by Andrea S. Lee
Wild & HumanI have an unconventional take on the Year of the Snake, so just hear me out. It’s a creature with nuanced meaning and symbolism across cultures. Shedding its outer skin in cyclical fashion to renew its physical appearance, a snake is rebirth and regeneration. It is an end and it is a new beginning. It is an aversion. It is terrifying. It is life. It is death. It is a cycle unto eternity. In its multiplicity its meaning is as flexible as its own scaly, slender, slithering body. It meets you wherever you are in the life-death-life cycle.
My father was tall and blonde just like his Germanic midwestern rooting in small town Missouri. When our family moved to Southern California, its cultural richness became our feast. My dad was especially fond of early Saturday morning visits to Los Angeles Chinatown where my brother Dean and I would run our fingers over silk thread embroidered journals, smell the incense and stuff our faces with rice paper candies. I was eleven years old when one Saturday in February we attended a Chinese New Year festival in Chinatown. We walked away with necklaces displaying little silver Chinese character charms for each of our zodiacs. Snake, Tiger, Horse; Dad, Me, Dean. When Dad took his first trip to China, and with subsequent trips to far flung Asian bucket-list locations, even more snakes, tigers and horses appeared.
My dad would have been 72 years old this Year of the Snake, but he passed away in 2023. His battle with liver cancer was short. I sometimes still hear his voice in unexpected places like at yoga on Thursday night, when - doubled over and staring at my feet - into my mind clear as an empty room echoes a voice,“Honey, it was my time to go.” There was also that time I dreamt about him on my birthday.
It’s death, but it's life too. Time traveling from Los Angeles Chinatown 1997 to Singapore 2024, my husband and I with our two children arrived islandside last year just days before the dizzying onslaught of Chinese New Year family events and meals. At one of these events, the matriarch of my Singaporean husband’s family, having observed me in a sea of thirty Yuens, Lees, Wongs, Woos and Hos, exclaimed with amazement that I fit in so easily with the rest of the family. I have a tall, blonde man from the midwest to thank for that. To him that would have been the greatest compliment. Even in his absence, mine is a new life with all of its relationships in fragrant bloom.
It's the ouroboros, a Greek word used to describe the image of a serpent eating its own tail in unending revolution. Life followed by death and then life again tied to the reality of shedding the old to unveil the new. You know what snakes also represent to a surprisingly large number of people: fear. Fear and crawling skin and heightened breathing. Seeing a snake or even just thinking of one elicits terror in many people. It's not a unique reaction either. An estimated 33% of the human population has a strong fear of snakes. In the United States, according to a YouGov 2014 survey of one thousand Americans, 64% of people have a fear of snakes coming in as the #1 fear of those polled, followed by a fear of heights (57%) and public speaking (56%). In a similar poll in Britain, snakes came in #3 after heights and public speaking. According to this data, it's a snakes vs. humans situation to many people.
In the snake corner: there are reportedly between 3,600-4000 species of snakes worldwide. The exact number is on the uptick with many species living in Africa, Asia and Latin America where reporting of new species is not as common or slowcoming. Of the total slithering population, 600 species are poisonous.
In the human corner: An estimated 5.4 million people are bitten by venomous snakes each year, resulting in between 81,000 and 138,000 deaths worldwide according to the World Health Organization (WHO, 2023). By comparison, in the United States approximately 7,000 to 8,000 venomous snake bites occur each year, resulting in between 5 to 10 deaths (Bawaskar & Bawaskar, 2019). Noteworthily, bee stings account for significantly more deaths than snake bites in the United States (Warrell, 2019).
The difference in statistics for developing vs. developed countries comes down to medical infrastructure and access to the appropriate antivenoms. Both are required for timely treatment of an envenomed bite, determining a life or death outcome. In light of this, it makes sense that rural farmers and children in low and middle-income countries are the most common victims of envenomed snakebites. It's safe to say that if you are reading this article on a laptop with indoor plumbing close by you are not very likely to be bitten by a poisonous snake and die. But yet we are still afraid of snakes, a lot of us are. (Ok, so that was probably more information about snakes and snake bites from WHO than you thought you’d read in this article.)
A team at Sweden’s Karolinska Institute led by Arne Ohman studied this fear of snakes in 2001 and their findings suggest that our perception of snakes has been shaped by evolution, harkening back to a time when we lived in heightened antagonism with poisonous reptiles. Ohman and his team studied the human eye and the speed at which it recognizes a snake within a landscape compared to other details. The Karolinska Institute study tested this by showing test subjects a slideshow of images, instructing the participants to click handheld switches every time a snake appeared on the screen. The results from this “scary slideshow” showed that the participants visually registered the image of a snake more quickly than other images, regardless of where it was in the visual frame. The speed of recognition for all other images depended on factors such as size and location in the visual frame. This study concluded that the snakes were successful in capturing the attention of the participants the fastest and thus convincingly an evolutionarily threatening stimuli.
In enters the theory of evolutionary delay which states that it takes an estimated 50,000 years for an adaptation to show up in the human genome (Deaner & Nunn, 1999). This means that an observed trait in behavior or appearance can be seen as an adaptation in response to conditions that existed at least 50,000 years prior, and not as they are today. Our hunter-gatherer ancestors had a very different lifestyle with different priorities than our modern life. This sheds new and refreshing light on the problems we face today - cancer, heart disease, myopia, diabetes, loneliness and depression. Our bodies and brains are designed to best handle life the way it was at a much different time.
Long story short - we’ve way outgrown our fear of snakes. It’s an adaptation that served us 50,000 years ago and actually doesn’t reflect the reality of our modern daily life and its unique challenges. The “scary slideshow” from the Karolinska Institute study is not just a series of images played in a soundproof chamber, but also the countless possibilities and anxieties I run in my own head at 4am as I lay awake. Over the years I’ve compiled my own personal “scary slideshow” - things that are no longer daily occurrences, yet I carry them forward in my assumptions and autopilot thoughts. The snake reminds me to look deeper and reassess. I’ve outgrown these fears now and they no longer serve me. Maybe instead of helping, they are even holding me back. In the same way that the snake sheds its skin to prepare for the new, we also create room for the next step and next move where the old used to be. There are insecurities to let die and dreams to go chase instead. There are things that we make small that actually need to be fed and let grow.
The Year of the Snake is renewal. Across cultures that’s its universal meaning. Renewal happens when we reassess the current state and move in a new direction. While stumbling upon a snake on the Singapore Zoo nighttime safari is still not very high on my preferred list, I might pause and reflect on why that thought even crosses my mind as we pull into the carpark.
References
Bawaskar, H. S., & Bawaskar, P. H. (2019). Snakebite envenoming. Lancet (London, England), 393(10167), 131. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0140-6736(18)32745-4
Deaner, R. O., & Nunn, C. L. (1999). How quickly do brains catch up with bodies? A comparative method for detecting evolutionary lag. Proceedings. Biological sciences, 266(1420), 687–694. https://doi.org/10.1098/rspb.1999.0690
Öhman, A., Flykt, A., & Esteves, F. (2001). Emotion drives attention: detecting the snake in the grass. Journal of experimental psychology. General, 130(3), 466–478. https://doi.org/10.1037/0096-3445.130.3.466
Warrell D. A. (2019). Venomous Bites, Stings, and Poisoning: An Update. Infectious disease clinics of North America, 33(1), 17–38. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.idc.2018.10.001
World Health Organization: WHO. (2023, September 12). Snakebite envenoming. https://www.who.int/news-room/fact-sheets/detail/snakebite-envenoming
 | Andrea Lee’s column “Wild and Human” explores nature and how we relate to it, as well as the beauty in being both primitive (wild) and civilized (human) in our modern world. Her column is inspired by her California roots and her family’s recent move from the San Francisco Bay Area to Singapore. |
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