December Supermoon in Dualistic Gemini: A Tale of Two Snakes
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“A Tale of Two Snakes” by Karen Mullen Smith
This supermoon in Gemini highlights the opposing forces within us personally and in the collective. Two nights before the full moon I had a dream that leads me to explore this duality.
In the last few weeks of the Chinese year of the serpent, and midway through The Alchemy of Menopause course, I have a dream of what appears to be an alchemical symbol: Two snakes with interlocking mouths, gently pulling in opposite directions like the Pisces fish. The snakes are underwater and are of a flesh or salmon pink colour, though the imprints they leave on surrounding rocks are red, like primitive line drawings. It is possible that the snakes have just shed their skin; at the beginning of the shedding process snake’s colours are muted, and some species develop a pink or reddish belly.
The water is clear and in a small round pool, not very deep and appears to be something of a shrine; in the dream I had the feeling that it is a sacred place in the Buddhist religion. I was not afraid of the snakes, just curious.
Since childhood I’ve had many snake dreams and my relationship with snakes both physically and psychically has been significant.
We are also in Ophiuchus season, “The Snake Bearer”, a time of the year that I am increasingly aware of when it comes around, and even more so since I discovered that my sign is Ophiuchus in sidereal astrology.
But the snake dream… duality, union of opposites, submerged under water, the unconscious (but not the collective unconscious), the personal unconscious. The colour of the snakes was not opposite as is often depicted in images of the caduceus, they were of the same fleshy colour. Although the snakes were pulling in opposite directions they were quite still; there was no fight.
In the Pisces symbol, the two fish might be said to represent the two sides of Neptune: the ability for spiritual transcendence, the shadow-side of which is the propensity for escapism and dissociation.
It is thought that the ruling planet of Ophiuchus is Chiron. That being the case, the dual nature of Chiron can be viewed as the healing of self and others (the wounded healer), and the shadow side of Chiron could be the shadow itself, our deepest wounds. The wound also holds our untapped potential. The dual nature of the serpent is present in the venom that can either kill or cure. The blood of Medusa which is given to Asclepius in two vials contains this power. Ophiuchus is Asclepius in Greek mythology.
My dream then could be about grappling with the wound; it can be integrated and used for positive purposes or remain as a negative influence. It can kill or cure.
At the essence of the serpent mysteries is resurrection and renewal. In The Alchemy of Menopause, we are exploring the possibility for renewal and resurrection at this profound threshold in a woman’s life. As we shed our mid-life skin, we are for a time muted. Many women experience feelings of lack lustre.
When I reflect on the dream what comes to mind is a tension around material that is rising in the collective unconscious (and in my personal unconscious). Social media is full of posts openly speaking of that which was previously unspeakable. This morning, I read a post about the history of women and mental health; it made for some very dark and disturbing reading. I also read about a sinister trend for drugging women in France (not that France is the only country where this happens).
We notice the things that affect us in some way, and while we cannot take on the whole daily digest of information (much of it born of the collective trauma) we do notice the things that feel personal to us even if they did not directly happen to us.
I wrote recently about the resonance and the attunement of the wombs of women, how they are linked through some unseen psychic fascia. Many of us feel the “witch” story deep in our cells; we feel the injustices inflicted upon our female ancestors and on a visceral level we remember. It seems the gates have been opened; content that for a long time remained hidden in the repository of the unconscious breaks through the psychic membrane and spills out into our carefully constructed, civilized world.
Brutal psychiatric methods, drugs, incarceration, and a subtle network of control that presents as concerned authority, has ensured compliance and a neat trimming of “problematic women” out of the picture. In the day-to-day, in the home, the workplace, universities, doctor’s surgeries, and the church, a quiet compliance is gently enforced behind tight smiles, even tempers, and soft voices.
Social and professional codes to varying degrees allow institutionalised misogyny to fester. In halls of power, and in the home, men of means wield their wealth as weapons against women who until relatively recently were denied economic independence, and who may still for other reasons struggle with economic stability. I saw something recently that said a significant reason marriage used to last 40,50,60 years was because many women were never financially secure enough to leave.
When women find their voice, the one that rises from the depths of their womb, through which all wombs speak, uncomfortable truths spoken are hard to ignore. As the womb heals and opens so too does the throat.
The symbol of the two snakes from my dream could be the tension that arises from acknowledging the wounds of our human history, and a desire to leave these dark aspects of misogyny in the past. Media exploits movements such as “Me Too”, and the Virginia Giuffre story; by appearing to speak out in the name of justice these stories can retraumatise women… but nothing seems to change and healing on a deep level appears to remain out of reach. This kind of exposure unfortunately tends to widen the chasm between the sexes. There is a fine line between revealing truths and weaponizing information. The more healed we are the less likely we are to respond negatively but this cannot be bypassed. It is not about our head or our will; it is a somatic experience in which the central nervous system plays a crucial role.
I was recently listening to a podcast where the presenter said she refused to acknowledge the darker aspects of media -social or otherwise- because of its vibration of fear. By not engaging she felt provided immunity from what she called “quantum entanglement”. But even if we do not engage (I rarely do), are we not all implicitly entangled in our human story. The key is to be aware and yet not controlled. How do we untangle ourselves. I can vouch for menopause being a time when this seems easier and even to a degree necessary.
A wound is healed when the behaviours that ensued from the wounding are no longer in operation. Did we heal the witch wound? Are we able to say with sincerity and truth that the virulent currents that flowed through late medieval, and early modern Europe at the height of the so-called “trials” have been eradicated from the collective psyche. Can we safely say that misogyny is a dark stain on our unenlightened past?
Can women really lift themselves out of the quantum entanglement and look the other way as their sisters, past versions of themselves, and to varying degrees their current selves continue to be branded by the hallmark of patriarchy? My sense is that there are layers of consciousness hidden, subtle and not so subtle, an energetic grid of power structures that are designed to keep women trapped and disconnected from their feminine power and essence. Worse of all is when women collude with those structures and harbour misogynist intent toward other women.
There is a way to loosen ourselves from this energetic grip. There is a way to face at least our personal, and maybe to some extent the collective shadow without losing ourselves in the process. The strength to do so begins with inner healing, and that begins with acknowledging what has happened and what we have experienced as women in our modern culture.
Healing the womb and clearing it of negative imprinting is liberating. Can we just extract ourselves from this negative culture of misogyny and continue through our lives untouched by its toxicity, or at some points do we also need to name it? Can we simply rise above it and cut the cords of quantum entanglement, or are we whether we like it or not woven into the shroud of patriarchy? To what extent does patriarchy and misogyny live in us? That I suppose is where we begin. Some women reach middle age and hate what they see in the mirror, and many put themselves through surgical and chemical alterations to make themselves culturally pleasing.
It seems to me that opting for a chemical menopause affects us not only on the physical level but on the psycho-spiritual level. Every woman is unique and every woman has the choice in how she crosses this threshold. Personally, I actively embrace the return to myself that I am experiencing in menopause, and I am not sure I would be experiencing this to the same degree if I was medicated.
Patriarchy is such a loaded word. At some point I stopped using it altogether. As a word what does it say? Patriarchy does not mean men; men have suffered their own wounds, and the consequences are evident to see. Both men and women have been duped to varying degrees; the task is to wake up to how this has unfolded and continues to unfold.
What we are talking about is a much more subtle operation, behind the veil. I can understand people not wanting to engage with that. Of course, to fill one’s heart with light and forgiveness, to raise our vibration to the frequency of love, and birth the new age is a noble goal, however the unresolved past has a habit of catching up with us and pulling us back. But it also pulls us in and down, into the body where personal, ancestral and collective memory is stored. This is how we know ourselves. As Jung says, “We do not become enlightened by imagining figures of light, but by making the darkness conscious”.
If the serpents of my dream represent the duality of making the darkness conscious and moving to the light, the alchemical medicine is in the integration of the opposites. Not naming the bad thing will not make it go away. The danger is that in attempting to name it we get stuck in duality, in division, hatred and blame. Then the wound never heals… we are trapped on the trauma wheel for all eternity. When the wound is not acknowledged, any timely manufactured movement or story can tear the scab off. On a personal level any trigger that activates our wound takes us back to chaos and we are over-whelmed by unconscious material.
Other ideas I’ve had about the snakes of my dream is that they are a symbol of the corruptible and the incorruptible soul. Being incarnated in a human life means we must wrestle with a corrupting world. Certain Gnostic sects viewed the material world as an evil trap from which one must endeavour to escape, but perhaps it was less about the materiality of the world and more about finding a way to integrate the darkness… a way to break free from the endless cycle. For the Gnostics it was the archonic forces that sought to corrupt and enslave the human soul. These powers or entities appear to have always been present in one form or another. Is it possible to escape them, is Jesus the way, or is it rather the living Christ in each of us. And if so, what does that mean? What does that mean for women given that the Christian mythos is based on the premise of the Son of God. Is there a way to acknowledge the suffering without being trapped by it? Does truth set us free?
It seems that my dream has thrown up more questions than answers. Dreams, says Clarrissa Pinkola Estes are the Riddle Mother.
It is interesting that my dream has inspired reflections on the eternal wheel of suffering. In Buddhism this is known as the Wheel of Samsara. As I mentioned, the pool in my dream appeared to be a holy shrine of the Buddhist religion. Many years ago, as a young woman I was (lightly) part of the Friends of the Western Buddhist Order; I attended their meditation classes in Glasgow and went on a few retreats to Dhanakosa and Taraloka. Maybe it’s time to revisit Buddhism, but any time I have in the past I seem to quickly hit a wall of what I perceive to be yet again institutional misogyny.
Since beginning to write this blog, I’ve had another dream image of a snake:
Scene: An old fashioned, possibly Victorian carriage full of young women and girls who are all frilly and feminine, dressed in bright pastel shades. They have not yet noticed but a snake is on the inside roof of the carriage in a transparent Perspex tube. The snake, which is red, black and yellow (alchemical colours) is hissing and angry at being trapped but is working its way out of its confinement. I fear for the women. There are rich pickings in this dream too.
I expect more will be revealed through my dreams or otherwise.
Full Moon Blessings.
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Wonderful read!