Animal Presences

Excerpt - James Hillman

A Snake is not a Symbol

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, because 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 that 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 temples of Asclepius 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 para-sympathetic nervous systems or 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 of 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 flickering tongue, its rattle or hiss and quick strike, its reticulated glistening skin, its coil and sidewinding, 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?

For instance, a black snake comes in a dream, a great big black snake, and you can spend a whole hour of therapy with this black snake, talking about the devouring mother, talking about anxiety, about repressed sexuality, and all the other interpretative moves that we therapists make. But what remains after all the symbolic understanding is what that snake is doing, this crawling huge black snake that’s sliding into your life. The moment you’ve caught the snake in an interpretation, you’ve lost the snake. You’ve stopped its living movement. Then the person leaves the therapeutic hour with a concept about “my repressed sexuality” or “my cold black passions” or “my mother” – and is no longer with the snake.

The interpretation settles the emotional quivering and mental uncertainty that came with the snake. In fact, the snake is no longer necessary; it has been successfully banished by interpretation. You, the dreamer, don’t need the snake anymore and you then form the habit of not needing dreams anymore either once they have been interpreted. Meaning replaces image; animal disappears into the human mind.

There are various ways of keeping the snake around. It can be imagined as a felt presence and talked with; it may need to be fed and housed, painted and modeled. It can be honored by attentions, like recalling it several times during the day: by “doing something for it” – a physical gesture, lighting a candle, buying an amulet, discovering its name. It can be brought closer by visualizing it, sensing its skin, its strength. Now imagination replaces meaning, and the human mind gives itself over to the animal presence.

This is the psychological and imaginative work of animating the image, giving a life-soul back to the snake that may have been removed from it by your desire to understand it. The snake may have no objection to being understood. It may be pleased with your turning to herpetology books about snakes, by your visit to a zoo to watch them, by your reading of ancient serpent mysteries. But whatever you do, consult with the snake first so that you do not insult it by following your own plan without recognizing its arrival in your life. Its arrival is a summons to divert your intentions from yourself at least partially toward it. Animating the image – that is the task today. No longer is it a question of symbolic contents of dreams…