My snake somtimes attacks the watering can I fill his bowl with, other times doesn't care at all. I asked the Yi what to expect this time, and got 13, People in Harmony. I opened his terrarium and started to pour water into his bowl, didn't get far, he attacked the can real hard.

Come to think of 13's nuclear hexagram, 44, Coupling. The sudden, new impulse entered his terrarium was something he decided to be an enemy after sorting the clans and differentiating between people, I guess. (Image of 13: "Heaven joins with fire. People in harmony. In the same way, the noble one sorts the clans and differentiates between people.")

And how do we know what feels harmonious for snakes...........

Why does my snake somtimes attacks the watering can?
13 unchanging

Hexagram 13 is appropriate for a snake. Based on visual features of the hexagram, stratagem 13 of The Thirty-Six Stratagems refers to a snake in the grass. The lower trigram Li is the head of the snake, and the upper trigram Qian is the grass or body of the snake. Snakes have an instinct to hunt, and perhaps the snake is telling you that it would like a little more action. You could drop crickets or other prey into the terrarium for the snake to pursue.

Maybe 13 is saying there is a human, a snake and an inanimate object. And you the human knows the different between these things, but the snake is not able to distinguish and therefore treats it as if it were something it was not (food/companion).

Also, interesting!... Bradford Hatcher has in his Key Words of 13 - xenophobia.
Had to look that one up on Google:
Xenophobia is defined as "an unreasonable fear or hatred of foreigners or strangers or of that which is foreign or strange."
--I could see that as describing the snake's relationship to the water can.

D.H. Lawrence - Snake

A snake came to my water-trough
On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,
To drink there.
In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree
I came down the steps with my pitcher
And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before
me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom
And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of
the stone trough
And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,
And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,
He sipped with his straight mouth,
Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,
Silently.

Someone was before me at my water-trough,
And I, like a second comer, waiting.

He lifted his head from his drinking, as cattle do,
And looked at me vaguely, as drinking cattle do,
And flickered his two-forked tongue from his lips, and mused a moment,
And stooped and drank a little more,
Being earth-brown, earth-golden from the burning bowels of the earth
On the day of Sicilian July, with Etna smoking.
The voice of my education said to me
He must be killed,
For in Sicily the black, black snakes are innocent, the gold are venomous.

And voices in me said, If you were a man
You would take a stick and break him now, and finish him off.

But must I confess how I liked him,
How glad I was he had come like a guest in quiet, to drink at my water-trough
And depart peaceful, pacified, and thankless,
Into the burning bowels of this earth?

Was it cowardice, that I dared not kill him? Was it perversity, that I longed to talk to him? Was it humility, to feel so honoured?
I felt so honoured.

And yet those voices:
If you were not afraid, you would kill him!

And truly I was afraid, I was most afraid, But even so, honoured still more
That he should seek my hospitality
From out the dark door of the secret earth.

He drank enough
And lifted his head, dreamily, as one who has drunken,
And flickered his tongue like a forked night on the air, so black,
Seeming to lick his lips,
And looked around like a god, unseeing, into the air,
And slowly turned his head,
And slowly, very slowly, as if thrice adream,
Proceeded to draw his slow length curving round
And climb again the broken bank of my wall-face.

And as he put his head into that dreadful hole,
And as he slowly drew up, snake-easing his shoulders, and entered farther,
A sort of horror, a sort of protest against his withdrawing into that horrid black hole,
Deliberately going into the blackness, and slowly drawing himself after,
Overcame me now his back was turned.

I looked round, I put down my pitcher,
I picked up a clumsy log
And threw it at the water-trough with a clatter.

I think it did not hit him,
But suddenly that part of him that was left behind convulsed in undignified haste.
Writhed like lightning, and was gone
Into the black hole, the earth-lipped fissure in the wall-front,
At which, in the intense still noon, I stared with fascination.

And immediately I regretted it.
I thought how paltry, how vulgar, what a mean act!
I despised myself and the voices of my accursed human education.

And I thought of the albatross
And I wished he would come back, my snake.

For he seemed to me again like a king,
Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,
Now due to be crowned again.

And so, I missed my chance with one of the lords
Of life.
And I have something to expiate:
A pettiness.

Taormina, 1923

http://www.poetryconnection.net/poets/D.H._Lawrence/834

@goddesliss - Yup.

@answeredquestions - You named the very thing I have learnt about hex 13 with this reading!

@pocossin - My English is too weak to be able to really follow that poem but I do very much understand two things it is telling about. First, the feeling when some wild animal accepts your hostility, peaceful, pacified, and thankless, and you do feel you are honoured because a lord of life is letting you share his company. Two, the sudden horror of the little thing lives in the back of our brain. Thank you for sharing! Anyways, my snake had two mice a few days ago, a well fed lord.

icegrapefruit said:

@answeredquestions - You named the very thing I have learnt about hex 13 with this reading!

Click to expand...

I just learned it as well because of this thread! so thank you!