Via LiveScience.com – Startling Discovery: The First Human Ritual:
A startling discovery of 70,000-year-old artifacts and a python’s head carved of stone appears to represent the first known human rituals.
Maybe you have to be there, but the image is about as snake-like as the face on Mars is a face. However, this place of ancient ritual with a carved python reminds me of the Indo-European poetic formula, from Watkins’ How to Slay a Dragon, that the hero slays the serpent. The fact that the red spears were burned reminds me of the premise that mythic images of snake have to do with menstruation from Grahn’s Blood, Bread and Roses. It is the male sky god Marduk that slays the watery snake mother Tiamat. Everything went down hill from there.
I am also reminded that Baba Yaga has been linked quite strongly to the snake and snake imagery. Baba Yaga’s daughters are snakes and she is sometimes described as having a single leg, thus being like a snake. I’ve been amazed by the quality of Baba Yaga by Andreas Johns.
Of course, the Jim Morrison lyric / poetry from The End came to mind as well, which I used in the post title.