The Snake is paired with si, the sixth earthly branch, whose double-hour runs from nine to eleven in the morning and whose phase is fire. In Chinese tradition the snake is closely related to the dragon and is sometimes called the little dragon, xiao long, and the connection is old: Nuwa and Fuxi, the primordial creator pair of Chinese myth, are commonly depicted with human upper bodies and intertwined serpent tails. The traits given to the sign, subtlety, insight, self-possession, reserve and a capacity for long patience, follow the animal's silence and stillness rather than any negative reading. The western association of the serpent with temptation and evil, drawn from Genesis, is absent here, and importing it into a reading of the Chinese sign is a straightforward category error.
The pairing of Nuwa and Fuxi with intertwined serpent tails is among the oldest surviving images in Chinese art, attested on silk paintings and stone reliefs from the Han dynasty and earlier, and some scholars read the entwined-tail motif as a visual ancestor of later yin-yang symbolism, the two complementary halves wound around a shared axis, though this is a suggestive visual parallel rather than a documented line of direct influence on the later diagram's formal development.