As a metaphor, I can associate the snake with the highest levels of knowledge and intellectual widsom but there the metaphor ends (apart from it also having the arts of cunning and subtlety) because the snake is a cold blooded creature, therefore metaphorically and in reality, the snake has no emotional aparatus, no sense of love that is so human and this is one reason why I shy away from any veneration of the Serpent because the snake is alien and inferior to what it is to be human. The snake never evolved compassion.

Rob