To our knowledge, no one has successfully rebutted the opinion that St. Patrick was a real person, however much the snakes remain unconvinced by direct personal experience of the matter. They have their own measure, their own skein of consequential events stretching back to the beginnings of their snakey kind, and Patrick does not appear there among those events, in point of fact.
They are keenly aware they may be summarily removed, of course, the snakes. That knowledge is given to every living thing, and each incorporates the prudent list of tactics for eluding such potentialities, the snakes being no exception to the rule.
St. Patrick in a rich enough symbology might represent to your practicing snake the embodiment of that threat of complete and general extirpation: the summing metonym of all the forces tending towards its elimination. But mark this: there's no evidence whatsoever that snakes think that way. We must not impute to them a snakey hinduism in which the role of the Destroyer, Siva, is taken up by the Celtic Missionary. No.
But that is not to deny to snakes their willful slithery adherence to Patrick's hallowed plan, however little credence they give to its existence. It's a feature of their design, is what I'm saying, a predisposed quality of their being. All of them built aversive to Ireland from the go, built to never be and to never have been deployed in such a place.
That the snakes were not accessible for deportation did not trouble the foundations of the fellow's views on ridding Ireland of them in the slightest.
It must be noted that the command, "Remove the Snakes!" is one of the more universally agreeable pronouncements, even when made far beyond the slithering circuit of the things where the satisfying likelihood that they will never appear greets all such talk.
The Saint's hallowed plan allowed for an arduous time of it describing once again what a snake was to his audience before the common wisdom of the matter could be fully received. In the event, they opened their minds to his knowledges, accepting both the premise of the snake itself as described by his holiness and his proscriptive plan for each and every one of them as well.
The snakes weren't there when Patrick arrived to send them away. But after him, they went missing from the place they'd never been. He made his mark, Patrick, is what I'm saying.
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