works in Chinese and western literature that give snakes some kind of humanity. For example, at the beginning of chapter 25 of the Divine Comedy "Hell", Dante saw a thief and a blasphemous sinner strangled alive by a snake carrying out sacred teachings, and the poet couldn't help shouting admiringly: "Since then, snakes have become my friends." Similarly, in China's literary works, snakes are regarded as the embodiment of beautiful ideals. For example, in The Legend of the White Snake, the white snake girl who boldly pursues human love life and has a fearless spirit of resistance, the white snake here is no longer the embodiment of hurting human beings, but a positive image that is touching and sympathetic.
Of course, on the whole, the image of snake in literary works is still "Yu", and its poisonous, ugly and evil characteristics and its frightening and hateful side are undoubtedly the main body of literary works.
From the above overview of Chinese and western snake culture, we get an enlightenment: everything has its duality or even multifaceted, so they have rich connotations and multiple meanings, and there are also preconditions that people cannot simply affirm or deny. The snake is really fierce and ugly in essence, but it cannot be denied that due to some of its characteristics and functions, when it is used as a carrier of a cultural phenomenon, it may appear as a positive image in some art forms under a special background, or it may be endowed with some other characteristics. It should be said that only such an understanding can conform to the dialectics of human social life at all times and in all countries.
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