Snakes and Ladders
Snakes and Ladders
It is Snake Season here in our gorgeous little country valley. Well and truly. If snakes had arms and legs they would be jumping up and down in front of us all waving (and, er, looking a lot like goannas). The combination of several years of steamy wet summers and then some cranking heat over the last few months (Adelaide, just shut up – it’s always that hot here) means that they are everywhere. Everyone it seems has a snake story to tell right now and there are some in our community who are experiencing more than their fair share of snake love.
Many moons ago on the second day I ever lived here, so very new to the country and all too aware of the terrors it concealed, a brown snake went for a slither around the water tank. The water tank that is disturbingly close to the front door, which was open. It was impossible for me to grab child / cat / puppy all at once so I simply froze. A genius move as it turned out. The animals didn’t of course and nor did my partner at the time, chasing the snake into the bush and away as I screamed after them all to be careful while also querying their sanity. With expletives. It took many minutes to settle my stomach and catch my breath and many more weeks to come to terms with the notion that I was now sharing space with snake. Just the one.
I began to investigate exactly how we were going to co-exist, this snake and my family. A kind soul at the Tavern later that day, as I breathlessly recounted the fearsome tale of a snake simply doing what snakes do up here, calmly suggested that I plant geraniums as snakes don’t like the smell of them. To this day, there are more geraniums around my house and in my garden than anything else and I’ll be honest, I didn’t even really like geraniums that much. Now some five years and two metres high later we are very good friends, those beautiful stinky geraniums and I.
Snakes also hate sulphur powder but then so do I, so that one was out. I mean there’s snakes and then there’s tracing around your house with fart powder (year 9 chemistry anyone?). The Australian Quarantine Service spray a very heavy clove oil solution into newly arrived containers to flush out snakes. Presumably they all run like hell immediately after spraying said concoction. I do so love to picture the spectacle in my head. God bless the AQIS for embracing ancient magic. The local farm store place up here has a giant blackboard out the front for half the year advertising their snake repellers, an electronic device that emits some kind of snake-be-gone frequency. Having invested in the rat version of that little box of trickery last year, that wiped out my beloved spiders whilst providing a handy stepping stone to my pantry for the rats, I am unlikely to be barrelling blindfolded down that road again.
There had to be another approach. I looked into snake goddesses and found that they are quite prevalent in so many cultures. I read about them and wrote their names down. The ancient snake goddess Asasara who represented domesticity and fertility, Egyptian cobra headed goddesses Renenutet, the embodiment of nourishment & harvest and Wadjet, protector of country, king and other deities, Hindu snake goddess Manasa, who offered protection for and from snakes as well as fertility and prosperity (they also allocated her control of poison, damn handy to have in your arsenal), Angitia the Roman snake headed goddess of healing, patroness of magicians and snake charmers. I realised that snake goddesses offered protection and reinforced the notion of woman as healer & nurturer. Already my picture of snakes had begun to shift, ever so slightly.
Twas time for a chat with the snakes. I didn’t send out invitations because I didn’t need to be eyeballing them. I created a ritual instead. I started with a protective circle & my staff (yes, any Big Stick will do). In ritual I recited the snake goddess names and as my tongue flickered to make the sounds felt the snake energy around me. I asked to speak with the spirits of the land that I have moved to. I asked them if we could come to some arrangement whereby they could be so generous as to allocate me the space immediately around the house and I would undertake not to kill them, poison them, hurt them in any way. The snakes and their little snake friends and family could keep the rest of the property / town / world but for the sake of me and mine, I requested a safe zone around my house, as respectfully as I could muster with the fear clenching in my stomach. I had a very real terror niggling that my L plate ritual was in fact just going to end up a call to snakes unspecified. Didn’t happen, another fear unrealised.
The bottom line with any of these things I call magic: you can choose to see it as a load of codswallop or you can choose to believe that your voice is heard and your communication is real. I know, deep down in my soul, that I have power and it is real, to quote the words of a very magical mentor of mine. And so I do fervently believe the latter and for the rest of that season after my ritual the proof was in the pudding, that I could enjoy in my garden whenever I wanted without snakes. I repeat this rite annually, when it starts to get warm and people start talking snakes.
What is it about snakes that strike fear into our hearts? Each time I see one moving across a road or through the grass, I am initially so hypnotised by their fluid graceful movement, the pretty arcing pattern they trace across the surface of the world. Until my brain screams SNAKE. Then I just want to know how to get it somewhere else on the other side of something solid, ideally glass so I can continue to marvel in safety. Why is it that even googling snakes for a bit more info and some friendly images of smiling snakes (hard to find, as it turns out) still gives me the same feeling in my stomach as when I see a shark in the ocean? Oh sure, they can be poisonous and they could ATTACK! and bite, sinking their poisonous fangs into my very mortal flesh and kill me dead. I get the fear of death thing, I really do. But it’s more than that. The feeling is the very modern dilemma of being unable to negotiate with a snake – or a shark / bear / tiger / charging elephant / flood / fire.
As inhabitants of the earth in the twenty first century, we do not have the same acceptance of the natural world our ancient forebears did, when it was their only world. We don’t read the signs anymore or notice the shifts or hear Her Voice. We seem to deny that we simply cannot control Mother Nature and her creatures despite our often ludicrous attempts to do so. It is these ultimately futile efforts that are desecrating the natural world, destroying habitat and species & upsetting the beautiful balance this planet depends on. Which may just be why the animals and weather and oceans and tides and wind and fire are screaming at us to listen.
If you have an animal repeatedly popping its head up into your consciousness – whether in film or art or dreams or actually right there slithering up the kitchen door frame – you are obliged to take notice. It’s a sign. What you resist will continue to jump up and down in front of you trying to jag your attention. It is an unwinnable war when you’re up against the Universe and her deep desire for you to move forward. There is much that has been written about this and once you tune yourself in, it is nigh impossible to ignore. Look at the way the creature moves, behaves, is – this is the medicine of the animal and it is what you are being asked to take a hearty dose of into your life.
Snake is a sign of transmutation, of change, of shedding your skin to reveal something new and wonderful. This change can manifest in our lives in much the same fashion as the snake sometimes appears to us – fearsome, unwelcome, unheralded. When snake medicine slithers into your life, you are undergoing a period of transformation. You’re probably in it right now. Snake wants you to know that you are the catalyst for this change, in charge of your life and your choices, even if they are unwelcome to others. So often when change beckons, it is leaving behind our old patterns and behaviours and then the flow on effect that has on the people around us, the ones who are used to or invested in us being a particular way, that is the toughest ask. This is probably the same feeling the snake has right before it discards its old skin to emerge shiny and new.
We have just come through that shitfight cracker of a year in 2013 when so many of us went through momentous shifts in our inner and outer world. That transformational bundle of time was the Chinese Year of the Snake. We are fast approaching the Chinese New Year on February 1st when the energy shifts to the Year of the Horse. It makes sense to me that at the end of the snake time, there is finally shedding of skin and acceptance of change. Perhaps it is in embracing this change that we will convince the snakes around us that they can move on, lest they be trampled. Choose to have the snakes in your world slither up the ladder to see what lies on the next storey.
C. Kerrie Basha,