SINGAPORE – Over the course of human history, snakes have acquired something of a bad rap.
The most notorious of them all is perhaps the Biblical serpent in the Garden of Eden, cunning and devious, who tempted Eve into taking a bite of forbidden fruit.
Then there is Bai Suzhen, the eponymous serpent in The Legend Of The White Snake, one of China’s four great folktales. In a Tang Dynasty version dating from the early ninth century, she is portrayed as a malevolent demon who takes the form of a beautiful woman and seduces the scholar Li Huang.
When he returns home after three days with her, he falls ill and dies. His family searches for the woman, but finds only a giant white snake.
For centuries, these snake stories have been wielded as cautionary tales, often with anti-feminist overtones. In the Renaissance, for instance, Eden’s serpent was frequently depicted with the head and body of a woman, despite the male pronouns assigned to it in some translations of scripture.
Looking back on the trail of destruction left by previous Years of the Snake, perhaps humanity would do well to heed the portent of this seemingly inauspicious animal. The havoc it wreaks usually cuts across gender, race, class and country.
Nearly a century ago, in 1929, the world found itself in the coils of a particularly grim Snake Year. The glitz and good fortune of the Roaring Twenties screeched to an abrupt halt when Wall Street crashed in late October, triggering the start of the Great Depression.
The Wall Street Crash of 1929 marked the end of the Roaring Twenties and the start of the Great Depression. PHOTO: REUTERS
Other Snake Years have proven just as venomous. In 1977, two Boeing 747 passenger jets collided on the runway at Tenerife’s Los Rodeos Airport, resulting in 583 deaths. To this day, it remains the deadliest crash in aviation history.
In 1989, up to a million people flooded Tiananmen Square in Beijing to demand economic and political reform. The protests lasted 1½ months, coming to a swift and bloody end on June 4, when tanks and troops forcibly cleared the square.
Then in 2001 came the attacks that shook America to its core. ...