The comparative milk-suckling reptile

Abstract

Cross-cultural folk beliefs about milk-suckling or milk-drinking amphibians and reptiles have long been noted by scholars. European dialectal folklore, for instance, has countless instances of cow-suckling and milk-stealing animals including butterflies, reptiles, batrachians, hares, hedgehogs and nocturnal birds. These creatures are regularly said to sneak into the domestic space at night to suck life-giving milk or blood from cattle and women. The early documentary evidence for this set of ideas, which relies, in great part, on the motif of breasts or udders suckled by a snake or similar animals such as toads or lizards, has not yet received the study it so richly deserves. Ideally, a comparative study of the milk-suckling reptile (both animal-human and animal-animal) would be carried out across the full gamut of relevant disciplines including ethnology, linguistics, philology, folklore and historicalreligious studies: this would naturally include pre-modern written references and an analysis of their transmission. This paper aims to open up new avenues for research on the traditional fondness of snakes for milk, a truly 'impossible biology'. It is built around several known and little known premodern literary and iconographic sources -examples can be found from much of Eurasia -and adopts an interdisciplinary and retrospective comparative method.

Monstrous animal siblings in Europe

“…When the mother sees this, she fears for her child and kills the snake. Soon the child becomes ill and dies» (Uther, 2004: 165-166; on ATU 285 see further Ermacora, 2017a;Rölleke, 2020). The following legend recorded in a rural milieu in Shanti Nagar, in northern India, 1958India, -1959, is a good representative of the snake-twin phenomenon.…”

Revisión del conflicto entre los humanos y las serpientes en México: origen, mitigación y perspectivas

“…Las serpientes son probablemente los animales de los que más mitos y leyendas existen y resulta muy difícil desarraigar prejuicios que tienen antecedentes muy antiguos (Casas-Andreu, 2000;Ermacora, 2017;Paulino, 2018). Muchos de estos mitos y leyendas surgen de la exageración, otros a partir de observaciones o interpretaciones equivocadas (Klauber, 1982) y otros son producto de ciertos prejuicios y falta de información, ya que por lo general no se conocen aspectos básicos de la biología, la conducta y el papel que desempeñan las serpientes en los ecosistemas, principalmente debido a sus hábitos nocturnos y por ser poco detectables en algunos hábitats (Aguilar-López, 2016).…”