Snakes on Iona
Iona is a place of legends, one of which is that St. Columba (like St. Patrick in Ireland) banished all snakes from the isle. One story states that a live snake was brought to Iona, and died immediately upon touching the shore.
We have been doing lots of walking and also scavenging and collecting elemental artifacts – round egg rocks from St. Columba’s Bay, pieces of dried seaweed, fibers and hair from sheep and cows (tangled in the heather, hanging from the barbed wire fences), and early on during one of these walks I noticed that the bays appear to be full of snake bones – serpentine bleached pieces of coiled driftwood, as if all snakes that swam ashore had immediately expired.
I now have a small collection of these “bones” in my room that I have been fashioning into “spirit sculptures” – making small snakes wrapped in found fibers (grasses, wool, seaweed, bound together with roving purchased here on the Isle) A fitting exercise, because banished or not, the snake is the Celtic symbol of creativity and re-birth, exactly what we are experiencing here.
Elizabeth
