In The Frog Prince, a beautiful princess drops her golden ball into a deep...

In The Frog Prince, a beautiful princess drops her golden ball into a deep spring and must allow a frog into her bedroom to get it back, maturing thereby into a woman. Fairy tales and myth often place an odd creature on the path of the hero to signal an opportunity exists: turn right for good or left for evil. Of all the harbingers of change in fairy tales and myth-disfigured dwarfs, shriveled witches, even Yoda-it is reptiles {and amphibians} that are considered ugly enough without embellishment to awaken the part of the brain that listens to fairy tales. In real life, it is possible that reptiles have the power to switch off a person's thinking brain and switch on the subconscious, opening the door to a person's most deeply suppressed passions. Perhaps this is what makes reptiles so terrifying.
Coiled at the center of the Oxford English Dictionary's definition of the word fascinate is this: "of a serpent." Evolved from lizards, deliverers of venom-snakes are the villains of the animal kingdom. And yet, throughout history, snakes have been recognized for their power to bewitch man, to deprive him of resistance, to draw him near.