I think it’s silly the way some people love to call psychopaths “reptiles.” Denying our very humanity, as many more like to do, isn’t enough for this select group. Of course, if we’re reptiles, we aren’t human. And it means we’re not even mammals. I guess they can’t take our detachment so they are mentally detaching us from all categories of beings they feel any connection to.
The association of reptiles to evil is an old one in our Judeo-Christian culture. The first 
evil invaded the paradisaical Garden of Eden in the form of the serpent. Eve was a mammal, a member of the human species. So, I guess she was intrinsically good. But the evil serpent made her do something wrong. That’s the equation. Human = good. Reptile = evil.
And so it has been from time immemorial. Look at Harry Potter. The students are divided into four houses. One of them is identified with reptiles. Slytherin.
I like reptiles for their stillness, their concentration, their readiness for action. These are the same traits Bruce Lee advocates for his students. That’s the stance of a warrior. Not that we always have to be at war. Just living life on my own terms is a worthy goal. For this, some people want to read us out of the circle of humanity. Says some interesting things about these people’s values. Happy to be one of me rather than one of them.
Links
- Psychopathy: Is it in their Eyes? Adelyn Birch, Psychopaths and Love
- A Psychoanalytic View of the Psychopath. J. Reid Meloy, Ph.D.
- Reptilian State Theory. Meloy
- Reptilian Us. Yours truly
- She’s Got the Blood of Reptile. Yours truly
- The Eyes Have It. Yours truly
Reblogged this on cabbagesandkings524 and commented:
Cluster B – Reptiles? Really?
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I suppose we inherit a fear of snakes from our arboreal ancestors. Maybe it is past time to outgrow it.
I prefer to see the mythical snake as an agent of consciousness, directing Adam and Eve to become fully human, and the “expulsion” from the garden as not a punishment, but a graduation. Besides, I suspect it wasn’t an apple, but a mushroom.
If you leave a story running around loose for a few thousand years, it can get edited quite a lot to fit many agendas.
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Oh! I like that interpretation. Would you believe it that I heard the same idea from a Catholic priest? I think Rudolf Steiner also said something like that. Instead of falling, they evolved. I guess when children grow out of their original innocence, it’s a kind of fall from grace but it leads the kid to develop his own sense of responsibility leaving the Eden of childhood for the hard work of adulthood.
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It is a way to avoid the usual misogynistic interpretation. Of course, there is also the Freudian interpretation of who, or what the snake symbolizes, a different kind of loss of innocence.
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I went to a spiral dance with Z Budapest. At it, she said the serpent is an ancient ally of women.
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Surely the blame for this problem (I can see how much harm it must do) belongs mainly to the psychopaths at the top, who deliberately feed the unwitting public stupid stories about lizard aliens, perverted myths about Sophia with serpents, and lies about lizard-human DNA and the Sumerians, when an honest power structure would ensure a sensible education in mathematics and sacred geometry as an alternative.
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