The following is an excerpt from James Hillman's book DREAM ANIMALS co-authored by painter Margot McLean:
"Often I begin a workshop on animal images with the snake. The snake works like a charm, freeing people of their insidious notions of snake symbolism, and therefore of animal symbolism in general. The questions I ask sound like this: "How do you understand a snake image?" "What does a snake mean?" "What's your interpretation?" I have assembled and condensed the replies:
1. The snake is renewal and rebirth becuase it sheds its skin.
2. A snake represents the negative mother because it wraps around, smothers, won't let you go, and swallows whole.
3. It is the animal embodiment of evil. It is sly, shifty, sinister, fork-tongued, and it is cursed by God to slide on its belly because of what it did to Eve and Adam. The Book of Revelations says the serpent is the Devil himself.
4. It's a feminine symbol, having a sympathetic relation with Eve, and Goddesses in Crete, India, Africa, and elsewhere.
5. The snake is a phallus, because it stiffens, erects its head, and ejects fluid from its tip. Besides, it penetrates crevices.
6. It represents the material earth world and as such is a universal enemy of the spirit. Birds fight it in nature and heroes fight it in culture.
7. The snake is a healer; it is a medicine, and we see it still on the signs of pharmacies. It was kept in the healing temple of Asklepios in Greece and a snake dream was the God himself coming to cure.
8. It is a guardian of holy men and wise men - even the New Testament says that serpents are wise.
9. The snake brings fertility, for it is found by wells and springs and represents the cool, moist element.
10. A snake is Death because of its poison and the instant anxiety it arouses.
11. It is the inmost truth of the body, like the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems, and like the serpent power of Kundalini yoga. That's why the sophisticated folk medicine among native Americans, South Asians, Chinese, and Africans, for instance, relies on parts of snakes for remedies.
12. The snake is the symbol for the unconscious psyche - particularly the introverting libido, the inward-turning energy that goes back and down and in. Its seduction draws us into darkness and deeps. It is always a "both": creative-destructive, male-female, poisonous-healing, dry-moist, spiritual-material, and many other irreconcilable opposites, like the figure Mercurius.
This twelfth interpretation of the snake takes all the other eleven and turns them into steps in a program in which the snake is finally explained by the final step: the unconscious psyche.
What has really been said by this last term that is not better said by the image itself, its fascinating flickeriing tongue, its rattle or hiss and quick strike, its reticulated glistening skin, its coil and side-winding, the panic rising on sudden sight of it? Why must we exchange the living image for an interpretative concept? Are interpretations really psychological defenses against the presence of a God? Remember: most of the Greek Gods, Goddesses, and heroes had a snake form - Zeus, Dionysus, Demeter, Athene, Hercules, Hermes, Hades, even Apollo. Is our terror of the snake the appropriate response of a mortal to an immortal?"
