The Year of the Snake (蛇)

Hey everyone, first of all I would like to welcome you all to my new contribution and hope you have a week which has brought many interesting experiences into your lives! In this article I would like to go into the Chinese culture and I am happy if you can learn new things.

The zodiac signs in China are slightly different from what the Western tradition knows and the 12 zodiac signs consist of twelve animals which are assigned their own characteristics and each year is assigned its own animal like 2025 the snake or 蛇. The snake is considered in China as one of the wisest and most intelligent animals and when people are born this year, there is philosophy that they have a special mental strength and in the course of their life will reach enormous wisdom and ancient China had also exerted an enormous influence on other Asian countries where the snake also has an important meaning. The beginning of the new calendar year is associated with first full moon of the new year and traditionally each animal is assigned its own element which in China consists of the five wood, metal, water, fire and earth and 2025 is also associated with the wooden snake. Also in mythology the snake has an important meaning and there is the legend of the white snake which has existed for thousands of years and has strongly influenced Chinese history and the beauty of this snake attracted everyone who saw it. One night this snake turned into a beautiful woman with a white dress and wandered around until she met one boy with whom she fell in love without knowing her true identity and the two fell in love so much that they had decided to unite and marry. There were some people who wanted to stand between their love and there was even a monk named Fa Hai who knew the true identity of her and told him that behind the woman in the white dress would be a snake to camouflage herself, whereupon he became more and more skeptical about his wife, but nothing could separate the two. A magician decided to forcibly separate the two and decided to lock up the white snake and take her to a faraway place which should not stop her husband from looking for her and when he had found the place where she was hidden, he decided to free her and prove all skeptics the love between the two. In Chinese mythology, in addition to the legend of the white snake, there are many other legends in which this wise animal has an important meaning and there are also some mythical creatures which have characteristics of a snake.

Many thanks for stopping by and I hope you could learn something new about this topic! I captured these pictures with my Camera Sony Alpha 6000 plus 55-210 mm lens.