Take Gan Eden – the Garden of Eden – to be the body – the temple. Then Adam and Eve are the male and female principle – yang and yin. Snake, the most interesting player, is energy, coiling, uncoiling, moving slowly, darting fleetly, around the body, always looking for mischief, for a play. Religion turns him into a devil – Satan's player – because he questions the validity of external authority, of the sovereign, and thereby, supposedly, threatens social harmony, status quo. He cannot help this, it's what energy does, it's natural. You must decide who to side with: the eternal external word or the ever-changing, ever-changeable internal. If you choose the internal – snake – then, as you waken him through the work, he ventures out into world and you become real in the sense of energetic, of spirit, which you never were before in your previously obedient robotic guise.