Proceedings of the Athanasius Kircher Society » Snakestones

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February 6th, 2007

Snakestones

Ammonites, those spiral-shaped cephalopod fossils that can be found in most natural history museum gift shops, have always had mythical appeal. The Greeks were convinced that they protected against snake bites and cured blindness and impotence. The Romans believed that sleeping with a pyritized ammonite under the pillow allowed one to predict the future. The Blackfoot Indians called them buffalo stones because they looked like sleeping bison. In Scotland they were ground up and fed to cows in order to cure cramps. In New Guinea, they were used as charms to aid in hunting and gardening. In India, they are known as shaligrams, and were used in Hindu sculptures to represent Vishnu’s discus.

Near Whitby, a town in Northern England where ammonite fossils are common, legend holds that the 7th-century Saxon Abbess St. Hilda cast a spell that turned all of the region’s snakes into stone. “The fact that Whitby snakestones generally do not have a head is supposedly due to a convenient beheading curse issued by another Christian martyr, St Cuthbert. However, to make snakestones more saleable, and to reinforce the legend of their origin, serpents’ heads were sometimes carved onto them, especially in victorian times.” (From a collection of ammonite folklore on the British Natural History Museum’s web site).

Whitby Snakestones with carved heads can regularly be purchased on Ebay, or from Two Guys Fossils.

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