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Celtic Hist. Newsletter: St. Paddy & the Snakes
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hist-@historicgames.com
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Oct 06, 2009 13:07 PDT
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The Celtic History Newsletter
Brought to you by
The Celtic Croft
http://www.kilts-n-stuff.com/
&
MacGregor Historic Games
http://historicgames.com
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St. Paddy & the Snakes
Sorry I'm a little late this month again, I just finished our 7
weekend run at the Minnesota Renaissance Festival, and packing to go
the Feast of the Hunter's Moon in Indiana this weeked, so just a short
article...
Most of us have probably heard the story that somewhere around the 5th
century St. Patrick forever drove the snakes out of Ireland and that
many scholars believe this to be an allegorical tale meaning that by
spreading Christianity, St Paddy drove Pagan religion(s) from the
Emerald Isle (at least until the birth of Wicca and other modern
Neo-Pagan faiths).
Whatever the case, the evidence to-date is that there have never been
snakes in Ireland. Paleontologists tell us that snakes first evolved
from lizards about 100 million years ago -about the same time that
Tyrannosaurus Rex first appeared. For a long period snake fossils are
found only on southern continents, suggesting that snakes came from
"Gondwanaland" a former supercontinent that broke apart into
modern-day Antarctica, South America, Africa, India, and Australia. At
that time, what we know of as Ireland was under water -not a very
suitable location for air-breathing reptiles...
Beginning about 65 million years ago, the world's climate began to dry
out, and vast tracts of grasslands and other open habitats dominated
much of the northern hemisphere, and by the Eocene era, 50 to 35
million years ago, the predecessors of boas and pythons were
widespread throughout the northern hemisphere. As of the the Miocene
epoch, 25 million years ago, snake fossils have been found virtually
everywhere around the world, except for Ireland, New Zealand, Iceland,
Greenland, and Antarctica. Even though the oceans and risen and fallen
over the millenia and land bridges have come and gone between Ireland
and other parts of the British Isles, the ice age that followed may
have frozen out any snakes that tried to migrate to Ireland during
those early warmer periods of low oceans. So if it wasn't the Pagans
that St Paddy drove out, it also sure wasn't the snakes.
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