Snake worship she sold herself to a man named Gonga no Tayu, who (unbeknownst to Sayohime) intended to sacrifice her to the snake deity of his village in place of his own daughter. When presented to the snake, Sayohime read from the Lotus sutra, enabling the deity to achieve enlightenment and shed its monstrous form. The deity then returned Sayohime to the care of her mother. In Australia, various Aboriginal mythologies tell of a huge python, known by a variety of names but universally referred to as the Rainbow Serpent, that was said to have created the landscape, embodied the spirit of
The Crow and the Snake Croxall the story served as a warning against covetousness and for Thomas Bewick it illustrated the danger of being ruled by brute appetite. The latter interpretation had earlier been preferred by Guillaume La Perrière in his emblem book "Le theatre des bons engins" (1544). There the greedy crow is poisoned internally after swallowing the snake, “thinking it tasted good as sugar or venison”. The Crow and the Snake The Crow or Raven and the Snake or Serpent is one of Aesop's Fables and numbered 128 in the Perry Index. Alternative Greek versions exist and two of these were adopted during