For her, love had come to mean only a privileged spiritual experience. Early on, I teased her that she reeked of the New Age's spiritualizations and needed to learn to see in the dark more than to live in the light. Now, in a classic reading of the snake, it would be hard to avoid its sexual significance in this woman's context. But snakes have many other meanings. Snakes are often symbols of power and, of course, a snake brought wisdom to Adam and Eve, via sex, in the Garden of Eden.
Snakes shed their skins, so they indicate transformation.
A snake swallowing its tail is also the symbol of the eternal self. So, in my view, it would be a terrible mistake simply to say that this snake pointed to the woman's molestation and that she needed to face it. As play, I asked the woman to design a performance piece in which she became a figure I called Barbie Ouroboros, driving a pink Cadillac on her way to perform an exotic snake dance. She took this to heart, donning a blond paper wig and playing a bimbo, who, entering a dark space, performed a dance with a snake she made of black velvet. And then she did something amazing.