Archetype in Focus: Snake

The snake is said to be one of the first symbols depicted and also the most common of all symbols. Valiant, epiphanic and terrifying, snakes flare up out of the earth or from under leaf litter or rocks or the dark waters of rivers or the darkness of the psyche. The underworld realm of the dead that snakes mythically inhabit is also the fecund ground from which new life emerges, a place of healing, initiation, and revelation, dominion of the ancient Great Goddess. The snake is the theriomorphic form of countless deities including Zeus, Apollo, Persephone, Hades, Isis, Kali, and Shiva.
 
The magic appearances of the living snake makes them seem divine or mythical. The strange beautiful diamond patterns of their skin, their size - a snake can be as small as a finger or as large as a tree. They can live in almost any terrain -from desert to water. They hear with their entire body, they smell with their tongue – and their tongue is forked, just like Satan. They can unhinge their jaws to swallow an animal much larger than themselves, evoking devouring monsters of ancient myths. They digest their food without chewing, without teeth, by crushing it along their many backbones until broken down enough to be digested. They lost their legs back in the Jurassic era, when they found safety by burrowing tightly into the earth. They shed their skin, which then supposedly keeps shedding, eternity after eternity.  It is easy to see how the snake attracts our projections. 
 
Particular species of snake are now known to physically possess extraordinary medicinal properties even in their venom, which can also sicken or kill. The snake has thus always conveyed power over life and death, making it, everywhere,  a form of the ancestral spirit, guide to the Land of the Dead, and mediator of hidden processes of transformation and return.

From the ARAS Archive of Archetypal Research. ARAS.org