Secrets Of The East

There was many a day as a very young child, that I clambered over and under and around the cannon out front of the Eastern and Oriental Hotel in Penang. There are plenty of cannon still dotted around various locations in Penang, none of which have ever been used in earnest. Fort Cornwallis, not too far from the E & O Hotel, is one of the most well-known cannon emplacements on the island.

Eastern and Oriental Hotel,
aw still a great place!

Penang is an unusual place because technically, it was never any regional Sultan's actual island, and there are genuine cultural ties back in history to China and also to India via fleets from those places in days of the very ancient past.

Up in the hills, almost mountains, in fact, there are religious centers of major significance both to traditional Hindu people and also to Taoist - or at least Shangdi-style Chinese.

Today, when one is apt to hear a wide complaint that the world is becoming flattened, and deliberately flattened too, by out-of-control bureaucracies and mindless, juvenile in the historical sense, mono-cultural materialism, reminding myself of some of the ancient places in Penang is instructive.

The Chinese Temple of Supreme Bliss - but locally and colloquially also known as the 'Snake Temple' (because part of its name contains the word for 'snake') - is something that probably not even that many present-day Penang locals know accurately about. But here is a very fine example of what distinguishes the potential for social and cultural depth that human society possesses - and what the purposes of such depth is.

The Temple of Supreme Bliss -
the superficial temple...

THE actual Snake Temple though, 'She Miao,' is a much smaller, different place nearby, which is specifically and literally a temple to well, not a snake deity, but to something to do with ancient mysterious, seething, gaseous and ever-expanding energies, sometimes deadly, sometimes beneficial. Like all temples, this one goes through its materially up and down phases - and to a large extent, over many years, it has functioned as a kind of a small, open-to-the-public, reptile zoo of sorts, and this has been the means for its commercial basis of survival.

At the moment, it is seeing an 'up' moment, where everything has been extensively refurbished and up-graded; it looks good, especially in the evenings, but not forgetting though, that even in the day-time, the insides are kept rather dark because there are snakes hanging out in the rafters there!

'Something' is burned in the place that keeps the snakes, most of which are particularly deadly, somnolent.

Anyway, strange to tell, the snake image has a fundamental place in the Chinese version of the Adam and Eve story...

And, when the leaders of the ancient world, had lost their way, and become devoid of a moral standard that Heaven could abide, the God of Heaven... ...destroyed them.