Chinese Snake Year 2025
Moments in the Flow…About This and Other Snake Venerations
Hello Again,
If you are on social media, or watching the news, you have probably heard that the Chinese Lunar New Year for 2025 is the Year of the Snake. I recently mentioned snakes in my post The Voice of Spring. It is one of the creature symbols for the Great Mother Goddess of Ireland, Brigid, who is their Goddess of the Spring.
In this context it refers to life returning above ground, shedding the old skin of winter and creating a new skin for the coming year. It also refers to the return of energy moving up the human spine, sometimes called kundalini. And we would need this energy now, because spring is also the time when the hard work of the agricultural year would begin.
Our modern medical symbol, the Caduceus, remembers this healthy flow as snakes intertwined on a pole topped by wings.
Seeing Brigid’s Snake Symbol
Wales
I witnessed messengers of this connection when I visited the area of Bride’s Bay off the West Coast of Wales. ‘Bride’ is a word that derives from the name Brigid.
The tour began at St. David’s Cathedral. After lunch, we left the town that grew up around the cathedral and went to a rural area near the coastline to visit a holy well. We found it below the slope that led to a small temple to St. Non. She was David’s mother, and the holy well connection and the birth of David at the beginning of the 6th century CE, supports some theories that she had been a druid priestess.
Then, we crossed the narrow dirt road and began walking toward the cliffs along a path through a grassy field. On the way we would find the ruins of the small stone cell where the Patron Saint of Wales spent his life of spiritual austerity.
Suddenly the tour guide shouted, ‘stop!’ Crossing the path in front of us was the long black snake that was one of Brigid’s symbols. It paid us no attention at all and just kept moving along on its way toward the well. For me that was a stunning final confirmation that the Divine Feminine energy was still strong here.
We had also seen a snake carved into the wood below one of the choir seats in the cathedral. There was small corn doll--a ceremonial object for certain goddess festivals--placed beside the statue of Mother Mary in a stone niche across from the holy well.
It was known that the snake was often the guardian of a spiritual site or healing well. That seems to continue to this day.
North Carolina
Hurricane Helene also did damage to places of great beauty in the mountains of Western North Carolina. One of my favorite waterfalls cannot be reached now and it will be years before a new path is built. On several of my early visits to see and feel the energy of this place, we walked a bit downstream from the falls to get another view. Each time I looked over the rocky end of that short path, I saw a coiled gray snake on one of the lower rocks.
In my muse-given novella, The Greatest Enchantment (a Forest Fairy Adventure), there’s a scene where the two fairies, Melarose and Runawind, have a short conversation with a guardian snake while the human characters are visiting the waterfall. This snake has scales in many shades of gray, allowing her to blend well with the rock she sits upon on the left side of the falls.
The fairy Runawind makes a statement about the difference between lizards and snakes and gets this reply: “Yesssssss….not many humans are as wise as you; not many humans still view us with respect, and honor us for our powers and medicine. They recoil from us in horror, as if the only thought we have is harm. I must endure the jagged energy of their shrieks when they manage to catch a glimpse of me, though I am far off and pose them no threat. It’s a wonder that my sense of patience is not completely gone.” She raised her regal head high, moving it slightly back and forth. “But I am here because Grandfather* requires me.”
“Of course,” Melarose added. “As all sacred water places require their beloved Snake Guardian.”
(*Grandfather is the waterfall. And yes with extended ssssss is not a typo, but her snake sound.)
The Snake’s Meaning for Indigenous, Ancient and Modern Cultures
There are still cultures that honor and venerate the snake. The Native Americans of the US and other indigenous people honor them, while those in areas where venomous snakes are prominent are very aware that the power to kill resides in those who carry poison.
Most modern age people would have a hard time imagining positive benefits for a snake year or the other ways snakes were and are venerated.
I would never want to see one in my home, but I wasn’t sorry to see a black snake in my yard in upstate SC. Snakes, like other creatures of Scorpio, do not usually go after us, but attack only when they feel threatened (by proximity or stumbling on them). Sometimes called a Rat Snake, this black snake in the yard is a poison-free rodent eater. Free pest control. Some black snakes, like the King snake are said to kill the poisonous Copperheads.
I learned an old local custom when the gardener told me he had killed a black snake in the back yard and hung it on a tree beyond my fence. To my puzzled look, he added that doing this would help bring rain.
The Snake in Ancestral and Ancient Times
In days of Ancient Egypt and Minoan cultures, there were Snake Goddesses. We have seen figures of a snake goddess that show her holding or wearing snakes. Some have said that the coiled upper arm bracelet with the snake head we may still see worn today was inspired by this ceremonial priestess practice.
But it seems the ‘snakes’ St. Patrick drove out for the Celtic Irish ancestors were not the creature itself but those who worshipped the Goddess.
However, for China, the Snake remains a revered animal in their Zodiac.
The Chinese Zodiac and the Four Pillars
I have seen the Chinese Zodiac Snake called diplomatic, elegant, and persuasive and that a Snake Year is a year for progress. An article in the Times of India tells us the Snake is a symbol of knowledge, creativity and insight. This site goes on to give more symbology and a quick forecast for the sign of your birth year. But the animal has modifications and more positions in the actual Chinese system.
The Element
China’s Zodiac, like ours, has twelve signs. These signs also have elements. The Chinese zodiac differs in that it consists solely of animal symbols, and each animal will change elements based on the year. The animal combined with one element produces characteristics that may not be present when the same animal is in a different element.
Wood is the element of Snake Year 2025, and this brings to the cunning and mysterious nature of Snake the potential to be charming, intelligent and creative, but also secretive, cunning and sometimes ruthless.
Other sites will go farther and call this a Yin Wood Snake or a Green Wood Snake and this promises a good year for imaginative enterprises and new healing technologies.
Wood does not correspond to any of our four elements but has a relationship with the four other Chinese elements: Wood generates Fire, Fire generates Earth, Earth generates Metal, Metal generates Water, and Water generates Wood. Metal is their word for the Air element.
Your True Chinese Zodiac Animal, Plus…
Many western people who know their Chinese Zodiac symbol may not be aware that these same animals also designate a month, a day of the week, and a time of day. I found a page where you can calculate the full nature of your Chinese Zodiac signs. They call these positions the Four Pillars.
It’s also important to know that the Chinese Lunar New Year doesn’t begin on January first, and their months begin about 6 days into ours. The calculator link above will be useful as it gives more accuracy than the simple year-only or month-only listings. And it gives more insight into your nature through the qualities of the month, day and time.
Personal Snake Year 2025
The Snake Year is going to be a ‘best year’ for those with this as their Chinese Zodiac Sign. Many other Chinese Animal Zodiac signs will find in the article above, and other information sites, that they will have a beneficial relationship to the Snake and a good year ahead in certain areas of life. Others might have good qualities mixed with some warnings. Ideas about the effects of the Chinese Zodiac year that stand out in importance will be validated in what can be seen in the astrological birth chart, and with the likely timing of those events, too.
Of course, you can learn far more about Traditional Chinese Medicine and the Chinese Zodiac by finding one of many books* published on this topic. And you can find out how these effects show up in your Western Astrology chart by visiting my Astrology Readings Page or contacting me to schedule a Reading.
Best wishes for your Year of the Green Yin Wood Snake!
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See you next time!
* The book results provided by the amazon link are far from complete and I do suggest some time spent on Google or another search engine to see more on this topic.
I also note how snakes must shed their skin in order to grow. Surely, this applies to us in some metaphorical ways, also!