Snake Worship, House-Snake Taboo, and Sacred-Tree Belief in Rural China: A Jiangnan Folklore Record from Jiepai, Jiangsu

This record is a primary-source archival item about snake worship, snake-deity folklore, house-snake taboo, sacred-tree belief, childhood memory, and local belief narratives in Jiepai, Jiangsu, curated for research use in Chinese folklore, vernacular religion, rural China studies, Jiangnan folklore, sacred-tree studies, taboo narratives, oral tradition, and emic documentation. It is released as the OA_V1 item-level record for “The Death of the Snake Deity,” a Chinese narrative text within the Jiepai Jianghu section of the Chuanyue Archive. The text documents a Jiangnan folklore narrative from Jiepai, Danyang, Jiangsu, China, concerning a snake deity, a local ginkgo tree, house-snake taboo, punishment for killing snakes, and a childhood memory of breaking that taboo. It preserves a local narrative world in which snakes, sacred trees, household taboo, childhood danger, and family oral transmission are closely linked. The record’s value lies in snake worship, snake-deity folklore, house-snake taboo, sacred-tree belief, Chinese folklore, vernacular religion, rural China studies, Jiangnan folklore, childhood memory, and local belief narratives. The text is not presented as evidence for the supernatural reality of the snake deity. It is preserved as an emic record of local narrative forms, taboo logic, family oral transmission, remembered childhood experience, and place-based vernacular cosmology. Methodologically, this item combines the Archive Author’s childhood memory, remembered family oral transmission, later source uncertainty, narrative clarification, local conceptual explanation, and author annotations. The annotations distinguish remembered oral versions, uncertain later verification, childhood fact, authorial exaggeration, narrative invention, and local belief claims. A key feature of the record is the category of “house snake.” In this item, “house snake” refers to a snake found or seen inside a household, rather than to a domesticated snake. The narrative records a local prohibition against killing house snakes, together with the belief that violating this prohibition may lead to financial loss, misfortune, or death. This item belongs to the Jiepai Jianghu Legends and Beliefs Series. The series-level record has been published on Zenodo with DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20834123. This item-level record has DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.20846204. The item is also part of the broader Chuanyue Archive, a native-insider emic vernacular multimodal archive. Related records will be released on a rolling basis over the next few months. This public OA_V1 release includes the public narrative text, author annotations, and contextual metadata. It does not include the ginkgo-tree location map, current-site photographs, raw spatial materials, or unreleased provenance materials. Those materials are retained in the Author Private Master Archive. Authorship and upload roles are separate. The Archive Author, The Jiepai Archivist, is the creator, archive owner, rights holder, and public contact person. Any uploader, depositor, or curatorial assistant provides deposit and formatting assistance only and is not the author, creator, archive owner, rights holder, or public contact for this archive.