Research source

(1) The heads of various kinds of snakes

Date of account: Published 1922
Source: Bantu Beliefs and Magic With particular reference to the Kikuyu and Kamba tribes of Kenya Colony; together with some reflections on East Africa after the war
Reference: Bantu Beliefs and Magic With particular reference to the Kikuyu and Kamba tribes of Kenya Colony; together with some reflections on East Africa after the war · selected passage 120
Rights: public_domain
Language: English
Record updated: 2026-08-25

Record summary

Published source text

Read the available text below. Archive transcriptions may contain OCR errors; later context is labelled separately. A recorded claim is not a finding that it happened.

Source passage

Source text · mention only

(1) The heads of various kinds of snakes. When a medicine man captures a snake he takes it by the neck in his right hand and passes its tail three times around and behind his waist with the left hand, like a belt, the third time passing its head to his left hand, which is grasping the tail, and then clasping neck and tail in the left hand and holding it out from his body. He makes three gashes with a knife on the back of the snake’s head, just above the neck, at the same time making a gash in the back of his left hand, which is holding the snake’s head and tail. He then takes some of the blood from the gash on the back of his hand and smears it with his knife point in each of the gashes in the snake’s neck. The snake dies after the man’s blood has been smeared on the gashes, and its head is then severed below the gashes and put into the nzele with the vegetable ingredients. These are then pounded up till the mixture becomes a pitch-like substance.

Historical context

Contextual commentary · mention only

This material belongs to a folklore tradition. Story type, collector, community, transmission and literary editing matter when comparing it with other sources.

Modern context

Contextual commentary · mention only

Lattice compares motifs and reported features without assuming that a traditional being is a biological species or that similar stories document one external cause.

Investigate related details with Anomaly Graph’s account-based search, or read how matching and provenance work.