Abstract
In South Asia, cobras are the animals most dangerous to humans—as humans are to cobras. Paradoxically, one threat to cobras is their worship by feeding them milk, which is harmful to them, but religiously prescribed as an act of love and tenderness towards a deity. Across cultural and religious contexts, the Nāgas, mostly cobra-shaped beings, are prominent among Hindu and Buddhist deities. Are they seen as animals? Doing ethnographic fieldwork on a Himalayan female Nāga Goddess, this question has long accompanied me during my participant observation and interviews, and I have found at least as many possible answers as I have had interview partners. In this article, I trace the ambiguous relationship between humans, serpents and serpent deities through the classical Sanskrit literature, Hindu and Buddhist iconographies and the retelling of myths in modern movies, short stories, and fantasy novels. In these narrations and portrayals, Nāgas are often “real” snakes, i.e., members of the animal kingdom—only bigger, shape-shifting or multi-headed and, curiously, thirsty for milk. The article focuses on those traits of Nāgas which set them apart from animals, and on those traits that characterize them as snakes.
Highlights
One threat to cobras is their worship by feeding them milk, which is harmful to them, but religiously prescribed as an act of love and tenderness towards a deity
The article focuses on those traits of Nāgas which set them apart from animals, and on those traits that characterize them as snakes
Transcending this enmity, the Hindu God Vis.n.u is served both by Garud.a as his vehicle and by the Nāga Śes.a43 as his bed (Figure 3)—a motif which shares a common Hindu or pre-Hindu antetype with the motive of the Buddha sitting on the coils and beneath the hoods of Mucalinda
Summary
A young, pious woman in distress, bites her lower lip and directs her gaze, displaying a mixture of hope and worry, towards the termite hill. Sunita and the other women in the group raise a pot of milk, and we see a stream of milk gushing over the erected head of the cobra, who opens her mouth to drink the milk (Figure 1) This scene[1] from the Tamil movie Devi, “the Goddess”[2 ], features a goddess who is a cobra—a. A Nāga might have been merely “a snake that is exceptional due to its great size, its great powers, or perhaps both” (ibid.). The iconography of Jainism identifies Pārśvanāth by a cobra with seven or more hoods spread This connection to water does not seem to be a prominent Nāga trait in South India, where they
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