Missing Witches - Meditation： Snake Kin

00:00:00.000 You aren't being a proper woman, therefore you must be a witch. 1.00

00:00:06.600 You must be a witch. 1.00

00:00:10.380 Feel the shiver up your snaky spine, and I'll breathe into the shiver in mine. 0.99

00:00:17.640 And let's begin.

00:00:20.740 We had just moved from Waterloo, Ontario, to Los Angeles, California,

00:00:25.500 and my mom, new stepdad, and I went for a hike.

00:00:30.000 It wasn't too far a drive. I think my folks were just checking out local outdoor options.

00:00:35.920 I don't think they knew until we got there that this was a site of an annual tarantula migration.

00:00:44.020 We were all jaw-dropped walking around the education center,

00:00:48.680 looking at pictures of that time of year when the big spiders break their routine and come out during the daylight.

00:00:54.920 Driven by the scent of sex, the males go walking, hunting for mates.

00:01:00.260 And the underbrush and trails rustle and writhe with desire.

00:01:05.960 The park ranger told us we were in tarantula migration shoulder season,

00:01:11.060 so we might see a few, but it wasn't likely. Be safe, enjoy.

00:01:16.300 We laughed nervously. We walked in.

00:01:19.760 the sun filtered through the leaves the forest was quiet it smelled like only california woods

00:01:28.680 can smell and we relaxed i was in the shade of the oaks and walnut trees when i heard the sound

00:01:35.120 i had run ahead on the trail the sound was in the woods maybe 20 feet off the trail

00:01:41.860 It was up in the canopy.

00:01:44.200 It was loud, dry branches cracking.

00:01:48.220 It was moving.

00:01:52.220 My parents caught up with me where I had frozen in place,

00:01:55.720 and my mom squeezed my hand as we stood in disbelief,

00:01:58.620 looking up at a massive, smooth, long body rippling through the leaves.

00:02:05.300 The biggest snake we'd ever seen.

00:02:07.480 my mom whispered Risa run and she pushed me and I did and a beat later they came running behind me

00:02:17.440 turned out the snake was an escaped pet a Burmese python lost but enjoying its freedom I bet

00:02:27.660 caught and contained carried away from home for someone's entertainment

00:02:31.700 objectified, owned, and now loose

00:02:35.840 in the sage and the sumac

00:02:37.520 I felt a tightness in my little seven-year-old heart

00:02:42.740 as I imagined what might happen to it next

00:02:46.000 I felt strange

00:02:50.860 transported, contained

00:02:53.800 let loose among the leaves

00:02:57.360 i guess i have felt a snake in my heart ever since

00:03:02.060 i am snake kin kin with the pythons let loose by hurricanes raging wilder with climate change

00:03:13.120 multiplying in the florida everglades as that place descends into a hell of fear and fascism

00:03:19.100 i am snake kin writhing i am the haunting under the floorboards i am kin with spiders

00:03:26.600 migrating to and the bats who live under my eaves and who at twilight i watch leave in their

00:03:32.820 fluttering ghostly shadow traces toward the beach i am kin with the darkness

00:03:39.600 with spirits that speak shadow truths and strike deep unnameable fear

00:03:47.120 witch is a declaration of love and curiosity about all beings all truths especially those

00:04:01.140 that aren't cute or convenient or easily commercialized

00:04:05.420 witches are kin with the troublesome and the uncanny and the strange

00:04:12.000 witches or snake kin were tangled up with them in stories of our magic our pleasure

00:04:19.100 our imagination our defiance and our ability to strike or to disappear with a whisper as we choose

00:04:26.080 we're reminded by them that nature is an all big-eyed deer as our coven mate jenny said in

00:04:34.580 a post on our covenstead. Sometimes it's snake pits, tarantula migrations, bat wings, toadstools.

00:04:43.420 It's a sideways grinning to the creepy and uncomfortable in ourselves and in the world,

00:04:49.200 not just the love and the light. It is an openness to the medicine in every kin.

00:04:56.940 I want to slip into and interrogate the twinned, twining feeling of uncanny and terror

00:05:04.420 and awe and a desire to touch their softness to be slithered on and known by a being who moves

00:05:12.360 and knows their world through their belly skin right up against you so exposed

00:05:17.040 two feelings so deep in us fear and excitement curiosity and revulsion the way we are in trance

00:05:26.680 staring into their eyes and the way we shiver and fear a clue that whatever is happening here

00:05:33.400 runs deep deep as ancient prophecy as nikki sanchez told us last week so there's many many

00:05:43.800 different groups of mayan people that span from southern mexico into belice and honduras

00:05:50.260 nicaragua and el salvador i named my papil heritage that prophecy is a mayan prophecy

00:05:55.940 but it's also one that i've been raised with the way that i was taught about it but what

00:06:01.940 It marked was the end of the 12th Bakhtun, which was the long count calendar, and the beginning of the 13th Bakhtun, which is a new long count calendar.

00:06:10.460 What I've been taught about that is that that beginning of a new era, a new calendar, actually marked an opportunity for a shift in the collective consciousness of humanity on the planet.

00:06:24.500 it. And the way that I have been explained it is that for the first time, the eyes of the serpent

00:06:32.100 could see through the eyes of the eagle and vice versa. And so the serpent for me and the way that

00:06:39.000 I've been taught about it, she is the one closest to the earth because her entire body, her belly,

00:06:44.400 her brain, everything is always on the earth, is always listening to the ground, knows more than

00:06:50.180 any other creature what the earth is feeling. And the eagle, of course, flies the highest of any

00:06:55.760 bird and can see from this great macro perspective in that prophecy to see those two minds be able

00:07:03.280 to come together and see through each other's eyes. I've always interpreted that as a coming

00:07:08.240 together of different worldviews. So we can talk about a Western imperial worldview and an

00:07:13.020 indigenous worldview for the first time, actually being able to meet one another's consciousness

00:07:17.320 and have the capacity to lift in and learn from one another.

00:07:25.120 In Genesis chapter 3, God says to the snake, 0.91

00:07:29.100 I will put enmity between you and the woman. 0.81

00:07:31.920 She will crush your head and you will bite her heel. 0.99

00:07:36.780 According to the Gnostics, this was the flawed God, the scared God, 0.97

00:07:41.880 the one who wanted to keep us safe by keeping us trapped.

00:07:44.980 in the view of these ancient snake handling heretics the snake in the story is the voice

00:07:52.140 of the universe in everything the holiness beyond serpent is used in the bible to refer to egypt

00:08:00.460 and the king of babylon the snake that women will crush is the one they'll no longer revere

00:08:07.340 the snake represents places where women's role though still constrained and lives still not their

00:08:13.520 own, did have a sacred escape route to power. A woman could become a priestess in Egypt and

00:08:22.700 Babylon, where she could study, wield power, live in some prosperity and peace, gather taxes and 0.99

00:08:30.140 build more spaces of worship and safety, and honor ancient snake river gods, gods of the underworld

00:08:37.620 and intestines, the ropes that run inside, the kinds of power that exceed and transgress

00:08:44.100 the limits of the ordered cage-like world.

00:08:49.000 Serpents recur through ancient cultures and symbol systems all over.

00:08:54.020 They are Sumerian fertility gods of healing and magic, Minoan snake goddesses that protected

00:09:00.840 the house.

00:09:01.600 Wadjet, ancient Egyptian snake-headed goddess

00:09:05.940 began as a protector of mothers in childbirth

00:09:08.940 and became used as a symbol of the holy power of kings

00:09:13.240 December 25th on the Egyptian calendar

00:09:19.380 was considered to be the going forth of the goddess

00:09:22.000 while April 21st was her feast day

00:09:25.040 the many days when Wadjet is honored

00:09:29.520 culminate during her month

00:09:31.140 epipi the harvest or summer month this corresponds to mid-may through mid-june in the gregorian

00:09:39.400 calendar so right now is the snake goddess time of course all hail the queen

00:09:47.980 the serpent is a trickster one of only two animals that talk in the torah

00:09:54.060 god told adam and eve they would die if they ate the fruit of the tree but the snake says

00:09:59.540 your eyes shall be opened and ye shall be as gods knowing good and evil

00:10:04.580 eve chooses a life with eyes opened she chooses to know good and evil both

00:10:11.700 and so does adam right he's right there with the god and the snake he's an adult he makes his own 0.96

00:10:19.080 fucking choice they eat and see the world and themselves anew their context is expanded 0.98

00:10:27.600 but they haven't eaten from the tree of life yet so god kicks them out before they get that power too 1.00

00:10:34.320 in many cultures the snake is tangled up with eternity

00:10:40.820 maybe that was her next gift no good and evil and then choose to live forever anyway if you want to

00:10:49.720 the snake is symbol of eternity is a lit motif across cultures the oroboros of time looping

00:10:56.120 the infinite that flies away into the limitless universe also always bends back

00:11:02.780 in projective geometry all lines meet eventually the limitless outside meets the limitless inside

00:11:10.400 and it does so in the shape of our sister the snake some hebrew scholars interpret the snake

00:11:17.680 in the adam and eve story as simply representing how all humans must learn to navigate sexual desire

00:11:23.680 desire that can lead us into disaster or into transcendence the twinned nature of our own

00:11:31.620 desiring selves when i was in siege up a friend asked a table of day drinking 19 year olds

00:11:39.500 liberal arts nerds asking their first questions aloud about philosophy and sexual identity

00:11:45.020 whether animals figured in anyone's dreams or fantasies and in my memory we looked at her

00:11:51.640 blushingly, a little blankly. And then she said, you know, like snakes. And then we all nodded and

00:12:00.180 smiled. If we hadn't dreamed in that direction before, we were about to. Because twinning snakes

00:12:08.420 and desire is not a stretch, right? They are phallic, but not hard, slippery and curved,

00:12:15.140 licking their way forward investigating small dark places they move through above and below worlds

00:12:25.600 they move sidelong not straightforward for some scholars the snake in the genesis story

00:12:34.780 symbolizes imagination itself and the snake is not a devil or a deity she's just a wild animal

00:12:42.320 with a gift, one of only two animals in the Torah that can speak. Maybe that's why they were keystone

00:12:51.140 species in mystery schools all over the world. Maybe they used to whisper to us in a language

00:12:56.420 we could understand and help us imagine perspectives beyond our own. 0.94

00:13:05.300 In the hands of Christian imperialism, the snake story becomes part of a rhetorical arsenal directed 0.92

00:13:11.180 at demonizing resistance, controlling wild spaces and common lands, architecting scarcity 0.97

00:13:18.660 and dependence and an excuse to keep the procreating gender shamed and underheal. 0.97

00:13:25.320 Snake gets caught in the small boxes of colonizer Christian patriarchy used to shame sexuality 0.99

00:13:32.540 and blame and control women and heretics. 0.75

00:13:36.380 but the serpent's sacredness exceeds that particular cage and narrative their stories

00:13:44.520 and selfhoods are vast and spiraling in mayan mythology the vision serpent appears to those

00:13:50.480 in a vision state emerges in the coiling smoke after a sacred ritual pushed out of your usual

00:13:56.820 body mind the vision snake appears a song of death and rebirth of shedding and transformation

00:14:04.640 In Maya mythology, serpents are the vehicles by which sky beings, sun, and stars cross the heavens.

00:14:12.400 Snakes might have been a way of telling stories about asteroids, what might happen when they passed us by,

00:14:18.520 or when they crashed headfirst into the world we thought we knew. 1.00

00:14:23.900 Witches are kin to the beings of visions. 0.72

00:14:26.680 in australian aboriginal culture the rainbow serpent created the world and then rivers lakes

00:14:34.320 and other bodies of water in hindu culture the divine serpent naga protects the wisdom of the

00:14:41.120 natural world in the sacred hopi snake dance the snakes are lightning who can cross to the spirit

00:14:48.760 world and bring messages with them and bring back rain and fertile harvest snake effigies have been

00:14:55.580 found, scraped and shaped out of the earth, all over the world, dating back thousands of years.

00:15:03.080 The largest known massive ancient snake sculpture winds its way around a bluff near Peebles, Ohio,

00:15:10.120 and its sacred story purpose is unknown, but it aligns with the solstices

00:15:16.220 and sings of a deep knowledge about the winding passages of time.

00:15:21.280 in its mouth it holds the sun or perhaps a frog thinking about life and death

00:15:29.740 stuck in the jaws of what comes for us all

00:15:33.040 in norse mythology the world serpent circles the world in the deepest parts of the world waters

00:15:44.040 its tail and its teeth when it releases the final battle ragnarok will begin

00:15:52.720 the world will burn and then be washed in rising tides and then be born again

00:15:59.360 the snake represents truth telling desire imagination lightning rivers rain forces

00:16:09.040 is able to create the world and to destroy it, the dangerous edge of the living world.

00:16:17.800 Pentecostal holiness snake handlers today and small isolated churches still hold to a faith

00:16:23.680 that tells them that the called can hold venomous snakes and God will protect them.

00:16:29.600 I hope so many of us would like to cling to that there's some magic amount we can do that will

00:16:34.660 spare us from the suffering that is being human in an unjust world. Usually accompanied by wild

00:16:42.180 music, the practice is a kind of balm in places of extreme poverty and resilience, though it's

00:16:49.100 one that requires turning a blind eye to the deaths of mothers, fathers, sons, and daughters

00:16:54.680 by a snake bite. The snakes themselves live without dignity, kept in small, sickening wooden

00:17:01.440 boxes. A sacred relationship turned to trauma reenactment. A common hunger.

00:17:11.980 I am kin to the hunger too. I am hungry for more freedom, more joy, more justice,

00:17:19.980 more gentleness, more wildness, more freedom, less fucking shame. I want to be kin, not just 0.86

00:17:27.260 with snake as symbol, eternity, connection, renewal, the infinite rainbow serpent, wadjet.

00:17:34.560 I want to somehow feel a body kinship with actual snake neighbors, too.

00:17:46.160 One summer, when our kiddo May was just toddling, we woke and went puttering around the house, 0.57

00:17:51.920 surveying the endless skin-shedding renovations

00:17:55.460 and found a snake

00:17:57.480 black with yellow patterned bands

00:18:00.120 just an eastern garter snake

00:18:02.480 over a meter long, though, steps from our front door

00:18:05.860 right in the middle of our stone path

00:18:08.360 with a large frog moaning halfway down its throat.

00:18:14.080 What could we do but watch?

00:18:16.700 The act took hours.

00:18:19.480 It was awful and fascinating.

00:18:21.920 Our neighbor was picnicking. Our neighbor was breakfast.

00:18:27.520 Our lives are only a few gulps removed from this same drumbeat of Hunter or Hunted.

00:18:34.880 Here, we are the invasive species, and trying to pull a frog out of a snake's jaw won't help anyone.

00:18:43.260 Months later, talking with a city friend, a parent, about big topics looming on the horizon of life with our kids, 0.99

00:18:50.240 I said, well, Mae has some notion of death.

00:18:52.880 And they were shocked, like, what?

00:18:55.760 And I realized, oh, this is a strange dark gift the snake has given us.

00:19:01.920 A knowledge of the fact of death in the world.

00:19:07.760 A knowledge we would need in the pandemic and cancer years ahead.

00:19:13.540 A painful but ultimately unavoidable medicine, that particular conversation.

00:19:20.240 In an interview with CBC, Dr. Nicholas Rio, an assistant professor of Native American and

00:19:25.820 Environmental Studies at Dartmouth College and citizen of the Sault Ste. Marie tribe of

00:19:30.620 Chippewa Indians in Michigan, said, Indigenous knowledge sees intruder plants and animal species

00:19:37.140 as nations in their own right. Indigenous communities seek to build relationships with

00:19:42.900 them. We're part of a broader kinship network or a family network that includes not just humans,

00:19:50.240 but other beings as well. So if a new plant or animal moves into your home place, how do you fit

00:19:57.180 it in? Snake kin, how do we fit each other in? Maybe we take lessons from the tales of snake

00:20:07.120 twins. In the 1980s, a Dr. Ebermut Rudolf sent multiple firsthand accounts and transcribed

00:20:18.620 tapes to the Philippine Quarterly of Culture and Society, from his travels through the

00:20:23.880 Philippines, gathering stories of snake twins, people who had somehow become mirrored with

00:20:30.040 a snake, who felt pain when it was hurt, who could speak to it in whispers, and who

00:20:35.740 became renowned herbarios for their unique abilities to cure snake bites.

00:20:41.380 In some of the stories, snake twins are born from the same human mother as their human

00:20:45.600 sibling. In others, they seem to just appear and always live nearby, bringing blessings and curses

00:20:52.920 as they see fit to protect their twin. In one, a too-smart young man tells of a trip to a crystal

00:21:02.860 cave to meet the king of kings of snakes. I'm not as interested in the impossibility of fact-checking

00:21:09.680 stories told in small forest towns 50 years ago, as I am in feeling into the fact that in a place

00:21:17.380 where large and deadly snakes are lurking commonplace, there exists a mythology of

00:21:22.920 partnership, not just partnership, but a living sympathetic magic. Instead of fear and extermination,

00:21:31.200 a communion. How do we fit in? I am snake kin. I imagine them in the culverts, the stone wall by

00:21:40.440 the lakeside, secretive and protecting secrets. I see them in my spine, in the curling smoke

00:21:49.740 and curling breath, in the curves of my drive home, snaking around the mountainside,

00:21:55.700 in the rivers that carve through the red sand the stone shield that remember their ancient names

00:22:02.400 in the season of meteors we lie on our backs at night and watch messenger serpents pierce the sky

00:22:12.460 i visited a friend's snake last week she had seen them in a gross pet shop window dying

00:22:18.820 and brought them home and they have lived with her for nine years now like a brother she said

00:22:25.140 They were dark-eyed when I got there and hiding.

00:22:28.580 She said they were preparing to shed.

00:22:31.060 She told me they look dimmed and tired and don't eat much until the time comes to shed the visible part of the self that no longer serves.

00:22:39.700 And then they emerge, brilliantly colored and ravenous.

00:22:44.020 listener friend witches snake twins this i know we will go dark sometimes

00:22:58.660 curl up under a rock and feel the strangeness coming

00:23:03.060 mourn and fast and feel the weight of inertia the heavy gravity of who we were pulling against

00:23:13.640 It's the new, odd coiling that builds its momentum from within us to emerge.

00:23:22.380 We'll be in that in-between, troubled and exhausted in the discomfort of it, 0.98

00:23:29.380 and wonder what the fuck is happening to us. 0.97

00:23:32.700 Why do we feel so heavy? 0.99

00:23:35.000 Why can't we order, organize, and plan for what will happen next?

00:23:39.140 I notice myself seethe when I can't see from my sky eyes what is happening to me, what is coming next.

00:23:48.440 I'm scared and angry at being out of control.

00:23:59.600 But we are snake kin.

00:24:03.420 We need to feel our way through, belly first sometimes.

00:24:07.060 and the old just can't slip off until the new is formed beneath.

00:24:14.740 Take your time, I call out to myself, my sister, my coven at large.

00:24:22.200 Feel it belly first.

00:24:25.080 You are snake kin and change is always coming.

00:24:30.440 You are related to the coiling that keeps the world from flying apart.

00:24:34.880 you are running in the waters and fires deep underground you are smiling at infinity

00:24:43.960 biting it between your teeth one with the future and the past

00:24:49.540 you are starting to trust in the coming of the new skin

00:24:56.380 rest breathe in trust in the rhythm of shedding again and again

00:25:03.980 trust in your changing self as medicine

00:25:08.620 witches we are snake kin

00:25:15.660 we come through death with bright new skin 0.99

00:25:18.960 ready to begin again

00:25:21.060 and may the god etc bless our writhing sympathetic twin

00:25:26.680 our belly cells, our sky cells

00:25:29.640 and happy snake season 0.97

00:25:32.640 you must be a witch

00:25:57.620 The Missing Witches podcast is created by Risa Dickens and Amy Turok with insight and

00:26:05.060 support from The Coven. Amy and Risa are the co-authors of Missing Witches, Reclaiming

00:26:10.240 True Histories of Feminist Magic, which is available now wherever you get your books

00:26:14.920 or audiobooks, and of New Moon Magic, 13 Anti-Capitalist Tools for Resistance and Re-enchantment, coming

00:26:24.000 fall 2023.

Missing Witches - June 01, 2023

Meditation： Snake Kin

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