The small neighborhood of Cueille-Aigue, in the Montbernage area of Poitiers, was once witness to a reptile of extraordinary resilience. An event of this magnitude, of course, led to wildly divergent and contradictory accounts. The one reproduced here is the most implausible – and, therefore, the most correct.
One fine morning, an inhabitant of the Cueille-Aigue discovered an enormous serpent in his cellar. He called the neighbors to aid him, and, armed with spades, picks, and other gardening utensils, they attacked the monster. The snake responded by retracting its head into its body, like a turtle into its shell.
As everyone knows, a snake cut in two will regenerate unless the head is destroyed. The serpent was chopped in half, into quarters, into increasingly fine pieces until it was nothing but mincemeat. Alas, they never could find the head.
References
Ellenberger, H. (1949) Le Monde Fantastique dans le Folklore de la Vienne. Nouvelle Revue des Traditions Populaires, 1(5), pp. 407-435.
A Book of Creatures 
“The one reproduced here is the most implausible – and, therefore, the most correct.
…Alas, they never could find the head”
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Funnily enough, another blog I follow posted about a snake creature as well this morning. Perhaps this is a sign I ought to pay attention to snake stuff today
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You should always be paying attention to snake stuff
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Actually it depends
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If you don’t miind me asking,what was the blog? I’m always looking for more to follow 🙂
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What a marvelous serpent!
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A turtle-serpent?
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Close enough!
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France has some pretty strange stuff going on there…
Also, I’m a huge fan of your blog and have been looking around here for about a year now. It’s nice seeing artwork of obscure monsters I usually have a hard time visualizing.
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France has loads of weird stuff! It’s just that most sources are in, well, French.
And thank you so much!
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Speaking of European reptiles, can we see Nidhogg next week? I’ve seen it variously portrayed as a serpent or a stereotypical Western dragon & I’d like to set the record straight.
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Well, what DOES it look like then? :0
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Argh, I meant “I’d like you to set the record straight”. I assumed you’d know more than I would.
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I mean, I don’t think it has a fixed iconography
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Interesting detail: the Cuielle-Aigue Serpent can produce copies of itself from chopped off sections of its body like the Lambton Worm. How fascinating…
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It’s a surprisingly persistent myth that has been applied to snakes worldwide
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When you say “myth” are you saying that this quality is strongly present in mythic snakes or do you mean that it is a misconception of snakes? If the latter, I would advise you against using the word “myth” like that as using it in that context is charged with monotheist/secularist bias against other cultures. Not trying to be an “SJW” about it but it’s important that we decolonize our language when discussing these kinds of topics
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I’ll try to keep that in mind
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Well, snakes have such a reflexes that their bodies and heads move even after the decapitation, so its not hard to immagine that people in old times thought that snake can live after being cut to pieces. People used to believe same thing about the earthworms and some do still.
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In Kindergartan a classmate of mine chopped an earthworm we found on the playground into pieces because he was convinced it would grow into two worms. All it grew into was a brown smear on the concrete. He spent the rest of the year afraid its ghost would haunt him.
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