Being thrown into a pit of venomous snakes, could there be anything as bad as that?
It’s a kind of death most of you might think of as fiction, something you relate to a certain
Indiana Jones movie.
But what if it really happened?
Let’s now investigate.
Getting tossed into a pit of snakes has to be one of the biggest downers a person can
have in their life.
We had a quick look at polls taken in the US and the fear to top all others in this
country is snakes, easily out-scaring public speaking and heights.
Just about everyone suffers a little bit from what’s called “ophidiophobia”, although
that’s an irrational fear of snakes.
For instance, many people can’t even look at snakes on the TV.
Most people would never let a ball python slither over their arms, even though they
don’t pose much of a danger if you handle them correctly.
With that in mind, the snake pit wasn’t just designed to kill a person.
It was supposed to torture someone mentally because, let’s face it, even being slithered
over by a hundred harmless snakes wouldn’t be very nice.
One person who might have died this way was the Viking warrior Ragnar Lodbrok, who popped
his clogs in the 9th century.
He is now called a legendary king, but the stories, or sagas, are very likely based on
a real person.
That was the guy that gave the Britons a hard time when he and his band of elite fighters
did their UK-based pillaging.
While the legends may be somewhat exaggerated or entirely fabricated, the Anglo-Saxons who
were on the end of some Viking bashing wrote about a mighty Viking invader named “Ragnall”
or “Reginherus”.
In what we now call France, the Franks were also given a hard time by a bloodthirsty warrior
with a similar name.
If this guy did exist, maybe he went the way the legends say- being thrown into a pit of
snakes.
Maybe, because it could be a myth.
But as someone once said, “When you have to choose between the truth and the legend,
choose the legend.”
One of them goes that Ragnar was captured by King Aella, the guy that ruled over Northumbria
in northern England.
Some sources state that Aella was captured by Ragnar and given the tremendously brutal
punishment of the Blood Eagle, but other sources say Aella got the upper hand and killed Ragnar.
Let’s go with the latter.
Ragnar was thrown into a pit of snakes, which has throughout history inspired the odd drawing.
It looks as though he was chained up and then had to sit there while a number of snakes
slithered over him and presumably injected their venom into him.
We are not sure how he died, but in the 14th century, someone wrote that Ragnar composed
a poem in the pit of snakes, right before his death.
It goes: “Fast to th’hereditary end,
To my allotted goal I tend.
Fix’d is the viper’s harm; Within my heart, his mansion warm,
In the recesses of my breast The writhing snake hath form’d his nest”
Ok, so we learn something by reading that: Ragnar wrote that the snakes were vipers.
If you know anything about snakes, you know vipers can kill.
Those you see in the snake pit in the TV show Vikings are definitely not vipers.
Some of them are reticulated pythons, which don’t have venom even though they can put
the squeeze on a person.
The show was hardly realistic, but what if the legend is real and Ragnar was thrown into
a pit of vipers?
There are lots of different kinds of vipers, but they are all venomous.
Take the Malaysian pit viper, which you might just see lying in a forest in parts of Southeast
Asia.
It’s small, kinda cute, and it is extremely lazy.
That’s because it waits for its prey to come to it.
It’s also why they sometimes end up being trodden on.
They are not naturally aggressive, but getting kicked in the face tends to put a snake in
a bad mood.
Rattlesnakes are also vipers, and they too will generally not attack if you haven’t
annoyed them or stepped on them.
In a snake pit situation, they would definitely bite someone out of fear.
Still, people wouldn’t just fall down dead.
If someone is bitten by a viper, they have time, lots of time usually, to get help.
That means Ragnar would have been laying in that pit for a while.
He certainly could have sat there and written a poem, although it wouldn’t have been an
ideal place to pen his thoughts.
With snake bites, there are many factors when it comes to death.
They are the amount of venom pumped into a person, the person’s health, and how they
manage the bite.
Running around like a loon and screaming is a big no-no since that pumps venom around
the body.
Still, enough time in that pit would kill anyone.
We now have to ask just how many snakes King Aella had at hand?
England isn’t renowned for its venomous snakes, nor any other dangerous wild animals.
The country does have adders, though, a kind of viper that is only mildly venomous.
Since the 1970s, England, Wales and Scotland have only recorded a couple of deaths by adders,
and they both involved kids.
Nonetheless, if 50 adders had bitten Ragnar, he would have died sooner or later.
You also have the legend of Gundahar, a king of Burgundy in the 5th century.
He appears in the Völsunga saga, a bunch of stories written in Scandinavia in the 13th
century.
Yet again, like all legends, the story was written a long time after the fact…if there
ever was a fact.
According to that story, Gundahar was thrown into a snake pit.
There’s actually a very old image stone in a museum right now that depicts the death.
Maybe it happened, maybe it didn’t.
You have to wonder if someone would have gone to all the effort in collecting lots of venomous
snakes.
There have been cases of contract killers getting rid of someone by using a snake.
Think about it, it’s a great way of making a murder look like an accident.
It’s just hard handling a venomous snake without it actually biting you, and forget
about hiding a king Cobra under someone’s pillow.
We actually found some news stories about a contract killer in India who killed a few
of his victims using venomous snakes.
There’s also the famous case in the US when “Rattlesnake James” knocked off his wife
that way.
With that in mind, the snake pit would have certainly been a workable method of execution,
if not a bit laborious.
The question we’ll now ask is how dying this way would have felt.
Firstly, it would hurt, especially where the snakes bite.
As things progressed, the victim would have struggled to breathe.
Their heart rate would have quickened, and it’s likely their vision would have become
blurred.
That was the case in 1957 when a snake bit Dr. Karl Patterson Schmidt.
Before he passed away, he wrote down how he felt in what’s now called a “Death Diary.”
The bite to the time of death took about 24 hours.
The diary can shed light on how the end of someone’s life might have gone down in the
snake pit, although we should say that not all deadly snake venom produces the same symptoms.
The doctor wrote that at the beginning, he was able to eat “2 pieces milk toast,”
but he soon started feeling a “strong chill,” and he was “shaking.”
He then looked in his mouth and saw his gums were bleeding.
In short, haemotoxic venom gets into the bloodstream, which leads to leaking blood vessels.
This hemorrhaging just gets worse, and the person bleeds all over the place.
Neurotoxic venom attacks the nervous system, and pretty fast.
The person becomes paralyzed from the head down, and at some point, they won’t be able
to breathe.
Venom can also be cytotoxic, meaning it kills the cells.
According to the British Medical Journal, England’s adders have cytotoxic venom, which
results in haemotoxic effects.
So, in those English snake pits back in the day, bleeding would have been the cause of
death rather than death related to paralysis of muscle function.
As he was dying, Dr. Schmidt wrote: “Slight bleeding is now going on in the
bowels.
No urine, with an ounce or so of blood about every three hours.
Mouth and nose continue to bleed, not excessively.”
He thought at that point he was going to survive, but then he keeled over.
He was later pronounced dead, with the autopsy saying he died from “extensive internal
bleeding.”
So, was the snake pit one of the worst punishments in human history?
Damn right it was, probably much worse than getting your limbs ripped off, just because
the victim would have died slowly while the perpetrators of his death just slithered around
him without a care in the world.
Now you need to watch “Most Painful Animal Attacks Human Could Ever Endure.”
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