These ideas come from many independent
sources. As I have just learned from
reading her novel Living Alone (1919) and her biography by Joy Grant, the writer Stella Benson is one example.
From an early age she felt very different from
other girls; she also had a conviction that she wasn’t a real person; she wasn’t
human. A future article about her may go into this in more detail.
In the meantime, there is something that is
worth highlighting: she went one step further and confided to her diary that she had a ‘snake-soul’.
Stella Benson loved reptiles
Stella Benson loved reptiles
Stella Benson kept pet lizards when she was a
little girl. She carried one of them around on her shoulder much to the terror
of the servants, which might be excused...
“...as she is rather large and snakey, though
she is such a darling.”
She wrote in her diary at the time that lizards
and snakes love music.
Later in life she went to London Zoo specifically
to see the snakes. Not only that, but, by chance, the husband of
the woman she was staying with in 1917 was the Director of Reptiles at London
Zoo and he arranged for her to go behind the scenes. She let a boa constrictor
wind itself around her and lick her with its tongue.
She expresses her love of snakes through one
of the characters in Living Alone. The ferryman keeps snakes that for him take
the place of a family. He says with paternal pride how beautiful they are:
"There is something
about the grip and spring in a snake's body that makes me feel giddy with
pleasure. Snakes to me, you know, are just a drug, sold by the yard instead of
in bottles. My brain is getting every day colder and quieter, and all through
loving snakes so."
She also mentions lizards, obviously from
experience:
“...all her watchers twisted
their necks gravely, like lizards watching an active fly.”
The novelist Rebecca West, who was a journalist at the time,
said this in praise of Stella Benson’s first novel I Pose (1915):
“How superbly you’ve done the snake that was the soul of the suffrage movement.”
“How superbly you’ve done the snake that was the soul of the suffrage movement.”
Reptiles in conspiracy theories
David Icke and other conspiracy theorists
believe that some people are influenced or even controlled by malevolent reptilians
who exist on another dimension.
Snakes are said to have Illuminati
connections. Snake people known as ‘Nagas’ are said to exist.
Perhaps there is no connection and this is
just a coincidence.
Stella Benson in China in 1933:
