#snake archetype

Many statues of Hera show snakes entwined in her robes, while Athena was portrayed with snakes wreathed around her shield. Snakes had been symbols of the pre-Greek Great Goddess of old Europe, and serve as symbolic reminders (or rem-nants) of the power once held by the female deity. One famous early representation of a deity (Crete 2000-1800 B.C.) was a female goddess with breasts bared, arms outstretched, and a snake in each hand.

The snake often appears in women's dreams as an unknown, an awesome symbol that the dreamer warily approaches when she begins to sense that she can assert her own power over her life. For example, the dream of a thirty-year-old married woman, soon to be separated and on her own: "I am on a trail, when I look ahead and see that the path I am on will pass under a large tree. A huge, female snake is coiled peacefully around the lowest branch. I know it is not poisonous, and I'm not repulsed—in fact, it is beautiful, but I hesitate." Many dreams like this come to mind, where the dreamer is awed or aware of the power of a snake rather than fearful of it as dangerous: "There is a snake coiled up under my desk...” "I see a snake coiled on the porch . . .,” “Three snakes are in the room. . .”

Whenever women begin to claim their own authority, or make decisions, or become aware of having a new sense of their own political or psychic or personal power, snake dreams are common. The snake seems to represent this new strength. As a symbol, it represents power once held by goddesses, as well as phallic or masculine power, representative of animus qualities. Often the dreamer senses whether it is a male or female snake, which helps to clarify the kind of power the snake symbolizes.

When we see this worldwide occurrence of the Goddess and her Serpent, and then recall the ancient African Black Goddess, the Black Witch, imaged with the snake in her belly—we can see the profound power as well as universality of this cosmological symbol, its range of endurance in the human mind. And we begin to see why the upstart patriarchal religions based themselves on the utter destruction of the goddess/serpent, pictured by the Babylonians as "primeval chaos"—an image picked up later by the Hebrews and used in the biblical Genesis, where Eve linked with her serpent become the symbols of ontological evil. Among patriarchal Hebrews, the serpent was portrayed as Samael, the brother of the "evil" first woman, Lilith. When Old Testament reformers like Hezekiah went around destroying "brazen serpents"—cult images made of brass—as "pagan abominations," what they were really doing was attacking the primordial Goddess religion followed by all their neighbors. The Hebrew patriarchs tried to destroy the world's original, most widespread, and enduring religion by branding it as "evil," and by portraying the Mother Goddess and her magic snake-lover as the source, not of all life, but of "all wickedness"—hated and condemned by their new tribal god Yahweh. To the degree that they were historically successful in this attempt, Western biblicized peoples have lost their original concept, and memory, of what the Goddess and her Serpent really meant—to all people, and all time.