Snakes––black snakes in particular––were long ago considered to embody the energy of the Goddess, and were revered by ancient Goddess-worshipping cultures. Hence we have the old tale of Adam and Eve, in which the snake resides in the Garden of Eden, and tells Eve the truth about the Tree of Knowledge. This creation story is certainly a re-telling of an older story, one that belonged to the aforementioned Goddess-worshipping cultures before they were overthrown by patriarchal cultures.
These much older stories from our deep history follow a pattern which can still be gleaned from the myths we have now––the myths that were re-written (or more precisely, re-told) by the overthrowing patriarchal cultures. Remants of those Goddess-loving cultures are everywhere, waiting to be rediscovered. The scholar Heide Göttner-Abendroth provides a fantastic analysis of these remanats and patterns of myth in her book The Goddess and her Heros. Of course it’s much too envolved to go into here, but part of the pattern envolves a king who is sacrificed. He travels then to the Underworld where he is restored there by the Goddess. This pattern plays out in the oldest stories we have on record from Egypt, Greeece, Germany, the British Isles, India, and elsewhere.
So this is not, really, just a pastel of a snake about to eat a red salamander (not a red eft, those darlings are highly toxic, you should not eat them either). It’s an image that evokes this very old mythological pattern, of the king who sacrifices himself to serve the Goddess. It’s a pattern that is embedded deep within us, and one that needs to be revitalized and explored as we reshape our mythological understanding of who we are, and work to restore the Divine Feminine back into balance with the Divine Masculine.
