The ancient enemy of humanity

And why we are afraid of what lurks in the darkness

When I was a child, I had one of the most horrifying experiences of my life.

I was startled from my sleep by an unnameable noise emanating from beyond my bedroom door. The sound was so nauseating that I didn’t want to believe it was real… no earthly thing could make that sickening slithering sound. I wanted to believe it was a nightmare, but it couldn’t be— I had just been jolted out of another dream.  

Just when I had convinced myself it was a figment of my imagination, I heard it again. Terror seized me and strangled the air out of my lungs. I couldn’t move a muscle. Something was definitely out there. 

I felt possessed by fear. Then, one by one, a succession of hallucinated horrors paraded in my mind. Was it some wretched demon lurking outside my door? Some abominable alien? Maybe something even worse, something more monstrous, inconceivable, mind-shattering, gut-wrenching…

That’s when I blacked out. I don't recall anything else. I just woke up the next morning. 

Maybe I was dreaming after all, but it felt too real. There was a visceral quality to the experience that I couldn’t shake. Something was there, I was sure of that. What it was exactly, I may never know. Yet it stayed with me. All those imagined monsters returned night after night, playing out an endless horror show every time I closed my eyes.  Disgusting serpentine silhouettes oozing venom between their scales, grotesque composites of man and beast, infernal satanic minions hemorrhaging viscous purple bile from their hideous maws, amorphous alien fiends with unnatural appendages and abhorrent eyes— all of them paid me a unwelcome visit when I returned to my bed.. 

It is impossible to forget the nameless horror I experienced. Though time may have softened its edges, even decades later, whenever I think of that night my skin crawls, my stomach tightens, and my palms sweat.

Reflection

What exactly was I afraid of? And what was the basis for all these imagined monstrosities? Surely I didn’t create them… And yet despite their bizarre appearance, completely disconnected from reality, they had some connection with real concepts, with familiar monsters. How else would I be able to describe them to you?

I had to find answers to these questions. My experience was so vivid and arresting that I knew there must be a deeper truth underneath it. To confront my terrors and unravel this mystery, I had to go back. Far back— beyond my childhood and into the realms of history, mythology, and religion. I had to understand the origins of my monsters. I had to extract their essences, and distill their dreadfulness. 

What I found is that while the monsters that crept through my mind were personalized, they are also universal. Across cultures and throughout centuries, several central themes recur, even, strangely, among societies that could not have communicated with each other. 

In every part of the world and at every point in history, you’ll find several familiar categories. Aliens, demons, ghosts, zombies, trolls, orcs, werewolves, and vampires haunt our imagination. 

But why? What do they all have in common? What makes them so terrifying? And why do we keep telling stories about them?

Dust-Eater

The oldest and most ancient enemy of humanity is the serpent. In the Garden of Eden, the devil himself took on the form of a snake to deceive our ancestors and forever cast them out of paradise.¹ According to the Bible, that was our first and greatest mistake, and the source of all our troubles since. Our world is broken and full of suffering, discord, anger, and evil— all because of a fiendish serpent.

However, the snake is not confined to the Judeo-Christian tradition. If it were, we could dismiss it as nothing more than a fanciful metaphor. But the snake has slithered into the origin myths of several far-flung cultures. 

In Norse mythology, there’s Jörmungandr, a colossal sea serpent so large that he encircles the earth, ever seeking to consume himself. He is a force of chaos, symbolizing the merciless brutality of nature and the endless cycle of life and death.

Egyptian mythology has tales of Apep, a massive snakelike drake that dwells in the underworld and is obsessed with destroying Ra, the god of sunlight. He represents the night, darkness, danger, death, murder, deceit, and destruction.

Tiamat is the primordial serpent of Mesopotamian mythology, the fullest incarnation of chaos from a time beyond memory, whom the god Marduk splits in two to form the heavens and the earth.

In Mesoamerican mythology, Quetzalcoatl is a feathered, flying snake— half bird, half reptile. As such, he represents the merging of the sky and the ground, of spirit and of matter, ordaining both the creation and destruction of all things.

The serpent has been with us from the very dawn of creation. But why this monster? Why does it have such a grip on our imaginations? 

Art for the Apocalypse by Fauna Flow Art

I believe it has to do with memories so old they are no longer accessible, now even coded into the DNA of our species. You see, animals were a constant threat to prehistoric man, particularly carnivores like lions, tigers, bears, wolves, and crocodiles. And although they were ferocious and fatal to encounter, at least they were large enough to be spotted from a distance, making them easier to avoid or attack.

Yet a snake is quite weak and easy to kill— if you can detect it first. If you don't, it's already too late for you. One quick bite and its venom is coursing through your bloodstream, leaving you paralyzed and helpless. Even if their fangs didn’t drip with paralytic venom, the threat was enough to leave you frozen in fear. 

A snake doesn't follow the traditional rules of combat. Guerilla warfare is all it knows. Silent, sneaky, and merciless, a snake strikes when you least expect it, whether you’re walking down a trail, resting by a river, or sleeping soundly in your soft bed. Like a terrorist, the threat of its attack is a more powerful weapon than the attack itself. 

Snakes also move in an unnerving and unnatural way. The Bible mocks them for having no legs, but those missing limbs work to their advantage. They can slither, climb, and writhe— and make us writhe in discomfort at the very sight of their movement. We call someone a snake when they act shady, shifty, or artificial, and that’s no coincidence.  We do it in literature, as well. Uriah Heep in David Copperfield, Snape in Harry Potter, The White Witch in The Chronicles of Narnia, Amy Dunne in Gone Girl, Iago in Othello² — all characters compared to snakes.

Anthropologist Lynne Isbell suggests that snakes are such a prevalent symbol of death because, for millions of years, they were the only important predators of primates. We even have specialized neural systems for detecting them.³ To be sure, lions, tigers, and bears are formidable creatures. They could kill us with relative ease if they chose to do so. Instead, they preferred to attack animals like deer, cows, pigs, and fish, because primates aren’t worth the trouble. They’re smart enough to work in packs and mount a coordinated defense. But strategy doesn’t work on serpents. Not even a walled fortress will prevent a snake from invading.⁴ 

That’s certainly part of the answer, though I think it’s an incomplete one. There’s more going on here. It’s not just about the things we fear, but about the role fear itself plays in our psychology. 

Why would God allow a snake to infiltrate utopia and seduce humanity? Because no amount of order and structure can ever protect us from danger and shelter us from the unknown. We’re not static beings. It’s in our nature to learn, to grow, to adapt. But we can’t do that from the comfort of a walled garden: we need chaos and uncertainty in order to change. ⁵

Think about it this way— no snake, no story. Without that mischievous serpent, humanity would have lived endlessly in the bliss of the garden. Nothing exciting would ever happen, no choices would be made, no willpower exerted, no creativity exercised, no fears conquered, no faith tested. 

Conclusion

Whether my childhood visitor was real or not, I can’t say; but the fear I experienced was as real as anything in this life. That fear was nameless, though certainly not meaningless. We are quick to dismiss the night terrors of children as mere fancy, and to disregard mythical monsters as mere fantasy, yet if my study of the snake has taught me anything, it’s that there is something much deeper going on in our obsession with monsters. There’s a reason why we keep telling the same stories over thousands of generations, and why we keep inventing new ones.

The snake is the oldest monster of mankind, but not the only. There are many more to explore, many more to understand: ghouls and goblins, skeletons and succubi, aliens, banshees, dragons, and demons. In my journey into the dusky catacombs and dark dens where these nightmarish creatures reside, I found an unexpected truth about our consciousness.

But I’ll save that story for another night…

“He who fights with monsters might take care lest he thereby become a monster. And if you gaze for long into an abyss, the abyss gazes also into you.” — Nietzsche Beyond Good and Evil (1886)

Footnotes:

1. Milton first made the connection between the snake in Genesis and the devil— it’s actually not explicit in the Bible. But these days it is taken for a fact that the two were the same.

Were I the Moor, I would not be Iago:

In following him, I follow but myself.

Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,

But seeming so for my peculiar end.

For when my outward action doth demonstrate

The native act and figure of my heart

In complement extern, ’tis not long after

But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve

For daws to peck at: I am not what I am.

-Othello I.1.45

2.

3. Van Strien, J.W., Franken, I.H.A. & Huijding, J. (2014). “Testing the snake-detection hypothesis: Larger early posterior negativity in humans to pictures of snakes than to pictures of other reptiles, spiders and slugs.” Frontiers in Human Neuroscience

4. There are other small animals that inspire fear and disgust, but none are so ubiquitous as a monster in our myths. The spider is even smaller and more subtle than the snake, though usually not deadly. Venomous spiders are not found in every country, and those in America (the Black Widow and Brown Recluse) can only kill you if their bite is left untreated for several days. Other venomous animals like scorpions, wasps, ants, centipedes, stingrays, and jellyfish are all dangerous, but either not as lethal as the snake or not as commonly encountered. Scientists have even determined that we have a specialized neural mechanism for identifying snakes, likely due to evolutionary pressures to avoid them.

Insects do show up as significant monsters in mythology and fiction, though only when multiplied:

1. In quantity-- for example, the Biblical plagues in Exodus-- hordes of frogs, lice, flies, locusts, and others.

2. In magnitude, like the  insectile Xenomorph from Alien (which we will discuss later)

3. Or both, like the swarms of alien creatures in films like Starship Troopers, District 9, and The Mist.

5. This idea is paraphrased from 12 Rules for Life