Giving New Life to Snakes and Goddesses

Rethinking the stories we've been told and reclaiming our feminine power

My essay “Becoming a Mom Is Like Shedding a Snakeskin” was published online in Motherfigure Magazine! You can read it HERE. 

In truth, this essay felt divinely inspired. After reading yet another Instagram post about the "beautiful" transition into motherhood, I later saw a snakeskin and something just clicked. 

For me, becoming a mom has felt like squeezing myself through a rocky crevice as a snake does when she sheds her skin. My essay explores the many parallels between moulting and motherhood. In the end, it rejects the idea that becoming a mom means becoming a whole new person. After all, a snake that sheds her skin is still the same snake; her essence doesn't change.

I was initially hesitant on likening motherhood to snakehood (no one likes snakes!), but the metaphor was spot on. 

Photo by Frank Flores on Unsplash

After sharing my essay, I was reminded of the the significance of snakes in the creation story of Adam and Eve (while doing research for another essay). Most of us know about the evil, tempting serpent that gives Eve the forbidden fruit. However, in her book Cassandra Speaks: When Women Are the Storytellers, the Human Story Changes, Elizabeth Lesser offers a different perspective – one that empowers women rather than shames them: 

“[Eve] hands the apple to Adam because she knows they cannot stay in the garden of innocence forever, that she and Adam will need to grow up, to take care of themselves, to take responsibility. She accepts direction from the snake, who in biblical times was a symbol of wisdom–the one who sheds the skin of ignorance and is born again. ‘And the serpent said unto the woman, Ye shall not surely die: For God doth know that in the day ye eat thereof, then your eyes shall be opened, and ye shall be as gods, knowing good and evil.’ Like the mythic Phoenix bird, the snake understands that the death God spoke of was not literal death, but rather the death of the child-self, the unconscious self, the fearful self who chooses the safe status quo and never fulfills his or her God-given potential.”

Woah. Let that sink in.

In ancient times, the snake represented the rebirth of a wiser self. 

In fact, many depictions of ancient gods and goddesses of birth and fertility include images of snakes. The Minoan Snake Goddess of Crete is a perfect example. 

So, what happened? Why did the snake become associated with manipulation and sin?

In a word: the patriarchy.

To explain it a bit further using the research of Elise Loehnen in her new book On Our Best Behavior: The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good, women essentially became slaves with the rise of agriculture as our primary food source– around 5000 B.C. As groups began settling, they fought over the most fertile land, and women and children became conquests. Women, like nature, were viewed as a threat: something to be dominated and controlled. And as women grew isolated from each other due to the emphasis on the nuclear family, their collective strength diminished. 

Around this time, we start to see the disappearance of goddesses in culture. 

Loehnen writes: 

“And then, of course, there’s the Hebrew Bible, otherwise known as the Old Testament (written in parts, between 1200 and 165 B.C.), full of laws that are not generous to women. One of Judaism’s distinguishing features is its sacred books: It was the first religion where laws and rituals were written down, many of which were collated from existing myths and belief systems. Judaism’s most pronounced distinction, though, was that the law no had divine sanction: This wasn’t Hammurabi’s preference, this was the patriarchy directed by God. Judaism’s official patriarchs were Abraham, his son Isaac, and Isaac’s son Jacob, followed down the family tree to Moses, who took dictation on Mount Sinai and delivered the Ten Commandments. God made deals almost exclusively with men– and confirmed women’s role as property (*4). Ishmael, Abraham’s other son, became the father of Islam.

“Men were shown preference in all ways. With the advent of monotheism, we also see the creation of an all-powerful, male deity: For the first time, there was no goddess, either as primary divinity or a consort. Genesis, the Bible’s creation story, is a retelling of Sumerian myth from 2500 B.C. that includes the goddess (i.e., the Divine Mother), a tree, and a serpent. In the original, the serpent, in its skin-shedding, represents death begetting new life, not evil, and there is no eviction from paradise. But in the Old Testament version many of us hold sacred (scholars believe Genesis was written between 950 and 500 B.C.), God the Father replaces the goddess as the lone creator, and a woman becomes the symbol of sin and the cause of man’s fall. Meanwhile, the snake, a symbol of the fertility goddess as well as of Isis (*5)– who had her own cult and dedicated temples across Egypt and the Greco-Roman world (360 B.C.- A.D. 536) – is the instigator of her transgression. In this ancient Creation story, common to all Judeo-Christian cultures (about ⅓ of the world’s population today), women are not only disempowered but spiritually depraved.” 

So, there you have it. Turns out that comparing motherhood to shedding a snakeskin was pretty appropriate, after all!

Isn’t it fascinating how considering the historical context of a subject can give it new life and meaning? If only we could all be so open-minded. 

I love being associated with this ancient, powerful creature and the goddesses that embody them.

Long live serpents! And long live the divine feminine and the mother goddesses, giving birth and shedding their skins and becoming wiser for it. 

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