Can Snakes Drink Milk?

The milk-drinking serpent in mythology and fact, from India to Africa

If you were ever to visit India during July or August you might be lucky enough to witness the festival of Naga Panchami, the day when snakes are revered and worshipped. The story goes that Astika, the sage, put an end to the bloody sacrifice and decimation of all serpents by King Janamejaya. To commemorate this, people offer up flowers and sweets, lamps, candles and sacrifices to images and carvings of snakes. They also worship live cobras, often brought in by snake handlers to be blessed and venerated. Alongside the sweets and flowers, worshippers also like to bathe the snakes in milk and even offer them bowls of milk to drink. This practice has been condemned as cruel by animal rights campaigners, since snakes are reptiles and cannot digest milk. Yet snake handlers may remove the fangs and sew up the mouths of their cobras and dehydrate them for days before the festival - only then to open a small gap and place the parched animal in front of a bowl of milk, which it will desperately try to swallow down.

The curiosity here is why go to these lengths to force a snake to drink milk in the first place? As it turns out the idea of milk-drinking serpents is found in multiple cultures across many continents, something described as ‘impossible biology’ by folklorist Davide Ermacora:

But snakes also have, according to both learned and popular lore, a long-standing predilection for milk: they are believed, from our earliest records, to be galactophagous. Even a superficial look at the old specialist literature on snake mythology and symbolism shows a widespread belief in the fondness/association of snakes for/with milk and bovids in different continents and ethnological contexts, including the religious systems of Sub Saharan Africa…

As Sir James George Frazer put it in 1907, “[w]here serpents are […] viewed as ancestors come to life, the people naturally treat them with great respect and often feed them with milk” (Frazer 1914: 84; this passage is recalled in Minakata 1909)…

However, it is worth noting here that there is no empirical basis for saying that snakes like mammal milk (or, for that matter, wine). Experiments, indeed, have shown that captive snakes systematically refuse to drink milk. Here there are also many biomechanical and behavioral implausibilities.

-The comparative milk-suckling reptile (2017) Ermacora

It would take a book to outline all the mythological tropes about snakes, which have included their supposed ability to fly, to whip people to death, to sting like an insect, to take their tails in their mouths and roll around like a hoop, to steal wine from jars, to penetrate the mouth or other orifice of a person or child and cause sickness and many more.

The literature covering the neuroscience and evolutionary implications of snake fear is not entirely clear on how inherited mechanisms of identification and avoidance work, but it is obvious that humans, like other primates, have some kind of instinctual phobia towards snakes. Most likely this is due to snakes being one of the few small animals with the capacity to kill a primate, particularly where our primary sense of vision is not present, such as long grass or snakes hidden under rocks or in holes.

Exactly how this fear of snakes was transferred to the topic of milk drinking is difficult if not impossible to say, but we can examine some of the most common stories and variants to get a sense of what the anxiety is.

The first set of motifs involve infants and breast-feeding. In the mythological Aarne–Thompson–Uther Index (ATU Index) this is listed under #285. The snake appears in the cradle, drawn by the scent of milk and the vulnerability of the child, and somehow steals the milk meant for the infant.

The snake might crawl directly into the baby’s belly, or it might put its tail into the baby’s mouth and suckle from the mother, thus stealing the milk and causing the baby to weaken and die without anyone noticing. (recorded in Catalonian, Venetian, Breton and other folklores). Adjacently there is a rich body of tales involving women breastfeeding serpents, including Clytemnestra in the Oresteia of Aeschylus, the Serpent Tale from the Book of Carados and from the Vita Sancti Budici (Life of Saint Budoc). The latter two involve a women offering up her breasts to a snake which had coiled itself around a man’s arm, the snake then latches onto the nipple and the women cuts it off. She is then rewarded with a ‘golden breast’.

The second set of motifs look very different. These involve snakes being welcomed into the home as guardians or bringers of good fortune. It is hard to say whether this was a widespread pre-Christian view, but certainly Roman, some ancient Greek, Baltic, Slav and Romanian folklore and material evidence points to snakes being considered protectors, and that milk might be left out for them to drink as a means of thanks. Snake or serpent ‘cults’ in Macedonia and the Balkans have long been a subject of discussion, connecting their presence in the home with a developing deification towards snakes in general:

The serpent cult in this region, however, was known at a much earlier age. The origins of the worship of snakes can be traced in Dardania back into the earliest prehistory. At a neolithic site in Pristina, Predionica, a late neolithic clay figure of a coiled snake was found in a house, symbolizing a protector of the domestic hearth. 1t is also interesting to note that such practices survived throughout the centuries of the Middle Ages and the modern era up to our own days.

Snakes are still regarded in many Albanian villages in the region of Kosovo and Metohija as protecting hearths and graves, their magical powers bringing health. A snake is sometimes built as a sacrificial anima1 into the foundations of a new house to avert evil. Its head likewise protects newly married couples against evil, and its teeth protect babies against the evil eye, disease, or magic. In the village of Susice (Shushicä) in Kosovo, two girls from the house of K. Metaj died from tuberculosis around 1950. Villagers believe that their grave is guarded by two coiled snakes, perhaps a distant echo of the mentioned tombstones from the Roman period on which two snakes are represented.

-Draco and the Survival of the Serpent Cult In the Central Balkans (1991) Marjeta Kos

The final set of stories focus on the apparently common behaviour of snakes biting and suckling on animal udders, particularly cows. Here snakes are not an outlier, as all manner of nocturnal creatures have been ‘seen’ stealing milk from cows, including hedgehogs, bats, hares and birds. The entire vampiric matrix of blood-drinking, milk-drinking night-dwelling creatures who invade the domestic space is not confined to snakes at all, but they are singled out for their venom and accusations that they wrap themselves around the legs of animals to cause pain and even death.

Across all of these tales milk is either a reward or a substance which the snake aggressively steals. Blood and milk, the two vital substances which the serpent might take, and either injury or protection could follow. The snake as an avatar of something wild and foreign to the interior of the home is also common, sometimes brought in for aid, or otherwise forcing its way in.

One explanation has been to try and point to some common heritage of all these cultures, namely the Indo-European, to try and find a root myth. But examples exist outside of the common Indo-European areas, including in parts of Africa. Python worship is a huge subject, but in at least one culture the python was revered and praised in part with bowls of milk to drink:

Worship of the python is confined almost entirely to one clan, in Budu, South Uganda. The temple is situated on the shore of Lake Victoria Nyanza, on the bank of the river Muzini. The temple is a large conical hut built of poles and thatched with grass. The floor of this structure is carpeted with sweet-smelling grass…

There the reptile feeds on goats and poultry which are tied to posts near the water. In addition to this the python is fed daily on milk from sacred cows. White clay is mixed with the milk. The reptile lies over the wooden stool and drinks the milk which is offered in a wooden bowl held by the priestess. The python is supposed to give success in fishing. He has power over the river and all that is in it. For this reason a special meal is given to the python before the keeper goes out to fish.

-Serpent worship in Africa (1931) Wilfrid D. Hambly

Given that we know scientifically that snakes do not drink milk, what is the explanation for these convergences and descriptions? In part the preoccupations of the stories - infants, breastfeeding and cows - are deeply rooted in the crucial but mundane business of survival, reproduction and care-giving. The snake as an outside agent of chaos, potentially poisonous and unseen, has a long reputation for being greedy, most likely stemming from its ability to eat animals much larger than itself. On the flipside, snakes as protectors or even embodiments of lost souls, deserve nourishment and protection, and what could be better than a bowl of milk?

One must ask, for example, why the snake is the typical protagonist in these stories, which are told with such consistency through time and space? Here are over-simplistic psychoanalytic interpretations where the snake is a penetrating phallus universally connected to genital symbolism, sexual allusions, desire and oral fantasies (a snake is the obvious phallic animal).

Ermacora’s point here is probably true, although we can’t rule out some deep primitive-brain connection between the instinctive fear of snakes and the complex of breast-feeding, motherhood and milk.

Ultimately the trope has become lodged inside the craw of various mytho-religous belief systems. Indian snake handlers who deliberately dehydrate their cobras in order to make them drink milk must know at some level that they don’t want to drink it, yet people want to see it, and want to believe it. What people believe about animals and natural world is endlessly fascinating. In his 2010 book, the British war reporter James Brabazon recounts his time in Liberia talking to some local people:

I found the locals to be a curiously naïve bunch – urban, even – despite being isolated in the middle of the bush with no infrastructure to support them. I asked one old man, marooned by severe arthritis on an island of shade under a tree, what creatures lived in the forest.

‘Tigah,’ came his surprising reply. ‘Dey very dangeros,’ he added, unnecessarily.

The rebels agreed. ‘And what about the rivers?’ I wanted to know. ‘Are they dangerous, too? I mean, do they have dangerous creatures in them, like poisonous snakes?’

‘Mos’ de snek in de bush ’ere poisonos. One bweh, dey wi’ kill you. An’ alligator’ plenteh in de swam’. Dey wi’ ea’ you raw.’

Nick smiled at me. Tigers and alligators do not live in the wild in Africa.

-My Friend The Mercenary (2010) J.Brabazon

Impossible biology indeed!