THE STORY & ITS AFTERLIVES
The Classic of Regions Within the Seas: South records the Ba serpent in clinical fashion: it eats elephants and expels the bones after three years, and gentlemen who take those bones suffer no ailments of heart or belly. Its body is scaled in green, yellow, red, and black; a variant tradition makes it a black snake with a green head, dwelling west of the rhinoceros country. The monster arrives in the text already half-pharmacopoeia: even the leavings of its appetite are medicine.
The image was old when the book was compiled. In the 'Heavenly Questions' of the Songs of Chu, Qu Yuan asks: a serpent swallowing an elephant, how big must it be? Later tradition brought the beast to Lake Dongting, where the archer Yi was said to have slain a ba serpent whose piled bones became a hill; the old name of Yueyang, Baling, 'Mound of Ba', was explained by that carcass, and a Ba Serpent Tomb was long pointed out there. The proverb 'a greedy heart is a snake trying to swallow an elephant' grew from the same image, turning the catalogue-monster into shorthand for insatiable desire.
