take a deep breath and start from the beginning

I haven't been this righteously furious since i broke my foot at that pacifist's impotency, so I'm gonna tell you all about it.

I need cash for when I leave Mountain Gardens, so there's a neighbor who I hired myself out to this weekend. He's obsessed with breeding variegated-leafed comfreys according to the teachings of Luther Burbank. I thought this was a harmless quirk, and a bit intriguing, because comfrey is such a non-descript plant to look at, yet has an ancient history of use for injuries.

My meditation for the day was "everyone is beautiful", so even though the guy drives away all his interns by working 'em so hard, I focused on his beauty. It wasn't too terribly tough of work, 'cept for he was fussy 'bout where on the bare soil you stepped. Basically I was digging it, until...

He brought up snakes.

Now, I'm well aware of some of the discripancies between my cosmology and those of Dominionist christians. I went to the local Baptist church last week so people'd recognize my face and pick me up when I hitchhike, and they said that their god destroyed two ancient cities with fire and brimstone because the people there were queer. That frustrated me, made me go tsk tsk, but the snake thing...


When I was in North Carolina, which I never blogged too much about, people said that they killed all snakes on site, ostensibly because of their dominant paradigm roll in mythology, (snake gets orders from Satan to tempt Eve, Eve tempts Adam, snakes and women get blamed for posterity). I got frustrated and didn't want to eat at the same table with those "Serpent Slayers". Since I was trying to get into the libratory aspects of these people's mindset, I held my tounge and just got frustrated. But this time...

I pick a comfrey outta the ground, and there's a huge orange salamander underneath it. I figure it must be a fishing lure, it's so big, immobile and cool lookin. The Gardener took it gingerly from me, and said something to the effect that "These (salamanders) and turtles and frogs are nice. But snakes are bad. I kill 'em."

I just about flew off the handle. "I s'pose you grew up in a Church where they said snakes are evil." "Pretty much."

I grew up at a Waldorf School, and going to Sunday School. I had some of the same snake/devil/woman/evil stuff put in my psyche early on, but it was never really shoved down there. And from hanging out with some entheogen-partaking, occult-oriented synchronicity manipulators, I know that that's not the full story, nor even the part of the story that an anarchist should be synthesizing.


Snakes are good in a lot of cosmologies. From reading AH, AL! I know that some of the resistance put up by real human communities has used lots of the same language as the Enemy, as the empire builders. For instance, some Gnositcs take the Garden of Eden story (the same story that's being enacted here at MG) and put Lucifer as a bringer of Light, with the snake as a messanger, sort of like Prometheus. The Pachakuti Mesa folks that I hung out with last year say that Mother Earth is connected in some way to snakes, and once again that they are bringers of wisdom. I know some of the Hindu sorcerers of our day make use of some sort of "kundalini" snake magic, associated with the opening of all the chakras and divine light seaping directly into your head. The Celts may have had some similar thoughts, according to my girl DJ Conway- sometimes, when a Celtic hero got pumped up, their head burst into flame like their kundalini force was erupting.

Since I'm working on the premise that humanity needs to realize and actualize all the inspiration and light and wisdom it can, and since the snakes have been our symbolical allies, AND SO WHEN THIS GUY SAID HE WAS KILLING SNAKES I WAS PISSED.

We walked over to this huge apple tree in the middle of his garden, and The Gardener basically said "If I had my way we'd cut this thing down." I accused him of hating apple trees and snakes, and he said the fruit was bad. I sollemnly sware that if I ever encounter someone about to kill a wild snake in a habitat it won't reduce to weeds, I'm going to say "Wait, there's another snake and it's about to strike! Hold still while I get it." Then I'll kick that person square in the crotch.