Introducing the Journey
I am lying on my back as dozens of snakes hover above me, hanging by their tails from a canopy over my bed. With their faces just inches from my body, I cannot move or roll away. I wake up, utterly terrified. Recurring childhood nightmare.
I am standing on the stairs in a large, empty high school, looking down at an enormous red snake lying in the middle of the corridor near the entry. Coiled in a relaxed manner as though he is resting, he is as big as an anaconda. Some people pass the snake, oblivious, but when I go to walk by, he lifts his head, gently grasps my right hand in his mouth and looks me right in the eye. I wake, knowing it is time to finish the book. Dream 2021
These dreams and dozens of others that appeared over more than fifty years highlight Snake’s persistent presence throughout my life. Our subterranean relationship came to a head with a pointed message I received from my guides in December 2014: “Turn up every day for the first two months of the new year and open to Source.” When I made the commitment to follow this inner guidance, I did not anticipate that it would be Snake who would guide me into a deep well of abandoned wisdom — or that our adventures would upend my life and completely alter my worldview.
Creeping through the night, I found a young soul who wanted, even yearned, to be with me. Though she did not know what she was asking, I bit her in her dreams, coiled around her heart and tracked her as she lived her seemingly independent life. Other people could not see me, but they felt my presence in her and were stirred. Some were powerfully attracted, while others were nervous and wary. These responses frequently left her confused.
To be greeted by powerful snake-energy is challenging, especially for a young child. Now, looking back, I know that Snake has been active within me throughout my life, mostly as an unconscious erotic energy rather than a physical creature. In Greek mythology, Eros was Aphrodite’s son. As the god of erotic love, he was often impulsively guided, as I was, by Life’s powerful instinctual energies.
Throughout her life, nothing in the human world fully satisfied. Rather than travelling the trodden paths, it was the hidden secrets and the darker thickets that drew her.
Up to this point, my life had unfolded in very serpentine fashion. In my late teens, I dropped out of university and landed into a quasi- spiritual community where I lived until I was forty. Having been trained as a classical musician, I taught piano lessons and performed at our weekly services. With very little time to myself, I half-heartedly accomplished the required menial chores while my two sons grew up with a herd of other children. When I left, burnt out from endlessly striving to fulfill disembodied ideals, my passion for spirit shifted to communing with the plants in my garden. It was there that my intuition blossomed as I listened to the spirit of the plants and created hundreds of flower essences. As the Raven Essence project developed and I began working intuitively with clients, I kept listening — to my dreams, to the very articulate spirit guides who presented themselves to me in meditation, and gradually into the complex language of my body-soul. Over 25 years, I was being steadily pulled down into the bowels the Earth — to be present to what was stirring within Gaia, to listen and record what I felt and heard. When the call came to “turn up and be present to Source,” I was well prepared to go deeper than I’d ever gone before.
My quiver in her flesh became her serpentine compass. You could say, and it would be true, that I had my way with her. Not an easy voyage for me either.
Who is Snake? His primary realm lies far below our conscious minds, beneath our ego aspirations and familiar sense of self; yet within our bodies, from our root to our crown, serpentine energy symbolizes our visceral link between spirit and earth. Snake’s anatomy is a living symbol of Life’s movement through the cosmos, a wave of pure aliveness animating everything in Creation. Meeting him with a shiver of awe is always an appropriate response, for Snake — almost more than any other living creature — has clear access to the heart of Life’s Great Mysteries. He holds the paradox of what we fear in our bones and what we most need to welcome and embrace, within ourselves and in the world. Snake’s story for these times exposes what we have repressed and abandoned in our ambitious achievements and how this has affected the Earth and all her creatures.
I was banished and reviled because of my power and what I am in touch with — the deeper, darker mysteries that humanity has both ignored and been addicted to in perverse and distorted ways….
On the first of January, 2015, I got up before dawn, made a cup of coffee and settled in my dressing gown into the armchair beside the fire. Closing my eyes, I let my energy settle into my heart and opened myself to the Great Mystery. For at least an hour each morning, Snake guided me on powerfully unpredictable journeys into the imaginal realm. Communing with Snake in the imaginal realm doesn’t mean the experience is not real. Once resonance is established with anything — a thought, a dream, a piece of land, an animal or a person, life-force energy begins to stream back and forth. I wrote this book with Snake as an ally and a co-conspirator. His presence was always palpably alive in my body as I listened for the flow of sensation, image and language. Each daily experience had such a vivid effect on my psyche that, when the meditation was complete, I simply opened my journal and recorded, as precisely as possible, what had unfolded that morning.
To purchase The Book of Snake, and to view the recording of the book launch in August 2021, click here.