Patrick and their rarity, they became a status symbol. The New York Times says that thanks to their association with St. During the economic boom period called the Celtic Tiger (mid-1990s to late 2000s), countless people started keeping snakes as pets. It's also worth noting that there are - technically - snakes in 21st-century Ireland. The symbol of the cult was a snake, so it's entirely possible that the destruction of the Crom Cruich was the source of the legend, and those were the snakes St. No retribution from an angry pagan god ever came, and the cult faded into obscurity. Patrick and his followers stormed their sites, destroyed their idols, and blessed the area. According to the texts, every year on Samhain it was expected that a first-born child would be sacrificed to guarantee a good harvest.Īccording to the text, the cult and the annual sacrifice ended when St. They were equal parts powerful and bloodthirsty, and they practiced a terrifying bit of human sacrifice.
Some scholars even date the "final" push of Christianity into Ireland to the 14th century.Īnother possible inspiration for the story could be found in a recent translation of a sixth-century text (via the Independent), which tells of a cult who worshiped the Crom Cruich. Patrick arrived, and it continued for centuries after he left. But some historians have offered pretty powerful arguments about why that just couldn't be true: Ireland's conversion from pagan worship to Christianity had already begun before St. Patrick drove them out of the country and converted others to Christianity. Patheos says it's sometimes claimed the "snakes" were early pagans, and St. One theory is that since snakes were often symbols of evil in Judeo-Christian tales, they simply represented something else. So, if there were never any snakes in Ireland to begin with and ancient writers and historians knew that, why does everyone think there was this snake plague? (It was only in the 1970s that the Irish Times reports a type of legless lizard was discovered flourishing in the Burren, likely a newcomer.) They were connected to mainland Europe for about 2,000 years longer than Ireland, and have three native snake species.Īs a strange footnote to the story, there's only one reptile native to Ireland: the viviparous lizard. Snakes - who are slow to spread to new areas - simply never made it to Ireland before it became an island but did make it to Britain. The entire country would have been way too cold for reptiles, and when the climate started to warm, Ireland was cut off from everything around it by rising sea levels and melting glaciers. National Geographic says the real reason snakes never colonized Ireland goes back to the last ice age. That's extra strange because scholars had been writing about Ireland's lack of snakes since at least the third century, and Monaghan says that after looking through thousands of years of Irish fossil records, he found there were never any snakes in Ireland to begin with.
Patrick's arrival in Ireland is 432 (via Library Ireland), and the stories didn't start circulating until centuries later. Patrick was a very real person, and it's important to point out that, according to Nigel Monaghan, keeper of the Natural History Museum, that he never actually claimed to be the one responsible for Ireland's snake-free landscape.
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