There’s a serpent in my head
growing wings.
How can I learn the grammar
of the serpent?
The pronouns, the particles, the
coiling syntax.
The language of the imaginary
reading
out from the centre
of the spiral—
The grammar of the
serpent language.
But the language of the serpent
is silent still.
I grew up with snakes. They were on the road as we rode home from school. They were in the paddocks. They were chased out of the garden. They hid in the long grass and could not be found. I have found the shed skins of snakes after they have left.
I learnt about the Snake Goddess from Crete during secondary school and when I travelled to Crete in 1977 and again in 1985, I spent a lot of time looking at the snakes that were carved into the rocks from archaeological sites. I have pored over the images in Jane Ellen Harrison’s books and in those of Marija Gimbutas.
In Australia, it’s not uncommon to find carvings of snakes or snakes painted on to rocks.
The snake represents regeneration. She sheds her skin and slithers away unseen. Snakes are protectors of the home and keep away rats.
In the tropics we have many snakes, my favourite is the green tree snake. It is non-venomous and will sometimes come indoors. I have moved one of these using a long-handled garden tool and twisting it around like a piece of spaghetti. I walked across the garden, and it slipped off to the other side of the fence. It was perhaps a cousin of the one pictured here twined around the light and muscling from the roof.
This poem is from my book Bird and Other Writings on Epilepsy (1999).
(Meet Mago Contributor) Susan Hawthorne
We all grow up with snakes in our head today. Language IS the ser-pent drummed into our brain via the pa-tri-arch-al Latin alpha-bet code which was originally writ-ten in all capital letters. Words were in-vented to deci-eve. (why the rule says “i” before “e” except after “c”). Ancient Egyptian hier-o-glyphs used the symbol of a horned snake, known as Cerastes, to denote “word”; Compare C + Erastes or “teacher”. Pythagoras himself was known as “erastes” or “teacher” who hid behind a veil when he spoke to his students. Note also that the Pythia (Compare python as a snake), were the female oracles at Delphi, who got their knowledge from snakes. Note that Greek “agora” refers to the market, where snakes could be seen, charmed in their baskets). Cerastes or the horned snake hides beneath the sand, only his horns visible, waiting to devour the hapless bird (euphemism for women) which thinks to eat what looks like a worm, but instead is swallowed whole by the devious horned snake.