now you want to get into bed with me. However, you are probably frozen. So come in with me and get warm you poor worm!" And then the good Oda stretched out her soft warm hand and lifted the cold serpent into her bed.
Into the bargain now the serpent changed into a young prince who in this manner was freed from the magic spell; and he took the good Oda to wife.
The sexual symbolism of this tale, the single phases of the seduction, the change of disgust into affection, are so transparent, that explanation is unnecessary, and the transformation at the critical moment makes any such wholly superfluous.
The serpent is here the prince, in the language of fairy tales that signifies the wished-for man. The symbol is by no means, however, accidental. As in magic and fairy-tale symbolism the part (for example the charm) almost always stands in place of the whole; that is protects from the bewitched or from magic, or calls forth magic, so is also the serpent a part of the man, namely the phallus. In the story of Oda this substitution is apparent. One has the feeling in reading it it might just as well have been the relation of a dream which a patient with hysteria or dementia præcox had had.[1] Indeed we meet the serpent there with absolutely identical significance and in dementia præcox also in other pictures which are of dream-like construction, for example, in delusions, hallucinations, wish deliria, etc. There are snakes which creep into the genitals or bite near them. They are cold, disgusting (as with Oda), they have the same tendency to produce terror, and a feeling of uneasiness that so often adheres to the anticipation of the sexual. Snake dreams are very common with hysterical women and can almost always be traced to this signification.
It must be pointed out, with the exception of what has already been said, what the serpent means as a sexual symbol. That it has a very great significance in mythology, in race psychology in fairy tales, and in psychopathology. Stoll mentions the importance of the serpent in the popular belief of the cause of the miracle of Moses ("Suggestion und Hypnotismus," p. 214, II Auflage; the
- ↑ See the "little green serpent" in Jung, the "Psychologie der Dementia praecox." Halle a. S., Carl Marhold, 1907. Monograph Series No. 3.
