St. Pat, sly as cats

Turn your heads and listen! Away in the green hills do I hear pipes? No, no, that’s only the waily-wailing of Greenweek, A Celebration of Irish Science, making sure we don’t forget the week of the day of the patron saint of the Emerald Isle.

Did you know …

That St. Patrick hated snakes? It’s true! He was a regular Indiana Jones, except in the fifth century, and maybe way crazier.

As everyone who’s anyone knows, Saint Patrick drove all the snakes in Ireland into the sea. It’s sort of what he’s famous for, if you don’t count the nightmare of bad taste that is his modern feast day. HOWEVER … it’s unlikely that Ireland ever had snakes to begin with (unless, maybe, you go all the way back before the pleistocene to the whocaresirnary period). From where, then, did the legend of Patrick’s snake-chasing come? Probably Patrick himself.

St. Patrick’s letters, and most likely his sermons as well, were filled to the brim with snake hate and dubious snake-related claims. He claimed that two adders, named Abnor and Slybaen, attempted to bite him to death when he was a baby, but that he bit them to death instead. He referred to snakes as “the penes of Lucifer.” He said that one sin would be absolved from your soul for every snake you killed in your life. He believed that Jesus visited him nightly to “check upon [his] progress in the righteous war against the wyrms.” Kind of a weirdo, really.

At any rate, unsatisfied with life on an island that merely had no snakes (again, something he took credit for), Patrick dedicated the latter part of his life to hunting Ireland’s anguis, or “slow worm.” The slow worm is a medium-sized, legless lizard, often mistaken for a snake. By the time he died, all of Patrick’s clothing was said to have been stitched together from slow worm hides, and he had an extensive collection of slow worm hats. It’s worth noting, too, that although he put so much effort into killing these harmless reptiles, the slow worm still lives in Ireland today—it seems doubly unlikely then, that he could have killed an island’s worth of snakes all by himself when he couldn’t even cause the regional extinction of a legless lizard. A land of storytellers, lol.