Overview: The Magic of Serpents, is a book that searches for the symbolism and worldwide mythology, religious, philosophical and spiritual level the serpent stands for.

Verdict: A remnant from the age of the dinosaur, the serpent was originally a symbol of arcane knowledge from the old gods. Transformed into the devil for tempting Eve to eat from the forbidden tree, the serpent has remained the villain ever since.

Scott Irvines’s The Magic of Serpents is a profound search for the symbolism and worldwide mythology - at the religious, philosophical and spiritual levels - for which the serpent stands.

If think, in one way or another, that we all have been made aware that the snake, or serpent, is one of the most symbolically significant animals in literature, religion, and mythology. Although many people associate the snake with sinister and even downright evil connotations, in reality the symbolism of the serpent is far more ambiguous and wide-ranging than this.

Indeed, some of the most famous and important symbolic traits of the serpent were born a long time ago, nonemoreso than in ancient myth, where a snake devouring its own tail, known as Ouroboros, was a symbol of eternity. The snake’s ability to slough or shed its own skin – symbolic of rebirth and renewal – has also played into this symbolism, and in many cultures, snakes have been associated with the underworld and the abode of the dead (because it spends so much time in pits and below the earth, or hiding under rocks).

In the Bible, although the serpent is most often associated with Satan and therefore with evil forces, this only tells part of the picture. And strictly speaking, even that part is inaccurate, in my humble opinion. But I won’t bore you with all that now.

As for snakes (serpents) in literature, the great D. H. Lawrence (1885-1930) wrote one of his most famous poems, ‘Snake’, while he was living on the island of Sicily, in the beautiful resort, Taormina, on the east side of the island:

The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, if you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

Lawrence’s gendering, and anthropomorphism, of the snake as ‘he’ stages a masculine battle (or stand-off – well, if snakes could stand, anyway) between him and the snake, two males facing off against one another. (Lawrence also refers to how the snake ‘mused’ as it drank at the trough, another piece of anthropomorphism).

In closing, what author Scott Irvine does here in his new book The Magic of Serpents, and which itself opens on a Preface that touts the fall of man through Genesis 3, 1-20 of the Good News Bible (1976), is showcase the fact that the serpent – far from being Satan in ophidian form, or being that of anthropomorphism, or simply something hungry enough to devour its own tail re: Ouroboros – is actually an entity, of sorts, a creative force within nature, the transformation from one age to another, shedding the old to grow new worlds and evolve into the future; in other words, to aid us humans’ passage from infantile innocence to the maturity of experience.

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