Originally Posted by Capt. Nemo

A mind boggling thing happened today. I've been reading Joseph Campbell's Occidental Mythology recently. Part of what I read that particularly resonated with me was a section about the early mythological significance of the serpent as a symbol of rebirth, and thus immortality and other related things. In the context it was discussed in its various forms in Sumerian, Akkadian, Hebrew, and other Near Eastern mythologies on down to the Greeks and Romans, with a big change in significance when certain types of cultural change appeared. It was all very interesting and got me thinking about those things a lot while I was wandering around dealing with the business of life lately.

I dropped off my son and wife at a Cub Scout meeting, and went to the auto parts store to deal with batteries and various car parts. As I was driving off I got an impulse to go to a pet supply store I passed. I went in and looked around. They had a fairly large reptile display. I went up to the display and looked around. At the top were the snakes. First thing I did was walk up to the snake display near the center, and as I did I was thinking about the mythological significance of snakes, and I had an unusual state of mind. I was feeling a deep sense of joy and wonder (this was a little strange since I had been dealing with frustration of a car where every time I fixed it something else would go wrong). The snake in the display had been coiled under a log. As I came into this state of mind, it came out looking at me, uncoiled, and moved to the glass with his/her head looking at me. It began to undulate its body in the air as if it was dancing while the face started at me, with the face projecting a bit forward and almost touching the glass. The undulation made it reminiscent of a snake in a caduceus.

I have been around snakes and other reptiles a lot, and my brother and sister have owned a number of them, and I have never seen a snake behave in that way. It was very wonderful. It seemed very much like the snake was reacting to my state of mind, since it had been idle until I appeared, and then became unusually interested in me. It did not exhibit any typical traits of a defensive posture or an aggressive posture, it was something else, though I don't know what.

So do you think I was somehow connecting with the snake on a spiritual/whatever level when I was contemplating it as something much more profound than a potential pet reptile, or was it just a coincidence that it exhibited a totally unexpected and very atypical behavior?