WOMAN MARRIES SNAKE

They are calling this ” a peculiar Indian love story.” It comes from Harper’s Magazine on-line.

Note: I started reading, on my iPhone, this story I might have thought, smugly, was merely an amusing novelty affirming my belief that the world has gone mad, forgetting the anthropological realities that divide humanity and make one soul’s rituals and objects of worship another person’s folly. And I most especially want to note that I have borrowed here from the narrative account of Mischa Berlinski, a writer unknown to me who made the journey to the ‘bride and groom’s’ village intrigued by the tale and on a mission to discern the truth in the best spirit of the best writer’s and journalists. I did not mean to plagiarize, but caution that, even without quotation marks, many of the words are Ms Berlinski’s in this highly condensed account.

And so, we learn:

In Bhudaneswar, India, in the state of Orissa, June 2nd of 2023, a thirty (?) year-old woman who claimed to have fallen in love with a snake got married to it. There was a Hindu ritual ceremony. Two thousand people were in attendance and there was the traditional procession of celebration.

The snake was a cobra.

The story was picked up by all the Indian daily newspapers, the wire services and translated into two dozen languages. Thousands of bloggers commented on the post (including, now, this one). Gay bloggers still living in countries where gayh marriage is illegal wondered why, if this woman could marry a snake, they couldn’t marry their beloveds. Hindu bloggers took issue with the marriage, saying that it was the kind of thing that made everyone think Hindus were weird. It affirmed conservative arguments that marriage, so broadly and loosely defined, would inevitably lead to people marrying their pets. On Comedy Central, Stephen Colbert countered that attacks on gay marriage growing out of Bimbala’s nuptuals were misplaced, because the union was, in fact, heterosexual: the groom/snake in question is male.

Ms. Berlinski who visited the site of the wedding was introduced to the snake’s new mother-in-law, a trim, 75-year-old silver-haired woman. She seemed to feel her daughter’s marriage aspirations were the work of God, since the girl had been unhappy and unhealthy in a multitude of ways and had visions that a snake had helped cure her of sickness. “We cannot disturb God’s work,” the woman said. The writer also learned from her guide that the snake is not an animal to the people of india. It is a god — and considered the religioius leaders of the girl’s village.

Indeed, anthropologists tell us that there is strong evidence of snake worship in antiquity. “One of the first challenges of the authors of Genesis was to confront the cult of the snake,” writes Berlinski.

Prehistoric Indians found themselves confronted by two terrifying animals — the powerful elephant and the unpredictable, often venomous snake.

The worship of the cobra in modern India is particularly associated with the god Shiva, one of the more impressive and terrifying of god in the Hindu pantheon. Shiva is often depicted with a cobra hanging around his neck.

But Berlinski, in her journey of research, had yet to meet the bridegroom. In video made of the wedding, only a brass snake is in attendance. Apparently the real snake could not be coaxed into attending. Apparently it (he?)lives in an anthill.

The writer’s account ends with the greatest of respect, describing village women on their knees in prayer near the bride’s hut on a peaceful afterenoon, “saying very little and hoping that Debo (the snake’s name, apparently)would come out fro the antihill.”

So what shall we make of this? With equal respect — again, having borrowed many of Mischa Berlinski’s words verbatim — I will say that we mortals of every race and creed, are groping our way through the heat, chaos and fever of life toward the god of our understanding. Can I be anything but humble, as a Christian, knowing how, in sacrament, image and prayer, I go on reaching toward God and the God-man Christ through the tangled darkness of the material world?