The Summer of the Snake

2021 was the Summer of the Snake.

There’s an audio this week - perhaps listen to it before you read this one.

In Native American symbolic and imaginal medicine systems, snake medicine people are scarce. Their initiation involves experiencing and living through multiple snake bites, which ultimately allows them to transmute all poisons – mental, physical, spiritual and emotional.

Snake Medicine people know the taste of death, and they know how to look fear in the eye.

You would be a fool to choose snake medicine.

But, sometimes it chooses you.

Deep in my unconscious in 2021, I knew something primordial was stirring, that a battle of life and death had begun.

I knew there was no point in anything unless I had some skin in the game, and that how I responded would matter.

I have written in an earlier Substack entitled ‘The Cancer Chronicles’ what would ultimately happen to me and what I would face, but this, I have recently realised, was the start of that process, that inexorable inner movement, that Summer of the Snake.

The power of the snake medicine is the power of creation itself; it embodies sexuality, psychic energy, and alchemy, as well as reproduction and ascension.

Life- Death -rebirth – the shedding of the snake’s skin.

From this process symbolised and embodied by the snake, we invite the energy of cosmic consciousness and wholeness. We accept the ability to experience anything willingly and without resistance. Through this acceptance, we realise what life and death are and what our true nature is.

Through acceptance of your whole life, you can bring about the transmutation of the fire energy, which I experienced directly in the Sweat Lodge. Again, something I have written about on other Substacks.

That summer of the snake came after the collective COVID experience, less an initiation and more a plague from ancient days.

The streets were empty.

I was beginning to learn in the depths that we are all universal beings and that, through the acceptance of all aspects of your life, you can bring about the transmutation of the fire medicine. By 2021, I had sat in the sacred circle of the sweat lodge many times and felt the fire within me meet the fire from the grandfathers. Inner to outer, known to the known. I knew what it felt like to burn. I had realised that on the spiritual plane, snake medicine means: wisdom, understanding, wholeness and connection to the Great Spirit.

This magic is a change of consciousness.

So that summer of 21, I chose the snake biting its tail as my symbol to meditate, visualise and abide with.

This decision came from my imagination, and the symbol existed in the imaginal realm. The ‘Mundus Imaginalis the ‘imaginal’, are terms coined by Henry Corbin, the great Islamic scholar of Sufism and a friend of C. G. Jung.

The term Imaginal refers to a region/energy that lies at the intersection of imagination, reality, and spiritual experience. Unlike simple fantasy or make-believe, the Imaginal denotes a mode of perception or a realm of being that reveals deeper truths, often overlooked by empirical or purely rational modes of thought. The idea has deep roots in philosophy, mysticism, psychology, and the arts. It has been most famously developed by the French philosopher Henri Corbin in his studies of Islamic mysticism and Sufism.

Corbin introduced the term mundus imaginalis—the “imaginal world”—as a translation of the Arabic term ʿālam al-khayāl. In Islamic cosmology, this realm exists between the purely spiritual and the material. It is not imaginary in the sense of being fictional or unreal; rather, it is a real and autonomous dimension accessible through the heart and the imagination, rather than through the senses or logic alone. The Imaginal is the place where visionary experiences occur, where archetypes and symbols become visible, and where spiritual realities take form. It’s a place of becoming.

In Sufi thought, this world is the domain of true vision. Mystics access it through dreams, visions, and inner journeys. It is also the place where encounters with angelic beings, spiritual guides, or higher truths take place. What distinguishes the Imaginal from the imaginary is its ontological status: it has a reality of its own, even if it is not physically tangible.

In Western thought, the Imaginal shares territory with Jungian psychology, particularly in the idea of active imagination and the archetypal realm of the collective unconscious. Carl Jung’s exploration of dreams, symbols, and myth shows clear parallels with the Islamic imaginal world. Jung believed that the psyche contains a symbolic language that, when accessed properly, reveals deep truths about the self and the cosmos. This realm, too, is not “unreal”—it is another form of reality that must be engaged on its terms. I could also connect this with my experience of shamanistic practice.

Artists, poets, and mystics throughout history have drawn from the Imaginal. William Blake’s visionary poetry, Dante’s journey through the Divine Comedy, and even the rich symbolic landscapes of modern fantasy and science fiction are often grounded in the Imaginal mode. These works do not merely entertain; they invite the reader or viewer into a deeper participation in meaning and reality.

Importantly, the Imaginal serves as a bridge. It connects the inner and outer worlds, the divine and the mundane, the subjective and the objective. It is a space of revelation and transformation, where insight arises not from discursive thought but from symbolic resonance. As modern culture tends toward literalism and materialism, the Imaginal offers a vital counterbalance—a way of re-enchanting the world and recovering the depth of human experience.

The Imaginal is not just a poetic or spiritual fancy, but a profound and necessary dimension of human consciousness. It is where the soul encounters itself, the divine, and the archetypal structure of existence. To engage the Imaginal is to awaken to a reality that is as essential, if not more so, than the physical world we see with our eyes.

It captures the fundamental key to working dynamically with symbols and the creative imagination and allows me to access a visionary facility within the consciousness, no longer limited by linear time and the mind’s constructs.

Language defines that this can only be expressed as a duality, but in truth, it is not a duality. I had worked with Mind Palace for many years since reading Francis Yeats’ book, “The Persistence of Memory.’ This was my own ‘Mansion in Eternity.’

In truth, I have never much cared for snakes.

I remember as a child being taken by school to London Zoo and freaking out in the Reptile House, a place filled with the creatures from my nightmares. Years later, a Shaman told me that in a previous life, a demonic snake element had been planted in my body, its head toward my genitals in my subtle body. He removed it using incantations and a rattle that he said loosened its hold upon me.

I have learnt not to question such things.

The snake had become a potent symbol for me. Covid had seemed at the time like a form of initiation, but more it was just keeping a school going at that time and devoting myself to serving the needs of others.

I had also reached a certain age, 56, and there was an awareness that change was coming, and I should put things for the next stage of my life, the final stage of my life.

I was Odysseus finding an oar in the desert.

The medicine is always in what we fear.

The snake biting its tail is a symbol of Eternity, completion and renewal. The competition of the work of incarnation.

Visual creativity means stilling the mind, opening the heart and filling the form of the symbol. There was infinite time to do this inner operation in the Summer of the Snake. The snake moves in the imagination, but you cannot see the snake moving.

And you should ask the question: Do you live in memory or imagination?

If you decide to enter the imaginal world, then you must banish doubt, for doubt is to change the vibration, to change the imaginative energy, to bring your will to bear.

Doubt casts a shadow.

In my journal at that time, in the Summer of the Snake, and in a heightened state of consciousness, I wrote in a florid hand, ‘We who live in time suffer his bite (the snake) so we may live in mortal dress and know that we will die. So, we circle the snake and hold the shape of the serpent in our minds.’ Serpent energy moves up the spine through the heart into the head, burning new channels.

You become a lightning rod to the heavens.

If the spirit rises, then the soul must descend, and that work must begin.

Thanks again for reading.

David

David Brazier