Snakes & Shadows – The Dark, The Light, & The Fullest Living of Life
Our lives are marked by moonless nights and sun drenched days as well as what artists call “chiaroscuro”: the delicate interplay of dark and light brought about by subtly shifting shadows. We paint with light as much as pigment, but make sense of what is illuminated one must explore the unlit depths of meaning and being. The dark serves us in the form of insightful pain, comforting silence, the stillness between periods of tiring activity, the death that begets life, and the blackness that gives birth to light. In spite of these facts, there is no element or force of nature more commonly associated with evil in Western societies than the dark hours of night, and no creature more demonized than the dreaded snake we imagine lying in wait for us there. To the degree that I have a different understanding of them – of learning from them and accessing their power – it is perhaps because of decades of deepened intimacy with a canyon as yet untouched by a bulb’s glare, and time spent in close association with the serpents housed there.
August is the month when when we are most likely to see rattlers here, black-tailed variety that is not all aggressive but dangerous if stepped on. And of all the many diverse creatures living in my magical canyon home, there is none more feared than these usually secretive reptiles we share our canyon home with. Not the
bears, who have on occasion broke into vehicles looking for food, and once contested the fresh baked loaves on Loba’s kitchen counter. Not the chisel toothed peccary making gnashing sounds in the willows, or the giant antlered elk that dominate the river in Fall. It may be that we mistakenly attribute the snake – like the blackness – to evil entities due to the way each reminds us of our vulnerability or triggers bone deep flight from the realization of our mortal life’s end. Or we may have learned to accept our biological limits as well as value what we neither can see yet nor understand, but what is most likely to send chills up our spine is still the terror of the unknown and the nearly universal fear of change.
No wonder the snake arouses strong feelings and critical dogma, often a concealed agent of mystery and danger, a representative of the shadow world and cross cultural symbol of unavoidable transition as it yearly sheds its skin. The meaning of life itself can be discerned from a reading of its meaningful molt, with the spirit and anima continuing on as our flesh and energy is repeatedly cycled back into the earthen alchemical cauldron from which it sprouted and branched. The snake’s molting skin is emblematic of our temporal creations and fragile illusions, as well as those exactly defined personas we pray will outlast all transition.
In societies where nature is generally considered to be base, dirty or evil, the serpent is reviled. Indigenous peoples, peoples living near to the land, have never been as quick to abhor the rodent-reducing reptiles slipping through their granary roofs. Examples of snakes treated as a positive, informative embodiment of life are found among many primal cultures: coiled within the womb of the African “black goddess,” wrapped around the Celtic and Teutonic effigies, held aloft in rainbow colors by the carved image of the goddess Una in aboriginal Australia. The Sumerian “Great Mother Serpent of Heaven.” The Venezuelan Yaruro’s “Puana the Snake,” creator of all. The writhing passion of Quetzalcoatl, the feathered serpent of the Maya. Snake-hearted Paghat of the Near East. The serpent and the planet-body, the snake and the feminized earth were seen as one indivisible entity. Thus for early Egyptians, the symbol of the cobra served as the hieroglyph for the word “Goddess,” and from her comes the egg, “Maat”: a word meaning both “matter” and “mother.”
The rattler is prominent in Native American mythology, marked by its propensity to warn us first with the distinctive buzz of its tail, the buttons of its rattle made of the remnants of its shed skins. They were often revered as agents of the Spirit who could avenge human affronts. Bites were punishment for sacrilege, or the harming of a fellow snake. The Comanche, on the other hand, would only kill one if it failed to rattle, presumably on a ninja mission of vengeance. Other tribes such as the Talawa and Tarasco wouldn’t hurt one under any circumstance. The Luiseno and Shoshoni regarded a snake-bit camp dog as a sign of failed spiritual duties. Most refer to them respectfully as “Grandmother” or “Grandfather,” in deference to their spiritual significance and power. Rattlers repay the Chitimacha of Louisiana for a historic favor by guarding their houses while they’re away.
Of all the known American rituals involving serpents, the Hopi Snake Dance is the most widely known. Many of the animals they use are rattlers, held in the teeth at a point five or six inches behind the head. This portion of the dance occupies less than a half-hour of the nine day ceremony for rain, but fascinates the snake fearing ethnologists and jumpy observers. They’re pulled from the enclosure called a Kisi one at a time by costumed participants until each one has been danced with, then they are placed in a circle of sacred cornmeal by the Antelope priests. Women scatter more white cornmeal over them, before they’re grabbed by the Snake priests in great handfuls and carried to the four directions to be released. It’s then the snakes’ job to reenter the underworld, and there ask the Thunder Gods to bring the much-needed rain.
By affirming the right to exist of snakes, we affirm proliferate, sentient, outlaw life. Sensual life. Sexual life. In the Yogic traditions the energy of life and transformation is known as Kundalini, serpent energy that rests at the base of the spine in the sexual chakra. It spirals in a timeless state, a unifying fire that extends upwards to that atrophied portion of the modern human brain, the source of shared instincts and dreamtime appropriately labled our reptilian cortex. The spine is the conduit for the life-force, the trunk of the sacred tree. It’s the arousal of the Kundalini serpent power that reunites the false dualities of good versus evil, spirit versus matter, body 
versus soul. It’s our conscious retrieval by the Garden of Oneness. It’s the re-membering of our selves, of our selves as the planet-body Gaia. With Kundalini we have both human nature and greater nature on the rise. With the Greek Oroboros – the snake with its tail in its mouth – we have a complete circle, nature forever consuming itself without being diminished, a corporeal as well as spiritual homecoming.
Here is the source of mantism, telepathy, intuition and healing, the power of the Earth to know and to cure itself. It is the feathered serpent Quetzalcoatl, breaking free from the hardening concrete. In spite of what you may have been told, the snake is velvet soft rather than slimy. It is a blessing. It is a teacher. It is a manifestation of anima and spirit provoking us to wake up and pay attention to the world under and around us, including those scaled and voiceless soothsayers living nearest it.
Neither serpents or the dark are threats so much as they are opportunities, with all manifestations of nature in and around us ready to inform and empower, and with darkness the fecund womb from which all possibilities arise. Both the shadow world and its resident snakes are in ways always right here in front of us, unseen among the dried grasses and lichen-covered rock of our still wild souls. They wait for nothing… but if they did, it would not be to ambush us – but to welcome us back to the real world of deeply experienced, inter-coursing dark and light. To wholeness and balance, to the wondrous endless cycling of death and life.
-(c) 2008 by Jesse Wolf Hardin (www.animacenter.org)
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(Photos (c) 2008 by Jesse Wolf Hardin)
Categories: Jesse Wolf Hardin – Essays & Tales, Understanding & Practicing Animá
Dave
Some beautiful photographs, I’m wondering if the snake in the first photo was a female. Perhaps pregnant. Since I was a boy, a long time ago, I was fascinated with snakes.
When my brother came home from Germany and the army in 1953 he brought a gift for my sister. It was a beautiful ‘leather’ purse. I can recall it today as it was comprised of two toned golden tan buckskin and creamy white scales. Smooth in texture and my sister loved it … until after using it for a few weeks when my brother informed her it was made of snake skin. She never used it again because, as my brother knew, she was repulsed of snakes.