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RE: ophidophobia?
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by FSB on May 15, 2009
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I'm firmly in the "learned" camp. While there may be some lingering genetic traces of ophidiophobia lingering from our primate ancestors, I believe those are far outweighed by accumulated cultural influences and fears. As someone else pointed out, other primordial predators which were as much if not more of a threat to our forebears as snakes do not elicit anything close to the hatred, fear and loathing directed at even the most harmless snake species. Our family kept a large and very tame black rat snake which I played with as a toddler, and of whom I have no conscious memory, and I have never known even the slightest twinge of fear at snakes, nor have I ever been able to imagine what it must feel like. In fact, I think I was probably 5 or 6 before I began to realize, to my utter dismay, that most people were horrified by snakes and thought we were all crazy to have them in the house. To me, they had always been nothing more than friendly, beautiful and totally interesting animals.
I have also seen huge, burly and otherwise fearless-looking men cringe in horror at the sight of a small kingsnake, while their children are almost universally fascinated by them (unless their parents have already gotten to them first). I'm all but certain that ophidiophobia is encultured by millennia of negative snake stereotypes, not only in the Bible, but in much of our other literature and art as well. Kaa, the huge Burmese python in Kipling's Jungle Book, is one of the few positive snake characters I can think of in Western literature, but Walt Disney had to go change him into the usual sly and slithering villain in his cartoon bastardization of the tale. It's a completely ludicrous and irrational phobia that is far out of proportion to any threat actually posed by snakes themselves, and I believe it to be a serious health problem worldwide. Our whole species is desperately in need of therapy...
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