St. Patrick awkwardly pointing at snakes is my forever mood
Aaaaahhhh! St. Patrick's Day, the holiday that's seemingly ubiquitous with bars everywhere trying to sell you green beer while drunk college students yell in the streets.
And also, snakes??
According to folklore, St. Patrick banished the snakes from Ireland, driving them to the sea where they drowned.
Because of this myth, there are a ton of portraits and prayer cards of St. Patrick awkwardly pointing at snakes, which is a BIG MOOD, especially in 2018.
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But here's the tea, fam. There were never snakes in Ireland to banish.
Despite legends and myths, snakes have never inhabited Ireland. First, it has been impossible for snakes to naturally migrate to modern day Ireland because of the sheer geological fact that Ireland is an island. According to the Christian Science Monitor, "scientists have never found a snake species that could migrate across open ocean."
And when Ireland was connected to continental Europe, it was during the Ice Age, when Ireland's climate was uninviting to the slithering creatures. "The Ice Age made the islands inhospitable to reptiles, whose cold-blooded bodies need heat from the surroundings to function," Popular Science explains.
That means no snakes in Ireland and therefore no snake miracles for St. Patrick.
"When Patrick drives the snakes out of Ireland, it is symbolically saying he drove the old, evil, pagan ways out of Ireland [and] brought in a new age," Philip Freeman, classics professor at Luther College in Iowa, told National Geographic in 2014.
So the myth of St. Patrick banishing actual snakes is kinda sorta very not true.
But still, perhaps the portraits of him pointing out the snakes is still a lesson that we too need to banish the snakes from our lives.
After all, Kim Kardashian did it. And she's thriving.
