Insects & others · plate 60 of 60
Snail
Cornu aspersum
Carries its house. Arrives when it arrives.
Only 1.1% of people are Snails. (estimated)
If you're a Snail
You move at one speed and the speed is slow. You carry everything you need and withdraw into it at the first sign of trouble or sunshine. You are home-loving to a degree that is hard to distinguish from being a home. People see you as unambitious. You have simply never been in a hurry, and you have never needed to be.
Garden snails fire a small calcium love dart into each other before mating, coated in a mucus that helps the shooter's sperm survive.
The Snail as a spirit animal
You are patient, self-sufficient and unhurried, carrying your whole life on your back and declining to be rushed by anyone, including yourself. You retreat well and recover slowly. The flaw is that a creature built for retreat finds reasons to retreat, and the door is easy to seal from inside. A garden snail moved a few meters from its hiding place will find its way back. Moved farther, it starts again, without visible regret.
Grounded in how the species actually lives; nothing borrowed from anyone's tradition. Why we put it that way.
How to get along with a Snail
Do
- Give them notice in weeks and expect arrival in months.
- Keep things damp and shaded; sun sends them indoors.
- Let them retreat; the door opens again after rain.
Don't
- Don't pull them off a surface. The grip is the whole animal.
- Don't lift the shell to see if they're home. They are, and they'd like to be left there.
When it goes wrong: A snail in trouble pulls in and seals the door; don't knock, water the ground nearby and wait for evening.
The Snail in a relationship
You take hours over it, and in your case that is not a figure of speech: snail courtship lasts most of a night. You are tender, odd and completely committed for the duration, and then you both go off and lay eggs. Fast romance is not available to you, and you have never missed it.
Field notes
Every animal is placed on six personality traits derived from how the species lives. Your answers are placed on the same six, and the closest animal wins. How the scoring works
- Sociability
- 1
- Boldness
- 0
- Energy
- 0
- Curiosity
- 2
- Devotion
- 0
- Roaming
- 0
- Garden snails are hermaphrodites, each one both male and female, and both partners usually lay eggs afterward.
- A snail can crawl along the edge of a razor without harm, riding on a layer of mucus.
- When it gets too cold or too dry, the snail seals its shell with a dried mucus door and sleeps for months.
Snails in literature
- The Snail — The Snail and the Rosebush, Hans Christian Andersen (1861)
- The Snail — Alice's Adventures in Wonderland (The Lobster Quadrille), Lewis Carroll (1865)
- The Snail — Natural Histories (Histoires naturelles), Jules Renard (1896)
Characters from public-domain works. Company, not a verdict.
Closest personalities
The animals whose profiles sit nearest to the Snail's. If you got Snail, one of these was probably your runner-up.
Other insects & others
Among the 60
Brockhaus and Efron Encyclopedic Dictionary, Brockhaus-Efron (1896). Public domain, viacommons.wikimedia.org.All credits
