2025: The Snake Did Bite — Fall Back or Ride the Fire Horse?

Three days before the great transition away from the Year of the Snake (January 29, 2025 to February 16, 2026) and onto the Year of the Fire Horse (begins on February 17, 2026, and ends on February 5, 2027), I humbly want to invite you into a gentle act: embrace the closing of a cycle and the conscious stepping into another.

What follows is not a prescription. It is not a mandate to believe. It is meditation — reflection upon symbols that have traveled with humanity for millennia.

When I reference Scripture, I do so as one who sits with it, not as one who wields it.

When I move through Tarot or archetype, I do so as a student of symbolic inheritance — wisdom once guarded, now shared freely for any reflective mind to explore.These texts and images are not chains. They are mirrors.

If you have overcome the serpents life placed in your path, perhaps you have encountered this meditation:

“I will put enmity between you and the woman… between your seed and her Seed; it shall bruise your head, and you shall bruise His heel.”

Here, the serpent need not be a creature in a garden. It can represent distortion — misalignment, instinct untethered from awareness, energy without integration.
The enmity becomes discernment. A boundary. A conscious separation between what elevates and what entangles.

The “woman” as helper can be contemplated as the inner guide — the quiet instructor that aligns impulse with awareness. Not superstition. Not fatalism. But coherence. The steady presence within that teaches from the inside out.

“Her Seed” as light becomes consciousness illuminating unconscious material. Light is not fragile sentiment. It is pattern recognition. It is the nervous system choosing regulation over reactivity.

The serpent bruises the heel.

The heel is vulnerability — embodiment itself. Biology still hums. Cortisol still rises under stress. Adrenal glands still fire. We remain flesh and chemistry, and that vulnerability is not failure; it is design.

Yet the serpent’s head is crushed.

The head is narrative. Perception. False interpretation. When awareness matures, distortion loses authority. Instinct may still nip at the heel — fatigue, temptation, old triggers — but it no longer commands the rider.

Transformation reorganizes the psyche.

Transmutation refines fear into wisdom.

Transition is the hallway where ambiguity lingers.

Transmission shifts: instead of radiating chaos, you begin to radiate coherence.

The bruise becomes initiation, not annihilation.

If instead one succumbs to the serpent along the way, another meditation appears:

“Dan shall be a serpent in the path… that bites the horse’s heels, so that its rider falls backward.”

Dan, in this context, symbolically means judgment. 

Judgment can mature into discernment — or it can curdle into accusation. When judgment coils in the path, it becomes self-sabotage disguised as clarity.

The adder bites the horse’s heel.

The horse, in this symbolic ecosystem, is our life-force — instinct, libido in the Jungian sense, the psychic energy that moves us forward. 

The endocrine system pulses. Adrenaline surges. Vitality drives.

If that energy is bitten, destabilized, poisoned by shame or distortion, the horse stumbles.

And the rider falls...backwards. 

The rider is directing consciousness. 

When instinct is hijacked by chronic stress, ego inflation, projection, or unresolved wounds, alignment fractures. This is not about demons in bushes. It is about feedback loops.

The ouroboros — the serpent eating its tail — can represent closed circuits. Unexamined wounds looping through perception until energy becomes trapped in reaction rather than channeled into growth.

Triggered versus channeled.

The difference is not intensity. It is stewardship.

Scripture’s opening pages remind us that lights were placed in the heavens “for signs and seasons.” 

Contemplated psychologically, this speaks of rhythm and ordering. External cycles marking time while internal systems — pineal, circadian, endocrine — mark time within.

Macrocosm and microcosm are not at odds, they mirror and teach through reciprocity.

The stars need not control us to instruct us.

 Archetypes are not dictators; they are templates. Mirrors of recurring human patterns.

And if I do not hold the Torah in hand, I sometimes carry its symbolic echoes in another form: the Tarot’s Major Arcana. Not as superstition, but as mythic shorthand — Cliff Notes of consciousness.

I look within, and see: 

The Fool steps into transition.

Death symbolizes transmutation.

The Tower destabilizes false structures.

The Magician directs will.

These are psychic events — movements of the soul (psyche) reorganizing itself.

The four suits of tarot— fire, water, air, earth — mirror modes of human personal and interpersonal engagement: will, emotion, thought, body. 

When balanced, the rider remains seated.

When one dominates without integration, imbalance begins. When one dominates without integration the horse is as stubborn as an angry mule. 

Curiosity loosens the serpent’s coil.

Reciprocity restores ecosystem flow.

The dark night of the soul dissolves old structures so new coherence can form.

Brewing tea is preferable, no one is blasting the pot with a blow torch. At least, I hope not;) 

Another symbol to be mindful of is the tree of life (the human spine-mind: nervous system)...The tree as Self mirrors our embodied system:

Roots — subconscious imprints.

Trunk — identity.

Branches — behavior.

Leaves — expression.

Fruit — outcome.

And, it is written: "A tree is known by its fruit." There is no getting around that. It is, what it is.

Hormones influence mood. How we connect to others, external experiences, also influence mood. What comes first, the fruit or the root? 

Ancient myth encoded these truths long before laboratories measured them. Symbol was observational neuroscience without microscopes.

When the serpent strikes the heel, perhaps we are witnessing dysregulation — chemistry misfiring, narrative distorting.

When the serpent’s head is crushed, perhaps we are witnessing integration — prefrontal awareness calming limbic reactivity. Light meeting instinct.

This symbolic ecosystem is not about superstition. It is about integration — of instinct and intellect, body and meaning, impulse and awareness.

The subconscious does not speak in sentences. It speaks in images. We dream because images compress experience more efficiently than prose. Logic builds structures. The subconscious grows forests.

When we listen symbolically, we become bilingual. The conscious mind interprets; the deeper mind reveals.

Ancient myth and modern neuroscience often describe the same nervous system in different dialects. One uses parable. One uses data. Both observe a human being learning how to ride power without being thrown.

So here we are.

Three days before the Fire Horse rises.

Close what coils.

Release what constricts.

Carry forward what integrates.

This is meditation, not mandate. Invitation, not imposition.

And so:

Happy Valentine’s Day, reader.

You have three days left of the year of the Snake.

Release the snake.

Ride the Fire Horse into the light of a new beginning.