The environment is one example of this reptile infested mental water. The triumph of monotheism over polytheism has dealt a devastating blow to nature. As the local deities which inhabited the brooks, meadows, fields and mountains were driven out by the missionaries and their abstract notion of God, Nature came to be viewed as spiritually inert. The brooks became drainage ditches, the meadows toxic waste sites, the fields condo developments, and the mountains ski resorts. Today, Eliot's vision of our culture as a "wasteland" heaped with "broken images" is literally true. The broken images are in the local river coated with the effluent of a factory. The earth itself has become the dumping ground of our civilization's otherworldly theology, even as God shat upon the Basel Cathedral in Jung's adolescent fantasy. (40) Transcendent monotheistic religions such as Christianity, having staked an exclusive claim on the serpentine pattern, now gasp and choke in the bad air of their own Damascus. The neglected gods hiss like reptiles, their shrines polluted by our stagnant minds. The compensatory swing back to paganism takes on a compulsive necessity. Like the Ancient Mariner in Coleridge's rime, we must learn to bless these water-snakes once more if we are to be freed from the fiends which peruse us for having shot the Albatross with the crossbow of monotheism.

http://www.geocities.com/Area51/Chamber/7227/serpent.html