I didn’t always pay attention to snails. I remember seeing them here and there. Accidentally stepping on one one in a blue moon. Small creatures they are… quiet and unassuming. My snail journey began right as I was turning a corner in my own life. Over the last five years I have raised and kept dozens of snails across a handful of species. Each new fact I learn about them fascinates me. Each encounter brings a new lesson, not just about life and nature, but about myself as well. I have adopted the snail as a mascot of sorts, and that article seeks to explore themes within snail mythology and how they relate to us as humans, and myself personally.
Queer Icons
Hermaphrodites biologically, land snails have stood for duality and fluidity. Possessing both male and female reproductive organs, these snails just are. In searching my own mind, body, and spirit I can heavily relate. The sense of knowing in your own body that no one else can even begin to comprehend. The freedom to just be is heady. It’s something I’ve been fighting for, for myself.
What if we didn’t have to pick a role? What if we were ready to give and receive? When snails meet to mate, they both exchange sperm, they often both come away impregnated. It’s a brilliant way of ensuring a balanced exchange. Through my explorations, I delight in change and transformation, in reciprocal exchange. I revel in the give and take. I experience each “role” I have been in with a fresh delight and bright mind for novelty.
Myself having these “masculine” as well as “feminine” traits caused me much grief by family and peers all throughout my life. Picked on by boys and girls, men and women, for the crime(?) of being just what I wanted to be. Snails help me remember nature is just throwing spaghetti at a wall and seeing what sticks. Whatever fucks it’s way to the top, am I right?
Love Darts & Kink
Perpetuating the species is the biological call for all life forms. While there are many, many representations of asexuality, right now I am focusing on the species as a whole. Reproduction is coded into our DNA. In some animals, it is for procreation only and only done during certain periods of time, like during ovulation. In humans and other species like dolphins, there is pleasure derived from the mating itself, so sex outside of the ovulation period takes place.
Snails mate when conditions are right, temperate weather, plenty of food, and moisture. In the wild this translates to spring and early autumn. Due to the biological nature of the snail, neither wants to use the resources needed to grow eggs, so there is a natural spermicide in the vaginal canal. In order to fertilize their mate, many species of land snails have a Love Dart, a hard and sharp calcium shiv that is loaded with hormones and enzymes that counteract that spermicide. They will spend hours sword-fighting and aiming to get the best shot.
This imagery calls to mind the various play that happens in the kink and BDSM spheres. Intentional pain. Calculated chaos and violence. I’ve been through so much pain in my life that I have fetishized it. I don’t need it to reach completion, but hell, it certainly does help. The select individuals who revel in sadomasochism mimic the violent love of the snail.
Trippy Taboos
Cultures and civilizations before Christianity revered the snail as a symbol of the Universe, eternity, duality, luck and good fortune. They would grant wishes in Japan and snail girl brought water to the Navajo. Their shell helped create the world with the Yoruba. Snails’ slow moving pace was thought to mimic the travel of heavenly bodies across the sky.
When Christianity was forced upon almost everyone through conversion or bloodshed, the snail transformed into something unclean. Lazy. Slothful. Sinful. It was used as an insult in England and other surrounding areas. Psalms 58:8 talks of the lack of “God” being “as a snail melting away in the sun.” Classic, wonderful, Biblical imagery. Throughout the last few hundred years the snail has fallen off as a favored creature and instead has become something most people are disgusted with.
I’ve always delighted in the weird and strange. Being raised in a Christian cult, I was not encouraged to pursue these hobbies and wishes, to say the least. After leaving my family alcoholism set in. Ten years was lost to me forever. I discovered snails shortly before turning a major corner in my life. A corner where I left behind pathways I was forced into. A corner where I needed to learn how to slow the fuck down and actually try to enjoy my life as it was.
I started my recovery journey August 22, 2020. I’ve explored countless new ways of being. I’ve come into myself more fully. I’ve explored fetishes, relationship dynamics, friendships, love, lust, and every emotion the human body is capable of. Caring for snails gave me a sense of a tie to the natural world, as their care is best in a bio-active terrarium. Being able to get a better grasp on the nurturing aspect of my personality was a game changer in a lot of ways.
Back to snails as taboo, even Salvador Dali incorporated snails heavily into his work, having a near fetish with them. Turning them into surreal and often grotesque looking animals, Dali was known to be fascinated with their symbolism of destruction and decay, but also softness (the body), and hardness (the shell) and how snails represent transformation. This is shown in his work “The Snail and the Angel”. I certainly have drawn snails in representations of BDSM. Tied up in Shibari. Being tortured with salt. Taking “foot” pictures, too.
There’s a whole monster-fucking niche, as well, dear readers. Take that how you will.
The Snail As Self
As snails leave behind a mucus trail wherever they go, humans leave behind trails too. Trails of emotions, of actions, of words… except much more permanent. I look by and see where my trail was and it’s full of dark times. I retreat into my home, my shell, on those days and mourn the person who had to get me through all of that. See, the alcoholic I was, I let die. I let that person go, and opened myself up to new possibilities.
Encompassing all of the duality, the transformation, the slowness, it’s no wonder I was attracted to these creatures when they showed up in my life. It was something I needed to survive. Lessons learned.
In my snail journey, I have experienced highs and lows. It’s always sad when a pet passes away, and there’s not a lot you can do if snails get sick. Finding the Holy Grail of Snails, the rosy wolf snail, was a definite highlight. Watching them mate and go through a life cycle was thrilling. These things happen. Cycles, remember?
I look up and five years have gone by since a live snail popped out of a shell I thought empty. I know more about life, liberty, and happiness than ever before. With the knowledge and experience I’ve gained over the years, the aim is to slorm into other’s lives with the teachings of the Snail.
What does your trail leave behind?
Jez
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