Woman.
Tree.
Snake.
Say these three words, then pause a moment and feel what is happening in your body. Until June of ‘22, when I wrote, “Apples” (part 1 of this post series, if you haven’t read it you can access it here:
), my internal reaction had been one of shame. I would draw in, making myself a smaller target for male anger. In a poem I wrote around the same time, a poem that came out like projectile vomit, I wrote: “Eve fucked/The original/bromance.” Man and God, forever a united front; woman, forever the necessary (to the species’ continuation) evil they must overcome in order to be reunited. Woman, not just herself, but as a representation of all the weakness Man is taught to shun in himself: the body, sexuality, needs, desires, physical limitations, emotions, mortality; and, by extension, his own humanity and the earth-womb from which he was formed. Tricky woman, forever dissatisfied with the crumbs he leaves her; clever woman, forever trying to lure him away from the Divine, to bring him down to her own base level. This is the story I grew up with, and yet…the more I drew in, the louder sounded the “NO” at the core of my being, the more forcefully I began pushing out. In “Apples” I reached the tipping point, the “NO” outward force finally overcoming the inward retreat, and I EXPLODED. It was, at first, a frantic kind of flailing, directionless. The Eden story was, in the words of Sue Monk Kidd, “wounded geography” in my female soul. I needed a new story, a new Eden landscape to repair the wounded one.
Woman, tree, snake.
Here is my story.
~~~~~~~
There is a stream that flows through the property where I grew up known as Clay Lick Creek. Despite being polluted by the overflow from countless septic tanks (including ours), the creek was home to even more countless schools of minnow, some impressively large crayfish, innumerable bugs and microscopic lifeforms, and a healthy population of water snakes. Except for the one small water moccasin, or cotton mouth, that I spied gliding its way downstream one fine day, the snakes that lived in the creek on our property were harmless common water snakes. Common water snakes have magical skin that changes color: muddy-creek-bottom brown when it’s wet, river-rock grey when it’s dry. They also have a faint darker patterning on their scales that helps them blend in even better. These unassuming snakes never got larger than a couple of feet in length and a fat thumb in width, and were even less aggressive than garter snakes (I caught one baby garter once that tried Very Hard to eat my gloved fingers with its toothless mouth. It was absolutely adorable). The only danger these snakes posed was in startling our horses as we crossed the culvert over the creek, although they were so small and quick that you had to be looking at it before it moved to see it go. Our horses were pretty chill and rarely startled badly, so we learned to just keep and eye out and go slowly. I loved watching those plain but beautiful snakes curled up on rocks beside the culvert, sunning themselves.
We humans co-existed peacefully with the snakes until the summer I was eighteen or nineteen. That year we noticed that there were more snakes than usual, which probably meant they had nested nearby. I enjoyed seeing the snakes more often, although I did have to be more cautious crossing the creek with the horses. Harmless snakes don’t bother me, I quite enjoy watching the graceful way they glide. I understood that girls were “supposed” to fear snakes, but once I had determined that a snake wasn’t dangerous I tended to be more curious than wary. I don’t think I would keep one as a pet, I much prefer fuzzy animals with expressions one can read, but apart from the startle factor that I get from unexpectedly seeing a snake or large spider, I’m fine. Of course, the opposite is supposed to be true of boys. As “boy” essentially means “not girl,” my brother was not supposed to fear snakes, and he had covered well. I never knew how scared he actually was of snakes until the day I came home and found them all dead. Every. Last. Snake. Broken bodies lay in tortured poses around the culvert and along the creek. I felt a deep shock, who could have done this?
But of course I knew. My brother had been complaining about the increased numbers of snakes all summer, and had voiced a desire to curtail the population more than once. I had firmly dissented. The snakes were causing no harm, let them live here. He hadn’t been happy about it, but I was queen of the farm and he still listened to me. Until, that is, he uncovered the nest in the hay barn. His fear must have been great indeed to warrant the killing spree that resulted. He admitted to it when I confronted him, anger covering his fear, his tone accusing. If I had let him take care of them sooner, it implied, it wouldn’t have happened like this. Alarm bells began ringing in my gut that day as I realized that the sweet, innocent boy who had been my best friend since he was born was becoming something foreign to me: he was becoming a man, in the most cultured sense of the word. He was becoming something I could no longer trust to value what I valued, see the world from my perspective, and listen when I spoke. From that day I began to realize that our positions were reversed, and these things were what he expected of me, as was his right as Male. It was the beginning of the end of our friendship. The snake population on our property never did recover.
What I did not realize at the time was that we were acting out archetypal roles as ancient as written history: the age-old battle between female intuitive wisdom and male ego. It did not even occur to me to wonder at the symbolism of the snake, both in my story and the biblical Eden account, until Sue Monk Kidd, an author I greatly respect, pointed it out in her tumultuous account of her own spiritual reclamation, The Dance of the Dissident Daughter: One Woman’s Journey from Christian Tradition to the Sacred Feminine. Why, Kidd asks, did the very male and very patriarchal authors of the Bible choose a snake to represent the eternal opposite of God in physical form? Because, her research replied, at the time the Bible was written, a snake was the animal most closely associated with Goddess.
Whaaaaaaat…The. Fuck?????
Kidd wrote of her own experience:
Questions followed one another in rapid-fire succession: How had the snake, of all creatures—an animal no better or worse than other wild beings—come to embody the full projection of evil within the Jewish and Christian traditions? Why was the snake selected to represent Satan in the origin myth? Could it be that the patriarchal force chose the snake in hopes of diminishing women’s connection to feminine wisdom, power, and regeneration? Was it a way of discrediting the Feminine Divine?
In the context of that time and history, the idea made gut-wrenching sense. In fact, later I would read many such theories by scholars, theologians, and historians1.
When I mentioned this Goddess-snake connection to my daughter, Rena, her eyes lit up and she grabbed a library book I had gotten her just a couple weeks before, a beautifully illustrated collection of Goddess myths from around the world written by Dr. Janina Ramirez, called: Goddess: 50 Goddesses, Spirits, Saints, and Other Female Figures Who Have Shaped Belief. Rena told me that she had noticed several of the Goddesses in the book were pictured with snakes, and she started flipping through the pages. The snakes were not hard to find. In this abbreviated collection of some of the most well known representatives of the Feminine Divine, at least thirteen of the fifty (including the biblical Eve and Virgin Mary) are associated with snakes, and two more with dragons2, which are close cousins. My Encyclopedia of Witchcraft had much more to add:
Snakes are symbolic of birth, life, immortality, rebirth, fertility, sexuality, health, and wisdom—especially women’s wisdom…Hibernating snakes burrow within Earth; emerging in the spring, they’re believed to carry Earth’s secrets as well as her sacred generative powers with them. No animal is as identified with the powers of the Earth or Great Mother Goddess as the snake3.
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