by Ellen Marie Metrick
The story of the expulsion from the Garden is one of the roots that cracked the foundation of my Catholic upbringing. Like a snake, this story grew and writhed into my beliefs, a pit of vipers that swelled to groundbreaking, catapulted me from the Catholic church.
Women get a bad rap from the get-go, labeled as trouble-makers, consorts with the snake, beguiling, and doomed to pain for all generations. Something deep in me rejected the premises on which this story judges women, but of course it was a long time before I ever had any inkling I might have ground to stand on, and even longer — not until last week, in fact — before I realized what that ground was!
I never felt comfortable with the role we had given women, never comfortable with woman hood, and as a girl spent most of my time trying not to be a girl, bucking up, not crying, being tough, and mostly just hiding, feeling incompetent, criticized by my dad constantly, not for being a girl, really, just for not being perfect, or for being in the way. But it related, for me, to this Biblical version of women’s history, anyway.
Snakes I always liked, kept them in five-gallon buckets in the summer, all garter snakes, no big deal, learned from the boys how to catch them. Still love them. I didn’t wish to tease the rattlers as my uncle boasted of doing, but wanted to see one, and didn’t till two years ago. That was blood-chilling and scary.
I was leading a group of kids down river on a hike with a friend of mine. He and his wife were the caretakers there, and I had spent already a great deal of time playing around in that area, but had never seen the rattlers I had heard were there. James would every so often say he’d found and relocated three-and four-foot vipers, so I was always on the lookout. After my first encounter, I wondered how many I had walked right past and not known.
James was leading the hike that day. His 9 year old son and I were bringing up the rear. The group had come to a narrow bit of flat land along the water that was blocked by fallen tree roots and dense scrub, beyond which the bank rose to cliff. We had to hold an old root and swing out around and over the water to continue the hike. Everyone except Ben and I had gone on around. Ben was about to grab the tree when he screamed, and yelled for his dad, and as he did I heard the rattle. There was a good sized pile of snake, ten feet up the bank from us, coiled and mad, and Ben’s scream had set her off. James came back and said, just stay calm, move slow, she’s not going to bother us, she wants left alone. I swallowed hard, took a breath, and followed Ben around the tree, and she never did move into strike position, just kept rattling at us.
I was amazed, really, at how calm she was. And, I understood then that I had always thought a rattler would be out there like a predator, looking for someone to bite. Of course, plenty of people and books had told me that they only went after someone or thing when mad, when disturbed, when they felt they were backed into a corner. Of course I had been told that, but realized then that I had never heard that. Now, I did, and understood it, too. The snake had no intention of striking, unless we’d come closer and threatened her in some way.
Last summer, during a party at our house, I got the message again. I walked, bare foot, to our shed to get chairs. We already had several folks at our house, and needed more seating. Walking back, I saw a tiny snake in the grass, almost stepped on it. Oh! A baby garter snake! I reached down to pick it up, and only when my fingers were an inch from its neck did it begin to rattle at me, a little whisper of a warning from its small tail. I stepped back, and it coiled its small rope of a body beneath our bedroom window, on the warm stones. It gazed at me, the black mask of the Lone Ranger stretched across its face.
I called everyone over, and eight adults stood above this little snake, marveling at it. It was fascinating, beautiful, small but deadly to children. It was a massasauga (Sistrurus catenatus), a prairie rattler, one of the most poisonous, though not necessarily deadly, of pit vipers. Odd to see it up here – the local lore is that the ranchers exterminated rattlers decades ago. I heard two other reports of these vipers in the town of Norwood, three miles from our house, over the rest of the summer. I was fascinated with it for weeks, researched it extensively, and wished we had not taken it so far out to pasture to release it. I wanted to really see that snake. Even when all of us were standing over it, our feet within two feet of it, leaning our torsos over it like a great human roof, it never struck or threatened. Jim picked it up in a large yogurt container to move it.
I see, feel, how Eve was pulled by the serpent in the garden. Jim and I both even had snake dreams, but before that snake came to lie under our bedroom window. It was not long after that I began considering the dream work. It was towards the end of a year of recurring nightmares about losing my daughter in various ways. And in the depth of feeling great anger, frustration, and even a sort of fear, towards my husband and our life together. I was ready to do something rash, or get help. The snake, I knew, could be a symbol of transformation. Of getting down in a humble place, belly to humus, to soil, and shedding the old skin. A female Massasauga, I learned, sheds her skin when she is ready to mate. The shedding releases a potent scent-call to the males.
The snake also, interestingly, over a year later, visited my daughter on the night after her first day of school. She woke in the middle of the night, called to me, crying about a nightmare. She had two dreams – one of having to leave our home, leave everything behind, and set out with just the clothes on her back. She was devastated. In the second dream, right after that, she said a blue-and-green polka-dotted rattlesnake was climbing up her chest.
I just learned of a book about dream animals, and Dream Animals may even be its title. In this book, my friend said, the author goes through all the possible metaphors for several different animals. She had only read the one on snake, and said the author concluded, “and sometimes, a snake is… just a snake.” I can’t imagine yet what he could mean by that. It is hard for me to just let something be what it is. Especially after decades of feeling betrayed by my own church, a place where I otherwise felt held in comfort and support, but in this founding story absolutely cast out. There must be more to this story, I always thought. And, indeed, through the dream metaphor, the snake speaks of knowledge, of transformation, of learning, of us moving from the innocence of the garden, of our naked child bodies, to the adult world of knowing good and evil, and also of unfortunate judgment and reliance on our knowledge, no longer comfortable in the nakedness of our childhood, and also always, consciously or unconsciously, trying to get back to that garden of youth.