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Originally shared by Dirk Puehl

“They told, how in their convent-cell / A Saxon princess once did dwell, / The lovely Edelfled. / And how, of thousand snakes, each one / Was changed into a coil of stone, /When holy Hilda pray'd; / Themselves, within their holy bound, / Their stony folds had often found. / They told, how sea /fowls' pinions fail, / As over Whitby's towers they sail, / And, sinking down, with flutterings faint, / They do their homage to the saint. (Sir Walter Scott “Marmion”)

Being able to petrify snakes is generally a useful skill to have, especially when you live in a place where you might find a deadly poisonous reptile in every crack. The north of England is usually not rated tops among the regions with an abundant serpentine population, but in the early days of Christianity it must have been all the rage for a saint to have a proven track record of driving out the brutes, with St Patrick leading the way in Ireland, of course. When a horde of snakes appeared on the Northumbrian coast, St Hilda wouldn’t take a backseat to anybody, made use of the above mentioned trait and simply turned the snakes into stone. And the moral of the story is: you never know when an obscure ability might come in handy and save the day – and why the Northumbrian coast is full of petrified snakes. Or something that does look quite like headless, petrified snakes.

The legend of St Hilda is a typical etiological story, explaining the presence of ammonites on the coast around Whitby to a point that the American palaeontologist Alpheus Hyatt named the species found in such abundance in Northumbria Hildoceras in 1876, at the time, when three ammonites had graced the coat-of-arms of Whitby already for centuries. St Hilda, if the sources are to be believed, must have been a remarkable woman beyond her petrifying abilities. The founder and abbess of Whitby and Hartlepool Abbey stands at the fabled turning point where Christianity in England was aligned along the Roman Catholic rather than the Celtic rite after the Synod of Whitby in 664 she had hosted. Famed as a administrator and teacher whose advice was sought by the local Anglo-Saxon princes, St Hilda became one of the patron saints of learning and the arts, and Minerva’s old symbol, the snake, still slithered to the according symbolism, albeit in a different guise.

The ammonites posing as petrified snakes, long known as snakestones or serpent stones in England, were first ascribed to St Hilda’s workings during the 16th century in local chronicles, even though the legends might be much older. During those days, enterprising merchants selling ammonites as quasi-relics cleared up all doubts and simply carved a snakehead on the fossils and sold them as a prove of the miracle during a time when the veneration of saints after the Roman Catholic faith was again a controversial question in Tudor England, to say the least.

Depicted below is a snakestone that has found its way into the #wunderkammer    via http://www.fossilsforsale.com/site_arc/index.cfm?action=item&prod_id=5886&

And more about snakestones on:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Ammonoidea#Mythology

and

http://www.academia.edu/2325235/Ammonites_legends_and_politics_the_snakestones_of_Hilda_of_Whitby

#history   #mythology   #1000faces   #folklore   #medievalhistory   #europeanhistory