shankara
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- Joined
- Apr 23, 2018
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- 1,322
I think the Serpent has got a bit of an unfair treatment in the Abrahamic religions, particularly due to the snake story in Genesis. Of course in the Christian interpretation of this story the serpent is evil, staining humanity with the taint of original sin that requires the crucifixion of Yeshua to remedy. Clearly that is a one-sided interpretation of the story, though the only interpretation many people understand. In various Gnostic theologies the story is inverted, the Garden of Eden not being a true paradise, but rather a state of blissful ignorance, innocence without experience, which humanity had to leave in order to undergo the painful yet necessary journey towards consciousness and experiential wisdom. Hence the serpent is not considered "evil" from this perspective, rather as the heroic liberator who accepted the curse of the thundering and blustering demiurge (to "crawl on his belly") in order to free humanity from that state.
Now having read that, perhaps you are thinking that I am some kind of satanist. So much has the serpent become associated with "darkness" that people may even be disturbed by hearing someone speaking in his defense. Yet even Yeshua said:
Now the meaning of the serpent symbol is hopefully becoming clearer to you. In many cultures the serpent was associated with wisdom, and also with healing. Shedding it's skin is an allegory of the process of regeneration, shedding the old to make space for the new, rebirth. Serpents are involved in various creation mythologies. The highest God of the Aztecs "Quetzolcoatl" was the "feathered serpent". Vishnu, Buddha, and other deities are depicted crowned by serpents, likely related to the "Kundalini" serpent, which essentially represents the control of vital energies of the body developed by spiritual practice. The serpent's hiss is also considered related with the element of fire, which of course is the element of the sun - the stories of Christ, Dionysus etc all being stories of the dying-resurrecting Sun God archetype.
The Abrahamic (particularly Christian) fear of the serpent is in fact found reflected in the western culture. In accordance with the explanation given above we can make a distinction, hopefully one which will help us to set ourselves from the shallow dualism of those who consider the serpent to be a symbol of evil (and even more absurdly, imagine the devil as some individual being trying to play tricks on us, rather than as a cosmic archetype representing the necessary challenges and tests involved in human life). Essentially we can say that "God" is a priori knowledge, while the serpent is a posteriori knowledge. Now it is the former which is more "pure" we could say, in the sense that logic conforms to laws and can be generalized, while experiential knowledge always has a subjective element.
In our present society, that is to say the Christian-influenced society of Europe, America etc., we see negative forms of both, one ripening into the other. The church, and later speculative philosophers, developed a form of philosophical scholasticism, a total reliance on the abstract and logical divorced from experience. Their dogmas and theories divorced the western humanity from the simplicity of its own experience, things like the sense of the presence one feels walking through a forest or seeing a snow-covered peak. At the same time they virulently attacked the old gods, the pagan gods, who were archetypes of such a natural experience of spiritual presence.
This eventually caused a reaction, one which we are seeing now. The modern "philosophy" (if it merits such a name), denies logic entirely, creating a wholly relativist world where individual subjective experience is the only thing of importance. Modern science is of course wholly empirical, a posteriori, and it has brought us marvels like the nuclear bomb and a million other instruments of death. It has even reached the point of telling us that our experience is wholly the product of neurochemicals, having lost the (a priori) distinction between the logical categories of consciousness and matter, it tells us that they are the same thing.
If we are able to integrate and understand the serpent archetype, we will find the balance between those two types of insight, logical and experiential. To be like serpents, like the serpent of Genesis, we must have no concern for the curses of any demiurge, no attachment to some particular religious system which comforts us with promises of paradise and scares us with tales of hell. As already mentioned, the serpent is a symbol of healing, and when we rid ourselves of attachments to dogmas, we will find a profound experience of inner peace. The way the story has been told to us is but one partial and biased interpretation of its original meaning.
The serpent, and all the other old gods which have been slain in the march of "progress" by the worshipers of wholly transcendent sky-gods, they are all within us, archetypes which can help and guide us if we allow them the space and understand them clearly. This is not to say that every form of paganism is positive - many are simply reactions against the Christian teaching, and any unconscious reaction to something is bound to be in some way less complete than the thing it is reacting against. But there is a natural spirituality which we have lost, a spirituality which at once is in harmony with nature and the things of this earth, and at the same time open to high philosophy and the recognition of the ultimate One Divinity, whatever name we call that Divinity by. Like the serpent shedding it's skin, this understanding will truly bring us a kind of rebirth, a natural and holistic awakening.
Now having read that, perhaps you are thinking that I am some kind of satanist. So much has the serpent become associated with "darkness" that people may even be disturbed by hearing someone speaking in his defense. Yet even Yeshua said:
"Be ye wise as serpents, and harmless as doves"
Which fits very nicely with the story above - cast out of Eden and onto this earth, we can return to a place of peace and wholeness only by again becoming innocent, but an innocence combined with the experiential wisdom we develop during our sorrowful pilgrimage on this earth.Now the meaning of the serpent symbol is hopefully becoming clearer to you. In many cultures the serpent was associated with wisdom, and also with healing. Shedding it's skin is an allegory of the process of regeneration, shedding the old to make space for the new, rebirth. Serpents are involved in various creation mythologies. The highest God of the Aztecs "Quetzolcoatl" was the "feathered serpent". Vishnu, Buddha, and other deities are depicted crowned by serpents, likely related to the "Kundalini" serpent, which essentially represents the control of vital energies of the body developed by spiritual practice. The serpent's hiss is also considered related with the element of fire, which of course is the element of the sun - the stories of Christ, Dionysus etc all being stories of the dying-resurrecting Sun God archetype.
The Abrahamic (particularly Christian) fear of the serpent is in fact found reflected in the western culture. In accordance with the explanation given above we can make a distinction, hopefully one which will help us to set ourselves from the shallow dualism of those who consider the serpent to be a symbol of evil (and even more absurdly, imagine the devil as some individual being trying to play tricks on us, rather than as a cosmic archetype representing the necessary challenges and tests involved in human life). Essentially we can say that "God" is a priori knowledge, while the serpent is a posteriori knowledge. Now it is the former which is more "pure" we could say, in the sense that logic conforms to laws and can be generalized, while experiential knowledge always has a subjective element.
In our present society, that is to say the Christian-influenced society of Europe, America etc., we see negative forms of both, one ripening into the other. The church, and later speculative philosophers, developed a form of philosophical scholasticism, a total reliance on the abstract and logical divorced from experience. Their dogmas and theories divorced the western humanity from the simplicity of its own experience, things like the sense of the presence one feels walking through a forest or seeing a snow-covered peak. At the same time they virulently attacked the old gods, the pagan gods, who were archetypes of such a natural experience of spiritual presence.
This eventually caused a reaction, one which we are seeing now. The modern "philosophy" (if it merits such a name), denies logic entirely, creating a wholly relativist world where individual subjective experience is the only thing of importance. Modern science is of course wholly empirical, a posteriori, and it has brought us marvels like the nuclear bomb and a million other instruments of death. It has even reached the point of telling us that our experience is wholly the product of neurochemicals, having lost the (a priori) distinction between the logical categories of consciousness and matter, it tells us that they are the same thing.
If we are able to integrate and understand the serpent archetype, we will find the balance between those two types of insight, logical and experiential. To be like serpents, like the serpent of Genesis, we must have no concern for the curses of any demiurge, no attachment to some particular religious system which comforts us with promises of paradise and scares us with tales of hell. As already mentioned, the serpent is a symbol of healing, and when we rid ourselves of attachments to dogmas, we will find a profound experience of inner peace. The way the story has been told to us is but one partial and biased interpretation of its original meaning.
The serpent, and all the other old gods which have been slain in the march of "progress" by the worshipers of wholly transcendent sky-gods, they are all within us, archetypes which can help and guide us if we allow them the space and understand them clearly. This is not to say that every form of paganism is positive - many are simply reactions against the Christian teaching, and any unconscious reaction to something is bound to be in some way less complete than the thing it is reacting against. But there is a natural spirituality which we have lost, a spirituality which at once is in harmony with nature and the things of this earth, and at the same time open to high philosophy and the recognition of the ultimate One Divinity, whatever name we call that Divinity by. Like the serpent shedding it's skin, this understanding will truly bring us a kind of rebirth, a natural and holistic awakening.
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