The silent din of dozens of snails, crawling alive in the tombs that the Etruscans closed over their dead. The snails have become companions in the afterlife, the link between here below and the hereafter.

This shell exists precisely in a metaphysical in-between, at once a coffin into which the animal contorts and inserts itself, to hibernate for the season or forever, and from which the animal emerges, very much alive, born anew. The snail, when it goes into hibernation, withdraws completely into itself by plugging up its shell, symbolising the need to die, to mourn certain things, the better to be reborn to others, and to continue its progress.

In a greasy earth full of snails,
I want to dig myself a deep grave,
Where I can spread out my old bones
And sleep in oblivion, like a shark in the waves.¹

Our lives are a succession of places, homes and encounters with our fellow human beings, some of whom continue to live with us even when they are no longer with us. Far from being closed in on itself, the life of every individual is open to the world and to others. The snail is a nomad among nomads. Migratory birds may travel, but they eventually make a nest. The propeller never falls in love with the same place, leaves eggs almost anywhere, sleeps where it has stopped for the day. All the same, he allows himself a few months where he no longer really lives, in a state between two worlds, between two temporalities, past and future at the same time. Its future during these rare sedentary periods is divided between what it has experienced before, which makes it what it is, and what it will do once it has emerged from its shell, the only reason it is locked in. So snails live only in movement, and when they stop it’s to die before being reborn.

And the loop unfolds again and again. The starting point of the spiral forming the shell, its centre, is the source; the point of emergence from which everything springs, and which unfolds ad infinitum. The snail is part of the wetland and only emerges from the earth, as the farmers say, after the rain. It is linked to the cycle of the fields, has become the symbol of the fertility given by the dead, the almost necessary ornament of the ancestor who has returned to the land of men to fertilise it, the bearer of all the symbols of the face of heaven and the beneficial storms. So each new loop is the repetition of a cycle, making the helical shape of the snail’s shell a universal glyph of temporality between slowness and renewal.

As such, the snail embodies the lunar theophany and indicates periodic regeneration : the snail, like the moon, appears and disappears; death and rebirth, the theme of eternal return.

Their voluptuousness is not only twice that of our own, but far more lasting. They swoon for three or four whole hours. It’s not much compared to eternity, but it’s a lot compared to. you and me.²

Hermaphroditic snails engage in prolonged, reciprocal lovemaking. Some of them are known for their ‘love arrow’. During mating, this element is aimed at the partner. The ‘love arrow’ becomes the messenger of reproduction. Like a celebration of life, the shells collide in a viscous orgy, like a bewitching ballet, all sublimated by this distinctive, glittering slime, on the way to love. A saliva that accompanies the creation of the next, and shines on our passing skins. The cosmetics industry, eager to control the effects of time, uses snail slime to promise the elixir of youth, as if the snail itself carried eternity. Is it only in cosmetics that the snail gives us eternal rebirth? Following its example, aren’t the things we leave behind – shells or thoughts – births?

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^1. BAUDELAIRE Charles, “Le Mort joyeux”, Les Fleurs du mal, Paris, 1851.

^2.  VOLTAIRE, L’évangile du jour comprising Colimaçons (Les) du Révérend Père l’Escarbotier, 1769.