Year of the Wood Snake: Astrological Lessons & Themes for 2025

It’s easy to invest in a lot of hope in the year of the dragon which happened just last year. The dragon symbolizes our own internal desires to soar to new heights. It represents ascension, charisma, achievement, reverence. But then, just as quickly as Dragon year arrived, it ended. And life may not have unfolded as we may have imagined.

Maybe we set our sights high, maybe we saw the higher vision of where we wanted to go, the potential of what, who we want to become during dragon year. We got glimpses. Flashes of insight. But couldn’t yet step fully into it. Last year, many of us could have realized the gap in where we currently are and where we want to be, was too wide.

Fast forward to today, we are officially in the year of the wood snake. Unlike the dragon, the snake doesn’t get as much as a warm reception. On an almost primal level, I think we distrust the snake. In Christianity, religious text depicted snakes as hubristic temptation, sin, and even a representation of Lilith. Humans also have an instinctive, genetic predisposition to fear snakes naturally due to evolution of us knowing we were python’s prey.

Even in Chinese culture, the year of the snake has negative connotations which is why many people choose to get married or have children the year before (dragon), or the year after (year of the horse). I’ll personally admit - due to pressures from my own family’s culture and wanting to tie the knot before the election chaos & results, part of the reason we got married last year was to also ride the wave of the dragon.

So I feel like a bit of a hypocrite right now. 🤷🏻‍♀️ Hindsight is 2020 though. While I don’t regret when and how my wedding happened, would it have been so bad or different if we got married in 2025? I really don’t think so.

Aside from this, I think we’ve misunderstood the snake all along…

If we go deep into the stories of Chinese mythology, the snake is actually a dragon in waiting. A "little dragon," as it’s sometimes called.

The renowned modern scholar Wen Yiduo (闻一多) proposed that the primary prototype of the dragon is the snake in his groundbreaking study on ancient Chinese mythology, Research on Fuxi (《伏羲考》), in 1942.

It is said that after 500 years, a snake can transform into a jiao, a lesser dragon. After 1,000 years, it becomes a full-fledged dragon. After another 500 years, it grows horns. And after another 1,000 years, it gains wings, ascending into divinity.

I love this connection between the snake and the dragon. And I want us to go into year 2025 not feeling like we missed out on any opportunities from last year. Maybe last year was never meant to be the moment of arrival…maybe it was simply the introduction to the version of you that you’re now being called to step into.

If the Dragon year confronted us with possibility and showed us who we could be… then the Snake year asks us:

Are you willing to do the work to become it?

This year is the shedding, the releasing, the unlearning. The shedding Snake doesn’t carry dead weight which are the old stories, outdated beliefs, identities that no longer fit. It leaves behind everything it cannot take into its next evolution.

The north node that entered into the sign of Pisces on January 11th of this year aligns with this very notion of letting go and surrendering. In fact, I see the archetypal qualities of the snake being in beautiful alignment with bot