The Crocodile in Culture

Long before there were warning signs, management plans or safety campaigns, people were already living alongside the crocodile, and had been for thousands of years, the whole length of the animal’s range. Wherever a culture shared its water with this predator, from the temple rivers of Hindu India to the islands of Melanesia to the Country of Aboriginal Australia, it did a version of the same thing. It wrote the animal into worship and law and story, so the hard-won knowledge would outlast the person who first learned it. The shape changes from place to place. The knot is the same wherever it is tied. The deepest expertise on the crocodile has never belonged to any one nation, and this chapter walks a little of that range to show it.

A god’s mount and a temple’s guest

Go west, to the rivers of Hindu India, and the crocodile is a mount fit for a god. The makara, a water-creature drawn for centuries with a crocodile’s long jaws and armoured body, is the vahana, the sacred vehicle, of Ganga, goddess of the holy river, and of Varuna, the old god of the waters. To carry a deity is about the highest honour a creature can hold in that tradition. A people does not seat a river goddess on the back of the crocodile if all it sees is a man-eater. Nobody would. It does so because it has watched the animal rule the river for as long as there has been a river to rule.