Only thing I can come up with that may sort of work, is using something like the object tag, with contentDocument (may need to check support, but Snap isn't really aimed at old browsers anyway).
I think the svg image will have to be local to the file though, so remote calls to images I don't think would work (or maybe with some amended server settings), so I couldn't get it working on a fiddle to show, just with a test url below, so the code would be something like...
in html...
<object id="tux" data="Dreaming_Tux.svg" width="600" height="600" type="image/svg+xml"></object>
then js....
var tux = Snap("#tux");
var tuxContent = tux.node.contentDocument; /// grab the referenced content
var sTux = Snap( tuxContent.firstChild ); /// snapify it
var tuxPaths = sTux.selectAll('path'); /// use snaps selector to grab elements
tuxPaths.forEach( function( el ) { el.attr({ opacity: 0.2 }) });