Household Serpents, Sacred Groves: Domestic and Landscape Ecologies of the Snake-Taboo in Lithuanian and Malayali Folk Tradition

Author(s)	Mr. Bharat Sharma
Country	India
Abstract	This article compares two snake-centred folk traditions that encode ecological restraint through narrative and ritual taboo: the Lithuanian cult of the household grass snake (žaltys) crystallised in the wonder tale Eglė žalčių karalienė ("Eglė, the Queen of Serpents"), and the Malayali tradition of sarpakāvu — serpent-dedicated sacred groves — practised in Kerala, South India. Reading both traditions through Hubert Zapf's model of literature as cultural ecology and Fikret Berkes's concept of traditional ecological knowledge, the article argues that the snake-killing taboo functions in both cultures as a folk-ecological code: a narratively and ritually enforced restraint on human conduct toward a keystone animal, operating at two different scales — the domestic interior in Lithuania, the landscape-scale grove in Kerala. The comparison suggests that "ecological justice," rather than being a modern critical imposition on old material, is already latent in the structuring taboos of both traditions, even where the two cultures diverge sharply in how they resolve the human–serpent bond.
Keywords	ecocriticism, folklore, Baltic mythology, sacred groves, Kerala, cultural ecology, animal bridegroom, taboo
Discipline	Sociology > Linguistic / Literature
Published In	Volume 2, Issue 4, July-August 2024
Published On	2024-07-10
DOI	https://doi.org/10.62127/aijmr.2024.v02i04.1514

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