A couple of weeks ago, I took my older boys to see Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull, just as I’d promised months before. The aliens didn’t scare me, and I didn’t flinch at the skeletons. I ate popcorn without a care in the world as the screen filled with killer ants. But I’ll admit to you that I squirmed with revulsion at the snake.
I hate snakes.
And this movie had only one, not a whole pit filled with them like the first film in this series. Still, the sight of the scaly thing made me want to pick up an axe or a revolver, anything would do.
According to a recent study, Indiana Jones and I are not alone. The Atlantic Monthly notes a recent study in the journal Psychological Science that suggests that “humans may have a built-in aversion to snakes and their hissing, slithering, menacing ways.” Researchers at the University of Virginia studied 120 preschool-age children and their parents to pick up reactions to images of various things, including snakes. The researchers were surprised to find that the children, even those who had had no exposure to snakes, immediately picked out the snakes as threatening.
The preschoolers had no such “threat-relevant” reaction to pictures of frogs or caterpillars. This suggests, says the Atlantic, “an innate predisposition to see a snake as a threat.” The authors of the article contend that humans and “other primates” could “have an evolved tendency to rapidly detect” a snake.
What, though, if this loathing isn’t at all evolutionary? What if it is the result of a cataclysmic events somewhere in the primeval past, something still embedded in the human heart?
The Scripture tells us that God’s first recorded words to the Satan, the rebel angel who took the form of a snake, was a curse on the serpent: “I will put enmity between you and the woman, and between your offspring and her offspring; he shall burise your head, and you shall bruise his heel” (Gen 3:15 ESV). The apostle John sees the whole scope of cosmic history as a skirmish between this snake-king and the man-child from the woman’s line (Rev 12:1-17).
Perhaps the problem isn’t that we hate and fear snakes too much. Maybe this isn’t an irrational phobia. Perhaps the problem is that we don’t fear serpents enough. We’re easily deceived by the cunning reptilian speech we so often hear all around us, and within us.
I still get nervous around snakes…at the zoo, in the yard. I just worry that I’m not nervous enough when I hear a snake’s voice in my own head…leading me to self-sufficiency, prayerlessness, apathy. That’s where the real danger is.
Indiana Jones had no idea; and, too often, neither do I.
Let’s hate snakes, together. And let’s long, together, for the Kingdom of the Crushed Skull.
