Animal Voices

IT IS WRITTEN that many are called, but few are chosen. Dawn was chosen to write this book and by no less a being than the eternal companion and sacred totem of the Great Mother Goddess, from whose womb the Universe was born—the serpent, or Snake!

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Awakening the Ancient Power of Snake could not have been published at a more fitting time, for it introduces us to a preeminent archetype that has been sadly misunderstood and denigrated for thousands of years and is symbolically and dynamically central to the psychic transformation that integrates the sacred feminine and masculine principles, sheds the constricting layers of the ego-self, and raises the soul-self to sovereignty of the psyche.

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Dawn takes the reader back to the seminal Garden of Eden myth in which the censorship of a prejudiced, patriarchal priesthood has robbed the Goddess of her divinity, reducing her to a mortal woman, Eve, in league with the duplicitous Snake that has been diminished from divine totem to the very incarnation of evil: Satan. With the fall of the Goddess and the fall of the Snake came the fall of Nature, witnessed in the present-day desecration and despoiling of planet Gaia by an unbridled, rapacious, masculine principle.

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Dawn acquaints us with ancient wisdom that perceived Snake as a protective, feminine archetype, intimately associated with the soul’s journey toward self-realization: acting as inspirer, guide, guardian, messenger, mentor, and healer. Snake, being the most ancient symbol of the divine feminine, is a power that unifies, integrates, harmonizes, and transforms.

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Invoked in psychic healing, the snake, as symbolized in the shedding of its skin, facilitates the throwing off of ingrained habits, beliefs, values, and prejudices and the soul’s advance into a sphere of higher consciousness and wisdom. Able to flow unimpeded through dimensions, Snake can fathom the obscure regions of the Shadow and bring to light repressed, rejected, unresolved, and unrealized aspects of the unconscious, restoring psychic flow in a manner that is gentle, graded, and protective.

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Our attention is drawn to Snake as an agent of synchronicity; active in the seemingly fortuitous coincidences of life that come to prompt and cue us; or as a messenger engaging us in dream form, or appearing in the imaginative, twilight zone between waking and sleeping: “elegantly offering” through the medium of

metaphors, hints, and clues to guide and direct us. As Dawn notes, the appearance of Snake in dream form must always be heeded; it is a harbinger of change and transformation. The greatest change is the progressive lifting of consciousness from the base chakras of the body’s energy system to the highest levels of thought and aspiration: a sublimation that involves the flowing upward of the primordial serpent power seated at the base of our spine: the spiritual force of Kundalini.

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These central themes of the book are placed in a frame and context that satisfies every query and interest the reader may have regarding these remarkable limbless creatures that evoke such reverence, awe, fascination, and fear. We are treated to engaging anecdotes about Dawn’s own snake companions—Carl, the ball python, and Chloe, the corn snake—and taken through the painful, inner wrestling of whether to feed live prey to captive snakes, beautifully and tenderly resolved in witnessing the union of predator and prey as a blessed sacrament celebrating life in death and death in life.

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Awakening the Ancient Power of Snake is a splendid anthology of esoteric, mythical, and psychic Snake wisdom, and scientific facts about snakes, enriched with invaluable insights into the attributes and nature of one of the most important of all archetypes: the Snake!

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Dr. David Lilley

David Lilley has practiced as a medical doctor, homeopath, and osteopath for the past fifty-four years and currently lives in Cape Town. He is a Fellow of the British Faculty of Homeopathy. From 1996 to 2012 he served as Dean of the South African Faculty of Homeopathy. His time is now devoted to writing books on the archetypes of the homeopathic materia medica, lecturing internationally, and conducting a small, select practice. He is the author of Healing the Soul, volumes 1 and 2, and The Wolf: A Mythological and Comparative Study.