The ancient Greek myth of Cadmus battling a snake could be an allegory for the discovery of the Amazon River, said Dr. Enrico Mattievich, a retired professor of physics from the Federal University of Rio de Janeiro (UFRJ) in Brazil. Mattievich wrote a book titled “Journey to the Mythological Inferno” in 2011, exploring connections between Greek myths and South American geographical and historical sites.
Some scholars have said the Cadmus myth was based on a simple fight between a man and a real snake. Some Jungian psychologists said it represents a battle against the impulse to commit incest. Mattievich thinks it is more significant; the snake is the unruly, winding, and sometimes tempestuous South American river conquered by early Greek explorers.
The snake’s fiery eyes and noxious venom describe the imposing volcanoes along the Amazon. It’s rows of teeth are the mountain ranges, and it’s many tongues are the branching rivers.
We will look at passages of the Cadmus myth, as told in Ovid’s “Metamorphoses,” along with Mattievich’s analysis, which he gives in his Q-mag article “Cadmus Slays the Serpent.” We will also briefly discuss Mattievich’s theory that Odysseus’s journey to Hades in Homer’s “Odyssey,” was actually a journey to an underworld of a different sort—to South America, a land below Greece.
He makes these archaeomythological arguments in the context of other, controversial evidence that contact began between the Old World and South America long before it is commonly thought to have started.
It is beyond the scope of this article to examine that evidence, but we will briefly mention an interesting experiment carried out by Dr. Thor Heyerdahl in 1969 and again in 1970. He built a boat using papyrus, similar to the boats constructed by ancient Egyptians. He sailed it from Morocco to Barbados twice to show that America was accessible to the people of those days.
Why the Snake May Represent a River
Verses 77–80 of “Metamorphoses,” describe the snake in very river-like terms, Mattievich pointed out: “The snake would at one point curl up within its coils making a vast circle, then it would stand up straighter than a length of planking, or be carried forward in a mighty rush, like a stream swollen by rainstorms, and with its breast push aside the woods standing in its way.”
Though the allegory is a “masterpiece of poetic creativity,” Mattievich wrote, “it was not able to transfigure completely the true nature of the ‘aquatic monster.’”
