The End is the most controversial song of The Doors. In 2010, Blender.com ranked The Doors at #37 on its list of The 50 Worst Artists in Music History, describing The End as “overblown screeds of nonsense.” Such a ridiculous assessment shows how far we haven’t come in understanding The Doors. On the other hand, Piero Scaruffi tells us that “The Doors are the closest thing rock music has produced to William Shakespeare.” I don’t have more than 20,000+ CD’s like Scaruffi, but I doubt that any other group has produced the quality and intensity of poetic drama that The Doors did. The End is undoubtedly one of the most important songs in rock and roll, despite the ludicrous pronouncements of critics like Robert Christgau, Lester Bangs, Caryn James, and many others.
A very brief analysis of Morrison’s use of the snake in this song.
Ride the snakeTo the lakeThe ancient lake
The snake is a timeless symbol with many meanings. Let me clear up any misperceptions once and for all: snake does not equal penis in Morrison’s usage. Morrison is of course wholly aware of Freud and others who may reduce the snake to a body part (and I am oversimplifying here), but Morrison uses the snake primarily as a symbol of consciousness. Like the dragon, the snake can be an obstacle to be overcome in the West. It is also the uroboros, a well-known symbol of psychic liberation and freedom.
Snake Images Across Cultures
The familiar image of the snake biting its own tail symbolizes the cyclic nature of the universe: life from death, creation from destruction. Renewal, regeneration, and rebirth are all highly associated with the snake, which sheds its own skin.
In Buddhist mythology, the King Cobra often appears to the left of the Buddha, protecting the Buddha from the elements. In a tale familiar to all Buddhists, Amitābha is a Buddha of immeasurable radiance or infinite light. Upon illumination, a great lake of bliss with lotus flowers appears. Morrison, who tells us to “ride the snake to the lake,” is likely combining the snake of consciousness with the illumination that ends at the lake. There are other stories about snakes and ancient lakes in mythology, so I do not want to tie The End to one specific myth. Suffice it to say that this is song involves very complex imagery, and it took Morrison more than a year to complete.
One aside: the phrase “smooth hissing snakes of rain” appears in The Celebration of the Lizard. Joseph Campbell talked to Bill Moyers about seeing a movie “of a Burmese snake priestess, who had to bring rain to her people by climbing up a mountain path, calling a king cobra from his den, and actually kissing him three times on the nose. There was the cobra, the giver of life, the giver of rain, as a divine positive figure, not a negative one.” Many of us think that the snake is associated only with evil or with the downfall (the Garden of Eden), but its symbolism can be both positive and negative. Morrison uses the snake throughout his work, as it is one of the core symbols in all mythology.
About The End, Morrison once said the following to New York Times reporter Bernard Wolfe: “the theme is the same as in Light My Fire, liberation from the cycle of birth-orgasm-death.”