Spring is when the snakes that live under my front porch come out of hibernation and back into my daily sun life. Babies and adults bask in the weeds, warming their cold bodies, waiting for food. The skink salamanders and the mice come out around this time, in synchrony.
I grew up with three older brothers who took great delight in trapping snakes inside clear glass jars and chasing after me. Well, those snakes were quite deadly Brazilian snakes… Later, in Malawi, I learned about the infamous mambas and once saw one crossing the road, head held high, slithering at high speed across the tarmac. Not helpful at all to have watched the trailer for the movie Anaconda… featuring Jon Voigt and Jennifer Lopez among others. I most certainly will not watch the entire Amazonian adventure. Then there is the other movie that I did watch, even scarier, when in the end you realize the monster is still inside the house…
My deep fear of snakes shifted with age, shifted with dreams, where they continued to appear, and with some practice, with the readings of mythology. Today I can stay quiet and watch some of them, a few feet away, soaking up in the sun. I know they are not coming after me. I photograph them - the black, the rat, the garter ones… known to bite if provoked, like most of us, but not instantly venomous and deadly.
Then I even create drawings of the anaconda, a visionary woman once saw roaming around my head
Snakes occupy large spaces in the history of symbols and images. From the spiral to kundalini energy coiled to spring on you, to the wisdom of ancient women goddesses. They are perceived as belonging to other realms and continue to feed fear. The snake in the grass of so many poems and here the last stance of A narrow fellow in the grass, by Emily Dickinson
But never met this Fellow Attended or alone Without a tighter Breathing And Zero at the Bone.
The snake entries at the Taschen “Book of symbols, reflections on archetypal images” are all delightful!
“How eerie a snake can seem. It smells with its flickering forked tongue. It hears through its skin and is particularly sensitive to low-frequency vibrations and tremblings of the earth, linking it with secret, subterranean, oracular mysteries of knowledge. ”
and further down:
“Valiant, epiphanic and terrifying, snakes flare up out of the earth or from under leaf litter or rocks or the dark waters of rivers or the darkness of the psyche. The underworld realm of the dead that snakes mythically inhabit is also the fecund ground from which new life emerges, a place of healing, initiation and revelation, dominion of the ancient Great Goddess.”
Un-gendered, multi-gendered, despised and veneered shape shifting creatures of temperature …
And here an older snake story that I like.
Meaipe, Espirito Santo, Saturday, February 2, 2006
The "rolinha" dove made a nest and layed eggs inside the trellis in the veranda, where Ginny had tended to the blue flowered morning glory vine. Niece, nephew, grand-nephews and grand-niece were overjoyed. They checked on the progress of the eggs, fed them grapes and loaves of bread, appreciated the daily visits of the "rolinho", the he-dove. In the last day of their stay at the beach the eggs hatched. Isn't life great!?
Family left the next morning and we in turn were overjoyed with the silent time to cook a little shrimp, a little rice, a sprinkling of some lemon on hearts of palm, cold, cold beer. We had been there for a week now, still one week to go before we had to stand in line once again and fly north!
Then there came the snake, a meter long, gray, round headed, thin tailed.
"No problem", says I. "Don't kill it, it is not poisonous, I KNOW!"
I had to convince them all. They all wanted to kill that snake, poisonous or not, because to their eyes, it deserved to be killed. To my eyes, it had round eyes, a tail rounded at the end, no sharpness to its demeanor. I was sure of it, it was not a poisonous snake.
We went to check on the status of the newborn. We were just about to place a mirror near the nest to see the birds. I had just removed a bunch of offending grapes and a huge stale bun from the nest.
The snake met us eye to eye. She snatched the birds right there.
No broom would stop her, she was seriously committed. She had waited for two days hidden in the yard, at the corner of that trellis, biding her time, waiting for the children to leave.
So we went to the beach to tell the story.
Business was very slow, we the only customers sitting outside the Italian restaurant by the water. Chatting away with Monica and Renata. Gordon had baked some ciabatta and with some of the leftover dough, he had baked some bread sticks.
Fernando, the roofer, came by and told us these thin gray snakes are the very, very dangerous "preguiçosa", the lazy one, and so we should proceed very carefully around her.
"Oh, great!"I think, "and I though it was just a garden snake!"
Vilma, the cook, joined us to tell us that this snake is "the very, very dangerous "cipó" snake. For sure, it is the infamous ‘'vine" snake!"
She tells us an uncle of hers died suffocated by a "cipó" snake, right inside his house. They make themselves very, very thin like a pencil and then wrap themselves around your neck and suffocate you while you sleep, "while you're not even paying attention."
According to Vilma, all snakes are to be killed. All snakes are very dangerous. Most will jump at you. Like scorpions, they will kill on contact. We were not talking about scorpions, but out of the blue Vilma tells us she had a brother who was married to a woman who died from the bite of a scorpion. "But", I said, "scorpions, yes, but not all snakes are dangerous?! You mean to say all snakes will kill you? "
"Yes", said Vilma with absolute faith. "I have no doubt, whatsoever!" Then she did something extraordinary. She went to the kitchen for a while, and came back with one of the bread sticks carefully painted as a snake. Perfect scales, eyes, fangs, this adorable and dangerous blue and tan magic marker painted bread stick snake.
She fondled her stick. "I named this one "Augustostrictor", after my boyfriend!"
She had no doubts. All snakes needed to be killed.
Meaipe, 2006
That was fun!
I find that snakes, more than spiders, scorpions, sharks and other similarly maligned creatures, elicit an almost primordial fear. Even those who have no story to which they can point (like brothers chasing little girls with jars full of venomous creatures!) drop right into terror. We are fortunate to live in a place where venomous snakes are rare to non-existent, but I don't think any of them really deserve the horrible treatment they receive. Symbolically, they are about rebirth, immortality, and wisdom. Ironic, isn't it?