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The Artist and the Snake
By Steven D. Farmer, Ph.D.
You either love them or hate/fear them, but what can’t be denied is that snakes are embedded deeply in our consciousness, a powerful spiritual reality and symbol of major transformation. People that have never seen a snake will dream of them. In some traditions if you’re bitten by a highly poisonous snake and survive, you’re considered to be a powerful healer. The American Medical Association has two intertwined snakes as part of their caduceus, and Hermes carried a snake as a symbol. Kundalini yoga works with the energies along the spine that can be likened to a serpent and is sometimes portrayed as such. Jeremy Narby in one of my favorite books, The Cosmic Serpent, proposes that DNA is often represented in indigenous traditions and art as two intertwined serpents. There is a richness to the physical and spiritual stories with snake, snake energy, and Snake medicine.
A good friend of mine, Paul Huessenstamm, who does this amazing spiritual/visionary art (www.mandalas.com), recently had an experience with Snake medicine. I invited him to relate his dramatic story as an illustration of how potent this particular power animal can be:
Snake Dream
“I’ve been painting pictures for several years now that I know have been inspired by Spirit/God/Source, a whole range of images from mandalas to deities from various religions and devotional practices. I’ve also traveled extensively throughout the world continuously over the past few years to give painting workshops, with the intention of helping others tap into that inspirational source for their creations. Although I’ve been making a decent living as an artist, the greater success that I felt was in my destiny remained elusive—until recent events that were foreshadowed by a dream I had in September of 2005.”
“It was then I had a very powerful Snake dream that, as it turned out, predicted subsequent events in my life. In fact I added this dream to my dream deck, a collection of about 25 ‘big dreams’ I’ve collected over the years, each of which I’d written out on a card to carry with me wherever I go. Many of them have foretold and predicted significant events in my life.
“Although it was quite a complex dream, one of the most significant parts was at the end of the dream. I was in a room with cobras all around me, like in Raiders of the Lost Ark, and although I loved snakes, I knew these ones were poisonous. I fell onto my belly and one of the cobras bit my bare foot. I woke up in the dream (lucid dreaming) and said to myself, ‘I’m going to die.’ I felt the poison going in me, but instead of killing me, I felt elated as the poison surged into my system. When I stood up instead of snakes there were now a bunch of people around me, and I was feeling ecstatic, full of life and vitality.
“I knew that Snake represented transformation, so I figured the dream signified the start of a process of deep transformation. Being hit by a cobra you’d expect to be sick and possibly die, not exhilarated, but this dream led to greater wholeness, not death. Based on my history with dreams, I knew that it was predicting some significant change in my life. I just didn’t know what it would be.
Snake Medicine
“Five months later, I’d been traveling in southern China for nearly three weeks doing my painting workshops. Afterwards I flew to meet up with my wife Amana at our beach house we’d rented in Bali, and was very much looking forward to a break and to spending time with her there. I got to Bali, spent the night there, had a wonderful breakfast, and then went surfing. The waves were perfect, the sun was out, and from the water I could see a number of the temples that are so prevalent in Bali. Life was perfect and I couldn’t have been any happier. After surfing I had a light lunch and jumped in the shower.”
“Unbeknownst to me, there was a snake in the back part of the shower.
“As I was stepping from the shower, before realizing the snake was there, I felt a sudden bolt of lightning in my body. This small, black snake had sunk his two fangs deep into my little toe. For the next few moments I went into one of those altered states where your whole life goes racing through your mind, and was thinking, ‘So this is how it ends. Being bitten by a poisonous snake in Bali.’ I’d been told that when snakes had fangs they were usually poisonous. As I screamed I somehow knew that I wasn’t the only one that had been bitten. Amana was in the other room and I knew that she’d been bitten also.
“A Balinese man came into our home and we asked him if the snake was poisonous. He said that all snakes in Bali were very bad and we should go right to the hospital, so we hopped in the car and for the next hour and battled a lot of traffic and interruptions to get to the hospital in the nearest village.
“As we headed toward the hospital, the dream came back to me. I started to question God. ‘C’mon, don’t throw me a twist where this snake really was poisonous and I die!’ My heart was racing, but since I didn’t have any other symptoms it was probably anxiety. I was actually laughing as to how being bitten by a snake in Bali would end it.
“The village hospital didn’t have the proper facilities so they put both of us in an ambulance that took us downtown where there was a much larger hospital. There they gave us all sorts of shots and like my dream, there were all sorts of people around me. I was hoping they’d give me the anti-venom, but an American nurse who’d lived in Bali and had helped a lot of people said they would only give me the anti-venom if my symptoms started to become severe. Otherwise I’d be sick for a couple of weeks.
“After a rather noisy and disturbing overnight stay, the next morning we both seemed okay so we checked out and went home. We spent the next three weeks in Bali, which gave me time to not only rest and recover but also contemplate this experience. That’s when it hit me that the dream was exactly right—some big changes were afoot.
I loved my work, but knew I’d been traveling far too much, so I made a big decision to cancel all my trips and workshops and clear my calendar for the next three months. Ordinarily I would have been traveling somewhere every couple of weeks, but I just wanted to stay at home and didn’t want to go to any foreign countries.
Breakthrough
“After a couple weeks I got a call from someone at Agape, a very large and well-known new age church in Los Angeles headed by Michael Beckwith. I was invited to put up several of my paintings in the sanctuary at Agape and leave them there for at least the next six month, which would expose them to the thousands of spiritually minded people that attend their services and related activities every week. I had 90 days to prepare for the biggest show of my life, which meant I’d have to not only prepare my existing pieces but also create some new pieces for the show.
“About a month later I suddenly realized that this little snake and the associated Snake medicine had been a part of putting this all together. Even though I thought I was dying, it really marked the beginning of an ecstatic transformation into a whole new level of my work. It would be much more in the public eye, particularly to others who would undoubtedly resonate with it.
“I thought, ‘God, that little snake was one of my greatest allies.’ Had that little guy not bitten me, I’d have been too busy to do the Agape show. That snakebite was one of the most positive things that ever happened to me as an artist.”
