The Earth Serpent

My husband is a geologist and a geotechnical engineer. Every day we sit together at our computers. I’m writing blogs and books and also bills for his consulting business. He’s writing reports and doing “research”. As he works, I hear the occasional mutter about “test boring 1” or “shear strain” or “pore pressure”.

But the other day I heard “Amazing!” and “Just like a huge serpent moving through the earth!”

“What?!” I yelped. I’d just finished the Lion Serpent Sun blog and had snakes on the brain.

The Geomancer elucidated, and I will paraphrase his words:

The Cascadia Subduction Zone runs offshore along the coasts of Northern Oregon, Washington, and Vancouver Island. It’s where the Pacific tectonic plate dives under the continental plate and causes earthquakes. No surprises here. Every first year geology student understands plate tectonics.

Seismologists in the US and Canada have come together to form the Pacific Northwest Seismic Network (PNSN). They’ve installed a vast array of sensors from northern California through Vancouver Island that measure the deep tremors caused by the collision of these two plates. The vibrations are deep and very slight, but some people do feel them.

The Network has noticed that every twelve to fourteen months for the past ten years the number of seismic events peaks for a month or so. The blogs of the grad students (OK, I don’t know for sure, but I bet they’re grad students) monitoring last August’s event sound like they are tracing the undulations of a giant serpent writhing beneath the earth:
“# Aug 19, 2010 – The tremor continues to slowly move north with the leading edge in the middle of the Straits….
# Aug 20, 2010 – Watch out Candians, the tremor is now on your door step. Several wech-o-meter locations this evening are just outside Victoria harbor. By tomorrow Dr. “ETS” Dragert will have them under his garage.
“# Aug 21, 2010 – The main ETS tremor is now located in the middle of the Straits of Juan de Fuca with the leading edge under Victoria. The Canadians must be happy now. There also continues to be a separate persistent patch of tremor near Olympia that seems to be slowly spreading south with its leading edge near Centralia. Do we have a double ETS this time? Time will tell.”

Other people besides my husband have keyed into the earth’s serpent energy. An ancient civilization located in what is now southern Ohio built the mysterious and powerful Great Serpent Mound there nearly three thousand years ago.

When Apollo was only four years old he went to Delphi to kill the Python, an Earth Serpent who lived there and protected the navel of the earth. It had tried to attack his mother. Does this sound like a Freudian wet dream or what?

There was already a temple to the Titan earth goddess Gaia there and an oracle as well. Apollo got his revenge and took over the oracle, and the Greeks built an even bigger temple to him near the oracle.

The ancient Greeks wrote that the Pythia, the priestess who was the oracle, sat on a three-legged stool that straddled a fissure that cut deep into the earth. She sniffed the sweet smelling mists that wafted up from the earth and raved. The priests translated her ravings into advice couched in neat hexameters.

A research team, led by Jelle Z. de Boer of Wesleyan University, examined pieces of travertine—a limestone stalactite deposited by an ancient spring—from the rock at Delphi to see what gases they might have trapped. They found ethylene, which has anaesthetic properties, produces euphoria, and excites the nervous system. It is sweet smelling.

Two major fault lines run through Delphi, and Greece sits on the edge of a subduction zone.

But I digress.

The Rainbow Serpent is a common figure in the myths of Australian aborigines from all across the continent. It is described as “a snake of some enormous size often living within the deepest waterholes of many of Australia’s waterways; descended from that larger being visible as a dark streak in the Milky Way, it reveals itself to people in this world as a rainbow as it moves through water and rain, shaping landscapes, naming and singing of places, swallowing and sometimes drowning people; strengthening the knowledgeable with rainmaking and healing powers; blighting others with sores, weakness, illness, and death.” Wikipedia.

The Earth Serpent is everywhere.