Snakes

The dream dictionary reaches for the snake first, and reaches predictably: a hidden enemy, a buried fear, a sexual symbol coiled at the base of the bed. It is the most over-determined image in the whole catalog, and that is exactly the problem. James Hillman opened his animal workshops by asking people what a snake meant, and the answers came in a flood that cancelled itself out. The snake is renewal because it sheds its skin; the snake is the smothering mother; the snake is evil, cursed to its belly; the snake is the phallus; the snake is the healer on the pharmacy sign; the snake is death, “because of its poison and the instant anxiety it arouses” (Hillman, Animal Presences, 2008). Hillman’s point in collecting them was not to choose the right one. It was to free people “of their insidious notions of snake symbolism and, therefore, of animal symbolism in general.” A snake, he insisted, is not a symbol. It is always a “both” — “creative-destructive, male-female, poisonous-healing, dry-moist, spiritual-material” — and the meaning peels off in your hand the moment you grip it.

So the first question the dream asks is not what does the snake mean but what is your snake doing. Is it coiled in a corner, hidden? Is it rising toward your face? Is it in your house, in your mouth, around your chest? The tradition tracks these differences with care, because the snake is the one animal in the inventory that holds its opposites openly. Jung made the structural claim flatly: the serpent “is the commonest symbol for the dark, chthonic world of instinct,” and yet “is not just a nefarious, chthonic being; it is also a symbol of wisdom, and hence of light, goodness, and healing” (Jung, Aion, 1951). It carries the strongest polarity a psyche can carry — in the Christian material, allegory of Christ and of the devil at once — and it carries that polarity overtly, where a person carries it only “latent or potential.” A snake in a dream is the place where your own contradiction has come out into the open.

The instinctual charge is not a metaphor you can reason away. In his 1925 seminar Jung observed that “there is hardly anyone whose relation to a snake is neutral,” that horses and monkeys share the human phobia, and that “whenever a snake appears, you must think of a primordial feeling of fear” (Jung, Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1925, 1989). But the same fear is what gives the image its pull. “The snake has a fascinating appeal, a peculiar attraction through fear,” he said — like the bird that flutters down toward the very thing that will hold it. The serpent “shows the way to hidden things,” leading consciousness “beyond the point of safety,” down into the earth and into concretization, “into the depths,” connecting “the above and the below.” What frightens you in the dream and what you are being led toward are, with the snake, the same animal moving in two directions.

The Greeks lived this doubleness literally. Ruth Padel, writing on the tragic imagination, notes that the ambiguity of the snake is sealed in a single word: “The double meaning of pharmakon, both ‘healing drug’ and ‘poison,’ sums up the ambiguity of Greek snake-power” (Padel, In and Out of the Mind: Greek Images of the Tragic Self, 1994). Snakes “crystallize the double-edgedness of pharmaka.” They were “an emblem of fear, potent in poisonous glances and bites, but they were also healers” — Asclepius’s “sign and incarnation was a snake,” and the Epidaurian records preserve the dumb girl who recovered her voice at the sight of one, and “the woman cured of barrenness when she dreamed of a snake coiled on her stomach.” This is the crucial detail for a dreamer: at the healing sanctuaries the snake-dream was the cure, the god arriving in serpent form. And yet the same animal could be turned against you. Athenians lived with house-snakes in their roofs, fed them milk and honey-cakes, “took snakes’ healing power for granted” — and lived equally “with the possibility that gods might turn the snake’s power against them at any moment.” The fact that the snake might be divine “did not make them any less dangerous.”

That is the chthonic root of the whole image: the snake is “the most obvious chthonic creature to emerge in our surface-world, the prime animal intermediary between this world and its underneath” (Padel, 1994). It is a “child of earth,” kin to the Furies — which is why, Padel notes, Artemidorus could read a dream-snake as signifying “all the gods to whom it is sacred.” It is never just one thing because it is the threshold itself.

What the snake is finally working toward, in nearly every layer the tradition records, is renewal — but renewal of the hard kind, the kind that requires a death first. Marie-Louise von Franz catalogues the serpent’s faces and lands on the paradox at their center: as enemy of the high gods it “represents the instinct,” yet Philo of Alexandria called it “the most spiritual animal imaginable… because it changes its skin, i.e., renews itself” (von Franz, Dreams, 1998). “It is this paradox that the snake represents; it is instinct and the spiritual meaning of the instinct as well.” The shedding is the whole point. Anne Baring, tracing the image to its Neolithic source, describes how “because of its coiling movement and its power to regenerate itself by sloughing its skin, the serpent became an image of the goddess’s power of renewal, especially her power to restore life to the dead” — the same coil that, “with its tail in its mouth,” becomes “the uroboros” (Baring, The Myth of the Goddess, 1991). In the alchemical workshop that figure is the engine of the whole process: “The uroboros or paradoxical serpent, which devours its own tail and begets itself, is a symbol of the circular process of the opus” — the serpent that is first the “waters of death” and then transmutes itself “into the divine life-giving waters which descend upon the dead, blackened matter” (Abraham, A Dictionary of Alchemical Imagery, 1998).

Which returns us, finally, to the body of the dreamer who wakes with the snake still pressing. The most vivid instance in the literature is Jung’s own. In the underworld vision he records from those years, a serpent “came close and began to encircle me and press me in her coils. The coils reached up to my heart,” and as he struggled he found he “had assumed the attitude of the Crucifixion” — and at the height of that constriction, the blind woman beside him received her sight (Jung, Analytical Psychology: Notes of the Seminar Given in 1925, 1989). The snake did not arrive to be interpreted. It arrived to do something, and what it did looked at first exactly like being killed.

So when the snake comes in the night, the dictionary’s question — what are you afraid of — is the wrong one, or at least the small one. The better question is the one the snake itself poses by being two things at once: the poison that is also the medicine, the death-coil that is also the womb, the skin that must split before the new one shows. The serpent shows the way, von Franz’s sources say, precisely by what it withholds — “it fleeth our grasp, thus showing us the way, which with our human wits we could not find” (Jung, Memories, Dreams, Reflections, 1963). The dream is not naming a danger. It is handing you the oldest instrument of change there is, and the only thing it asks is whether you will let it shed you.