Thereâs something about this image that wonât let me go. I donât just love it for its aesthetic, but for what breathes beneath it.
At first glance, itâs simply beautiful: a woman draped in pale fabric kneels before a coiled serpent, her expression one of serenity. But fairy tales are never just beautiful.They speak in symbols, not decoration. As Joseph Campbell wrote, myth and fairytale are not merely entertainment but the dream of the collective. They are maps for the soul, drawn in the language of dreams and symbols.
This illustration echoes the deep patterns found in tales like âThe White Snake, "The Lindworm,â or even âCupid and Psycheâ, all stories where the monstrous is not to be slain, but to be understood. To soothe the beast is to face what we fear in ourselves, the rejected parts, the serpentine powers of instinct, temptation, and transformation. In Jungian terms, the serpent can represent the primal unconscious, the life-force (libido), or even the shadow, those parts of ourselves we exile, suppress, or misunderstand.
When we dream of serpents, we dream of power, but not power over others. The power to transform ourselves. In Eastern traditions, this is Kundalini: the sacred energy that sleeps like a serpent until awakened. To kneel before it, to rest within its gaze is not weakness. It is initiation. This scene could be read as a dream of descent, a Persephone-like maiden resting in Hadesâ domain, her shadow-self crouched below, watching. Or maybe she is a queen of forbidden realms, comforted by her dragon, while her goblin attendant watches like a servant of deeper urges or older magicks. The fallen crown or perhaps deliberately laid down at the serpentâs side beside her speaks volumes. It may symbolize the surrender of ego, the abandonment of surface identity. She is no longer merely a daughter of day, she is now a vessel for nightâs revelations.
Fairy tales remind us: to become whole, we must not destroy the serpent but meet it, touch it, whisper to it in the dark. And maybe, just maybe, when we remove the crown and place our ear to the ground of the psyche, the monster becomes the mirror holding the missing piece we once abandoned to survive.
âđ âŁŕŁŞ Ë for those who still pause for fleeting things,
entries from the pages folded into margins
đ ⥠â˘Â
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