Serpent Symbol Quotes

Life lives on life. This is the sense of the symbol of the Ouroboros, the serpent biting its tail. Everything that lives lives on the death of something else. Your own body will be food for something else. Anyone who denies this, anyone who holds back, is out of order. Death is an act of giving.

The auric body of a snake is one of the most remarkable sights that the clairvoyant will ever see, and the secrets concealed within its aura demonstrate why the serpent is the symbol of wisdom among so many nations.

See how the symbols stretch across all three shields? They represent a god." Hypnos frowned. "There's a God of lions and knives and wineglasses? That seems incredibly specific." "This god is Shezmu," said Enrique, rolling his eyes. "He's seldom depicted, perhaps because he's at such odds with himself. On the other hand, he's the lord of perfumes and gracious oils, often considered something of a celebration deity." "My kind of god," said Hypnos. "He is also the god of slaughter, blood and dismemberment." "I amend my original statement," said Hypnos.

I sit here before my computer, Amiguita, my altar on top of the monitor with the Virgen de Coatlalopeuh candle and copal incense burning. My companion, a wooden serpent staff with feathers, is to my right while I ponder the ways metaphor and symbol concretize the spirit and etherealize the body. The Writing is my whole life, it is my obsession. This vampire which is my talent does not suffer other suitors. Daily I court it, offer my neck to its teeth. This is the sacrifice that the act of creation requires, a blood sacrifice. For only through the body, through the pulling of flesh, can the human soul be transformed. And for images, words, stories to have this transformative power, they must arise from the human body--flesh and bone--and from the Earth's body--stone, sky, liquid, soil. This work, these images, piercing tongue or ear lobes with cactus needle, are my offerings, are my Aztecan blood sacrifices.

The spirit of evil is fear, negation, the adversary who opposes life in its struggle for eternal duration and thwarts every great deed, who infuses into the body the poison of weakness and age through the treacherous bite of the serpent; he is the spirit of regression, who threatens us with bondage to the mother and with dissolution and extinction in the unconscious. (Cf. fig. 35 and pl. LXII.) For the hero, fear is a challenge and a task, because only boldness can deliver from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated, and the whole future is condemned to hopeless staleness, to a drab grey lit only by will-o’-the-wisps.

However, as a guarantee of its renewed youth, the symbolical phoenix never reappeared before the eyes of the world without having consumed solemnly the remains and evidences of its previous life. So also Moses saw to it that all those who had known Egypt and her mysteries should end their life in the desert; at Ephesus St Paul burnt all books which treated of the occult sciences; and in fine, the French Revolution, daughter of the great Johannite Orient and the ashes of the Templars, spoliated the churches and blasphemed the allegories of the Divine Cultus. But all doctrines and all revivals proscribe Magic and condemn its mysteries to the flames and to oblivion. The reason is that each religion or philosophy which comes into the world is a Benjamin of humanity and insures its own life by destroying its mother. It is because the symbolical serpent turns ever devouring its own tail; it is because, as essential condition of existence, a void is necessary to every plenitude, space for every dimension, an affirmation for each negation: herein is the eternal realization of the phoenix allegory.

If I were the Devil . . . I mean, if I were the Prince of Darkness, I would of course, want to engulf the whole earth in darkness. I would have a third of its real estate and four-fifths of its population, but I would not be happy until I had seized the ripest apple on the tree, so I should set about however necessary to take over the United States. I would begin with a campaign of whispers. With the wisdom of a serpent, I would whisper to you as I whispered to Eve: “Do as you please.” “Do as you please.” To the young, I would whisper, “The Bible is a myth.” I would convince them that man created God instead of the other way around. I would confide that what is bad is good, and what is good is “square”. In the ears of the young marrieds, I would whisper that work is debasing, that cocktail parties are good for you. I would caution them not to be extreme in religion, in patriotism, in moral conduct. And the old, I would teach to pray. I would teach them to say after me: “Our Father, which art in Washington” . . . If I were the devil, I’d educate authors in how to make lurid literature exciting so that anything else would appear dull an uninteresting. I’d threaten T.V. with dirtier movies and vice versa. And then, if I were the devil, I’d get organized. I’d infiltrate unions and urge more loafing and less work, because idle hands usually work for me. I’d peddle narcotics to whom I could. I’d sell alcohol to ladies and gentlemen of distinction. And I’d tranquilize the rest with pills. If I were the devil, I would encourage schools to refine yound intellects but neglect to discipline emotions . . . let those run wild. I would designate an athiest to front for me before the highest courts in the land and I would get preachers to say “she’s right.” With flattery and promises of power, I could get the courts to rule what I construe as against God and in favor of pornography, and thus, I would evict God from the courthouse, and then from the school house, and then from the houses of Congress and then, in His own churches I would substitute psychology for religion, and I would deify science because that way men would become smart enough to create super weapons but not wise enough to control them. If I were Satan, I’d make the symbol of Easter an egg, and the symbol of Christmas, a bottle. If I were the devil, I would take from those who have and I would give to those who wanted, until I had killed the incentive of the ambitious. And then, my police state would force everybody back to work. Then, I could separate families, putting children in uniform, women in coal mines, and objectors in slave camps. In other words, if I were Satan, I’d just keep on doing what he’s doing. (Speech was broadcast by ABC Radio commentator Paul Harvey on April 3, 1965)

John sees Jesus symbolically as the serpent lifted up on his cross, drawing the venom out of human life, restoring wholeness. It is a powerful image. John

What is more of a symbol of eternal growth and change than the Goddess? The eternal spiral of creation. Coiled like a serpent, our Shakti energy sits, waiting to be awakened within all of us.

Since time immemorial, the serpent has symbolized organic vitality. Serpents move in curves and so does energy. The serpent developed from the Light created on the first cosmic day. In the firmament it manifests as the life-breath that animates souls. In the physical universe it manifests electro-magnetism, the light in substance so to speak.

The most common form of sacred space to the witch is the magick circle. The circle is a symbol of the infinite and finite. It is everything and nothing. It is the Ouroboros, the serpent eating its own tail, symbolic of the never-ending cycle of creation and destruction, birth and death, and a symbol of the cosmos without beginning or end.

the lined face are pitiless reminders that whether or not we expose ourselves to the destructive forces of life, the poison of the stealthily creeping serpent of time consumes our bodies nonetheless.

The archetypal image of the redeemer serpent is certainly placed here in opposition to the serpents of evil that battle with it. But why do they both have the same form if there is only oppositIOn between them? What does it mean that they both dwell in the same place, the depth of the great abyss? Are they not possibly two aspects of the same thing? We know this image of the redeemer serpent not only from Gnosis and from the Sabbataian myth, but we know of the same serpent rising from below, redeeming and to be redeemed, as the Kundalini serpent in India, and finally from alchemy as the serpens Mercurii, the ambiguous serpent whose significance was first made clear to us by Jung's researches. Since Jung's work on alchemy we know two things. The first is that in its "magnum opus" alchemy dealt with a redemption of matter itself. The second is that pari passu with this redemption of matter, a redemption of the individual psyche was not only unconsciously carried out but was also consciously intended. As we know, the serpent is a primeval symbol of the Spirit, as primeval and ambiguous as the Spirit itself. The emergence of the Earth archetype of the Great Mother brings with it the emergence of her companion, the Great Serpent. And, strangely enough, it seems as though modern man is confronted with a curious task, a task which is essentially connected with what mankind, rightly or wrongly, has feared most, namely the Devil.

The spirit of evil is fear, negation, the adversary who opposes life in its struggle for eternal duration and thwarts every great deed, who infuses into the body the poison of weakness and age through the treacherous bite of the serpent; he is the spirit of regression, who threatens us with bondage to the mother and with dissolution and extinction in the unconscious. For the hero, fear is a challenge and a task, because only boldness can deliver from fear. And if the risk is not taken, the meaning of life is somehow violated.

The power of life causes the snake to shed its skin, just as the moon sheds its shadow. The serpent sheds its skin to be born again, as the moon its shadow to be born again. They are equivalent symbols. Sometimes the serpent is represented as a circle eating its own tail. That’s an image of life. Life sheds one generation after another, to be born again. The serpent represents immortal energy and consciousness engaged in the field of time, constantly throwing off death and being born again. There is something tremendously terrifying about life when you look at it that way. And so the serpent carries in itself the sense of both the fascination and the terror of life.

Kundalini power, the symbol of raising the energy coiled at the base of the spine upward through the chakras, is called by Sri Chinmoy, 'the power of the Supreme Goddess.' Repressed or coiled in a circle, she can be poisonous both to the body and the psyche, but once risen and standing upright, she is beneficent. The power of the serpent, rightly understood, is one of the ways the Goddess overcomes duality.

Order and chaos are the yang and yin of the famous Taoist symbol: two serpents, head to tail.*1 Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart. The black dot in the white—and the white in the black—indicate the possibility of transformation: just when things seem secure, the unknown can loom, unexpectedly and large. Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos.

Central to all these interlinked themes was that curious irrational, phi, the Golden Section. Schwaller de Lubicz believed that if ancient Egypt possessed knowledge of ultimate causes, that knowledge would be written into their temples not in explicit texts but in harmony, proportion, myth and symbol.

The universal hero myth always refers to a powerful man or god-man who vanquishes evil in the form of drag- ons, serpents, monsters, demons, and so on, and who liberates his people from destruction and death. The narration or ritual repetition of sacred texts and ceremonies, and the worship of such a figure with dances, music, hymns, prayers, and sacrifices, grip the audience with numinous emotions and exalt the individual to an identification with the hero.

Our marriage began with knots and fangs; vows inked on skin. Black venom stained our fingers, twinned snakes strangling the marriage vein in Celtic macramé – cocksure monogamy. We became one, me and the gun, the serpent reeling itself from the needle. I had few firsts left; marriage a wild west for the hedonist. Snakes unspooled like figure-eights, symbols of eternity. Acrimony, alimony; Leave the moaning to adults. We children will be wiser wed, inoculated – these hickeys, homeopathy.

What is more transformative than the female form? What is more of a symbol of eternal growth and change than the Goddess? The eternal spiral of cre- ation. Coiled like a serpent, our shakti energy sits, waiting to be awakened within all of us. What our bodies and beings were built for. What we were created to do. Change. Create. Create the change.

The invention of printing is the greatest event in history. It is the mother of revolution. It is the mode of expression of humanity which is totally renewed; it is human thought stripping off one form and donning another; it is the complete and definitive change of skin of that symbolical serpent which since the days of Adam has represented intelligence.

It was amusing to look at that colorful case so symbolic of an entire nation. Haiti, it is said, is the place to discover how much can be done with little.

The image of the Serpent, because of its association with life, rejuvenation, fertility, and regeneration, was a symbol of immortality. The coiled Serpent with its tail in its mouth was a circle of infinitude indicating omnipotence and omniscience. The Serpent, depicted in several successive rings, represented cyclical evolution and reincarnation. In ancient philosophy or mythological systems, creation and wisdom were closely bound together, and the Serpent was a potent symbol of both. It is in this capacity that the Serpent appears in the Babylonian and Sumerian mythologies, which contain elements akin to the Genesis story. The Serpent has the power to bestow immortality but also has the power to cheat humankind. In many of the ancient Near Eastern stories—for instance, the Gilgamesh Epic and myth of Adapa—the Serpent holds out the promise of immortality but then cheats man at the last minute.

Amid the ruins José spoke passionately about the Incas and their beliefs. He told us they had symbols for time: the serpent for the past, the puma for the present, the condor for the future. On

Serpens. The symbol for medicine, for healing. Nessie, Mother of the Serpents, has always understood how to keep the balance. Why does she remain by my side when all I can think about is tipping the scale for purposes of revenge?

In the Caduceus, the two serpents are called Ob and Od. As they twine around each other, they create the magickal wand of Double Power. The Unification of the Ob and Od is picture by the globe that crowns the Caduceus. The globe which climaxes the Caduceus symbolizes the Nur Muhammadi, or Light of Mohammed, the Aur (Light) in Hebrew, which is the result of the state of equilibrium existing between the two serpent forces. This Light is the SUPREME ESSENCE. Wilhelm Reich called this serpent energy the Orgone. It has also been referred to as: Ki, Kundalini, Mana, Prana, Vril, Animal Magnetism, the Odic Force, the Astral Light, the Élan Vital, the Libido, the Atmospheric 'I' and Ether.

Quetzalcoatl, the Feathered Serpent, [...] came to teach [the ancient inhabitants of Mexico] the benefits of settled agriculture and the skills necessary to build temples. Although this deity is frequently depicted as a serpent, he is more often shown in human form--the serpent being his symbol and his alter ego--and is usually described as "a tall bearded white man" ... "a mysterious person ... a white man with a strong formation of body, broad forehead, large eyes and a flowing beard." Indeed, [...] the attributes and life history of Quetzalcoatl are so human that it is not improbable that he may have been an actual historical character ... the memory of whose benefactions lingered after his death, and whose personality was eventually deified. The same could very well be said of Oannes--and just like Oannes at the head of the Apkallu (likewise depicted as prominently bearded) it seems that Quetzalcoatl traveled with his own brotherhood of sages and magicians. We learn that they arrived in Mexico "from across the sea in a boat that moved by itself without paddles," and that Quetzalcoatl was regarded as having been "the founder of cities, the framer of laws and the teacher of the calendar.

[The Christian story] amounts to a refusal to affirm life. In the biblical tradition we have inherited, life is corrupt, and every natural impulse is sinful unless it has been circumcised or baptized. The serpent was the one who brought sin into the wold. And the woman was the one who handed the apple to man. This identification of the woman with sin, of the serpent with sin, and thus of life with sin, is the twist the has been given to the whole story in the biblical myth and doctrine of the Fall.... I don't know of it [the idea of woman as sinner...in other mythologies] elsewhere. The closest thing to it would be perhaps Pandora with Pandora's box, but that's not sin, that's just trouble. The idea in the biblical tradition of the all is that nature as we know it is corrupt, sex in itself is corrupt, and the female as the epitome of sex is a corrupter. Why was the knowledge of good and evil forbidden to Adam and Eve? Without that knowledge, we'd all be a bunch of babies still Eden, without any participation in life. Woman brings life into the world. Eve is the mother o this temporal wold. Formerly you had a dreamtime paradise there in the Garden of Eden – no time, no birth, no death – no life. The serpent, who dies and is resurrected, shedding its skin and renewing its life, is the lord of the central tree, where time and eternity come together. He is the primary god, actually, in the Garden of Eden. Yahweh, the one who walks there in the cool of the evening, is just a visitor. The Garden is the serpent's place. It is an old, old story. We have Sumerian seals from as early as 3500 B.C. showing the serpent and the tree and the goddess, with the goddess giving the fruit of life to a visiting male. The old mythology of he goddess is right there.... There is actually a historical explanation [of the change of this image of the serpent and the snake in Genesis] based on the coming of the Hebrews into Canaan. The principal divinity of the people of Canaan was the Goddess and associated with the Goddess is the serpent. This is the symbol of the mystery of life. The male-god-oriented groups rejected it. In other words, there is a historical rejection of the Mother Goddess implied in the story of the Garden of Eden. Moyers: It does seem that this story has done women a great disservice by casting Eve as responsible for the Fall. Why...? Campbell: They represent life. Man doesn't enter life except by woman, and so it is woman who brings us into this wold of pairs of opposites and suffering.... Male and female is one opposition. Another opposition is the human and God. Good and evil is a third opposition. The primary oppositions are the sexual and that between human beings and God. Then comes the idea of good and evil in the world. And so Adm and Eve have thrown themselves out of the Garden of Timeless Unity, you might say, just by that act of recognizing duality. To move out into the world, you have to act in terms of pairs of opposites.

At the same time the act of sacrifice is a fertilization of the mother: the chthonic serpent-demon drinks the blood, i.e., the soul, of the hero. In this way life becomes immortal, for, like the sun, the hero regenerates himself by his self-sacrifice and re-entry into the mother.

But, as once Gilgamesh, bringing back the magic herb from the Western Land (cf. pl. XIX), was robbed of his treasure by the demon-serpent, so Hölderlin’s poem dies away in a painful lament, which tells us that his descent to the shadows will be followed by no resurrection in this world:

Snakes can have dozens of young at a time, and so they are often symbols of fertility. They resemble vegetation, especially roots, in their form and often in the green and brown of their skins. The undulating form of a snake also suggests a river. A point of muscular tension passes through the body of a snake and drives the animal forward, like a moment moving along a continuum of days and years. Like time itself, a snake seems to progress while remaining still. In addition, the body of a snake also resembles those marks with a stylus, brush, or pen that make up our letters. Ornamental alphabets of the ancient Celts and others were often made up of intertwined serpents. It could even be that the tracks of a snake in sand helped to inspire the invention of the alphabet. The manner in which snakes curl up in a ball has made people associate them with the sun.

When we see this worldwide occurrence of the Goddess and her Serpent, and then recall the ancient African Black Goddess, the Black Witch, imaged with the snake in her belly—we can see the profound power as well as universality of this cosmological symbol, its range of endurance in the human mind. And we begin to see why the upstart patriarchal religions based themselves on the utter destruction of the goddess/serpent, pictured by the Babylonians as “primeval chaos”—an image picked up later by the Hebrews and used in the biblical Genesis, where Eve linked with her serpent become the symbols of ontological evil.

Allegorical stories of saints battling with giants, monsters and demons may be interpreted as symbolizing the Christian's fight against paganism. At Bwlch Rhiwfelen (Denbigh) St Collen fought and killed a cannibal giantess, afterwards washing away the blood-stains in a well later known as Ffynnon Gollen. In Ireland, the tales of saints slaying giant serpents may have the same meaning; alternatively they (or some of them) may refer to early sightings of genuine water monsters. St Barry banished a serpent from a mountain into Lough Lagan (Roscommon), and a holy well sprang up where the saint's knee touched the ground.

By studying ancient symbols, Bruce had discovered that genetic tampering was commonplace throughout the ages, indicated by the frequent display of the rod of Asclepius, a winged staff with double-helix serpents created by ancient cultures who worshiped serpents and the demigods that tampered with human genetics.

As Claude Frollo had passed through nearly the entire circle of human learning—positive, exterior, and permissible—since his youth, he was obliged, unless he came to a halt, ubi defuit orbis, to proceed further and seek other aliments for the insatiable activity of his intelligence. The antique symbol of the serpent biting its tail is, above all, applicable to science.

If Thecla had symbolized love of which I felt myself undeserving, as I know now that she did, then did her symbolic force disappear when I locked the door of her cell behind me? That would be like saying that the writing of this book, over which I have labored for so many watches, will vanish in a blur of vermillion when I close it for the last time and dispatch it to the eternal library maintained by the old Ultan. The great question then, that I pondered as I watched the floating island with longing eyes and chafed at my bonds and cursed the hetman in my heart, is that of determining what these symbols mean in and of themselves. We are like children who look at print and see a serpent in the last letter but one, and a sword in the last.

THE INFERNAL NAMES Abaddon - (Hebrew) the destroyer ... Asmodeus - Hebrew devil of sensuality and luxury, originally "creature of judgement" ... Azazel - (Hebrew) taught men to make weapons of war, introduced cosmetics ... Bast - Egyptian goddess of pleasure represented by the cat Beelzebub - (Hebrew) Lord of the Flies, taken from symbolism of the scarab Behemoth - Hebrew personification of Satan in the form of an elephant ... Coyote - American Indian Devil Dagon - Philistine avenging devil of the sea ... Dracula - Romanian name for devil ... Fenriz - Son of Loki, depicted as a wolf ... Hecate - Greek goddess of underworld and witchcraft ... Kali - (Hindu) daughter of Shiva, high priestess of Thuggees ... Lilith - Hebrew female devil, Adam's first wife who taught him the ropes Loki - Teutonic devil ... Mania - Etruscan goddess of Hell ... Midgard - son of Loki, depicted as a serpent ... Pluto - Greek god of the underworld Proserpine - Greek queen of the underworld ... Sammael - (Hebrew) "venom of God" ... Shiva - (Hindu) the destroyer ...

The libido that is withdrawn so unwillingly from the “mother” turns into a threatening serpent, symbolizing the fear of death—for the relation to the mother must cease, must die, and this is almost the same as dying oneself. That is to say, the violence of the separation is proportionate to the strength of the bond uniting the son with the mother, and the stronger this broken bond was in the first place, the more dangerously does the “mother” approach him in the guise of the unconscious. This is indeed the Mater saeva cupidinum, ‘savage mother of desire,’ who in another form now threatens to devour the erstwhile fugitive.

Adelia began to get cross. Why was it women who were to blame for everything—everything, from the Fall of Man to these blasted hedges? “We are not in a labyrinth, my lord,” she said clearly. “Where are we, then?” “It’s a maze.” “Same difference.” Puffing at the horse: “Get back, you great cow.” “No, it isn’t. A labyrinth has only one path and you merely have to follow it. It’s a symbol of life or, rather, of life and death. Labyrinths twist and turn, but they have a beginning and an end, through darkness into light.” Softening, and hoping that he would, too, she added, “Like Ariadne’s. Rather beautiful, really.” “I don’t want mythology, mistress, beautiful or not, I want to get to that sodding tower. What’s a maze when it’s at home?” “It’s a trick. A trick to confuse. To amaze.” “And I suppose Mistress Clever-boots knows how to get us out?” “I do, actually.” God’s rib, he was sneering at her, sneering. She’d a mind to stay where she was and let him sweat. “Then in the name of Christ, do it.” “Stop bellowing at me,” she yelled at him. “You’re bellowing.” She saw his teeth grit in the pretense of a placatory smile; he always had good teeth. Still did. Between them, he said, “The Bishop of Saint Albans presents his compliments to Mistress Adelia and please to escort him out of this hag’s hole, for the love of God. How will you do it?” “My business.” Be damned if she’d tell him. Women were defenseless enough without revealing their secrets. “I’ll have to take the lead.” She stumped along in front, holding Walt’s mount’s reins in her right hand. In the other was her riding crop, which she trailed with apparent casualness so that it brushed against the hedge on her left. As she went, she chuntered to herself. Lord, how disregarded I am in this damned country. How disregarded all women are. ... Ironically, the lower down the social scale women were, the greater freedom they had; the wives of laborers and craftsmen could work alongside their men—even, sometimes, when they were widowed, take over their husband’s trade. Adelia trudged on. Hag’s hole. Grendel’s mother’s entrails. Why was this dreadful place feminine to the men lost in it? Because it was tunneled? Womb-like? Is this woman’s magic? The great womb? Is that why the Church hates me, hates all women? Because we are the source of all true power? Of life? She supposed that by leading them out of it, she was only confirming that a woman knew its secrets and they did not. Great God, she thought, it isn't a question of hatred. It’s fear. They are frightened of us. And Adelia laughed quietly, sending a suggestion of sound reverberating backward along the tunnel, as if a small pebble was skipping on water, making each man start when it passed him. “What in hell was that?” Walt called back stolidly, “Reckon someone’s laughing at us, master.” “Dear God.

Furthermore, the serpent represents the primary function of life, mainly eating. Life consists in eating other creatures. You don’t think about that very much when you make a nice-looking meal. But what you’re doing is eating something that was recently alive. And when you look at the beauty of nature, and you see the birds picking around—they’re eating things. You see the cows grazing, they’re eating things. The serpent is a traveling alimentary canal, that’s about all it is. And it gives you that primary sense of shock, of life in its most primal quality. There is no arguing with that animal at all. Life lives by killing and eating itself, casting off death and being reborn, like the moon. This is one of the mysteries that these symbolic, paradoxical forms try to represent.

Once the purging has taken place, the woman often dreams of a black goddess who becomes her bridge between spirit and body. As one aspect of Sophia, such an image can open her to the mystery of life being enacted in her own body. Her "mysterious and exotic darkness" inspires a particular depth of wonderment and love. For a woman without a positive mother, this "dark" side of the Virgin can bring freedom, the security of freedom, because she is a natural home for the rejected child. The child born from the rejected side of the mother can bring her own rebel to rest in the outcast state of Mary. In loving the abandoned child within herself, a woman becomes pregnant with herself. The child her mother did not nourish, she will now nourish, not as the pure white biblical Virgin who knew no Joseph, but as the dark Montserrat Virgin who presides over "marriage and sex, pregnancy and childbirth." The Black Madonna is nature impregnated by spirit, accepting the human body as the chalice of the spirit. She is the redemption of matter, the intersection of sexuality and spirituality. Connecting to this archetypal image may result in dreams of a huge serpent, mysterious, cold­blooded, inaccessible to human feeling. Seen as an appendage of the negative mother, it is the phallus stolen from the father and used to guard inviolate purity. Yet this same snake, when seen in relation to the moon, symbolizes the dark, impersonal side of femininity and at the same time its capacity to renew itself. The daughter who can come out from under the skin of the negative mother will not perpetuate her but redeem her. The Black Madonna is the patron saint of abandoned daughters who rejoice in their outcast state and can use it to renew the world.

Considering the hatred the Hebrews felt towards the asherim, a major symbol of the female religion, it would not be too surprising if the symbolism of the tree of forbidden fruit, said to offer the knowledge of good and evil, yet clearly represented in the myth as the provider of sexual consciousness, was included in the creation story to warn that eating the fruit of this tree has caused the downfall of all humanity. Eating of the tree of the Goddess, which stood by each alter, was as dangerously "pagan" as were Her sexual customs and Her oracular serpents. So into the myth of how the world began, the story that the Levites oferred as the explanation of the creation of all existence, they place the advisory serpent and the woman who accepted its counsel, eating of the tree that gave her the understanding of what "only the gods knew" - the secret of sex - how to create life.

Visual images of the Goddesses stand in stark contrast to the image of God as an old white man, jarring us to question our culture's view that all legitimate power is male and that female power is dangerous and evil. The image of the naked Eve brazenly taking the apple from the serpent, then cowering in shame before a wrathful male God, tells us not only that female will is the source of all the evil in the universe, but also that the naked female body is part of the problem. This image communicates to the deep mind the message that female will and female nakedness must be controlled and punished by male authority. In contrast, the Goddesses show us that the female can be symbolic of all that is creative and powerful in the universe. The simplest and most profound meaning of the image of the Goddess is the legitimacy and goodness of female power, the female body, and female will.

This magnetic process revolutionizes the ego-oriented psyche by setting up, in contradistinction to the ego, another goal or centre which is characterized by all manner of names and symbols: fish, serpent, centre of the sea-hawk,14 point, monad, cross, paradise, and so on. The myth of the ignorant demiurge who imagined he was the highest divinity illustrates the perplexity of the ego when it can no longer hide from itself the knowledge that it has been dethroned by a supraordinate authority. The “thousand names” of the lapis philosophorum correspond to the innumerable Gnostic designations for the Anthropos, which make it quite obvious what is meant: the greater, more comprehensive Man, that indescribable whole consisting of the sum of conscious and unconscious processes. This objective whole, the antithesis of the subjective ego-psyche, is what I have called the self, and this corresponds exactly to the idea of the Anthropos.

The symmetrical complement of the serpent, then, is the stone as representative of the earth. Here we enter a later developmental stage of the symbolism, the alchemical stage, whose central idea is the lapis. Just as the serpent forms the lower opposite of man, so the lapis complements the serpent. It corresponds, on the other hand, to man, for it is not only represented in human form but even has “body, soul, and spirit,” is an homunculus and, as the texts show, a symbol of the self. It is, however, not a human ego but a collective entity, a collective soul, like the Indian hiranyagarbha, ‘golden seed.’ The stone is the “father-mother” of the metals, an hermaphrodite. Though it is an ultimate unity, it is not an elementary but a composite unity that has evolved. For the stone we could substitute all those “thousand names” which the alchemists devised for their central symbol, but nothing different or more fitting would have been said.

A long story had been carved down the street, filled with figures engaged in combat. Eight people, four men and four women, gathered around a glowing crystal that threw off rays of light. Another eight figures, the same figures, followed, but each one was holding a symbol: a skull, a coin, a sword, cloth, an orb, a wheel, a stream, a leaf, and a star. I stepped farther down the street and traced out more patterns: the eight figures fighting monsters with the heads of bulls or hands like talons, creatures with serpent tails instead of legs and tentacles instead of arms. Then another scene, where just one of the eight, the one with the star symbol, left the battle escorted by a ninth person. Another ring of eight people followed, each one carrying a crystal, this time with the star-symbol man at their center. The ninth man was there too, only he held a sword. The next image showed the ninth man plunging that sword through the man with the star symbol.

Nine is the number of the feast without limits, where all that’s possible waxes probable and whatever may be, might be. Nine is the symbol seized in sleep and seeded into forever, freed by dreams and fervent screams of what should be. Nine kindles the imagination unbound by reason, risen to conceive without surcease or subjection to objective truth. Nine quickens the flesh to breach the formulas of fell, fallacious form and reach beyond the lines that bind and blind. Nine hails ambition unbowed by reality, driven to roam and remake the world without submission to sense or tangibility. Nine heralds the Angel Ascendant and the Architect Infernal alike, a phoenix and a many-headed serpent entwined. Nine is the beginning in the end, coiled and convoluted to create and devour until the difference is none. Nine marks the most wondrous and treacherous of paths, and thus the only one worth walking, for enlightenment lies in waking. Nine is nought but itself and one and all.

Women’s anger, publicly and loudly expressed, is all of that: unnatural, chaotic, upsetting to how power is supposed to work. Women’s determination to voice that fury toward men in 2017 and 2018 had led those men to feel some fraction of the anxiety that nonwhite non-men feel daily. That these men experience any anxiety or discomfort is intolerable enough that in 2018, a Canadian clinical psychologist named Jordan Peterson became a mega-bestselling author of a kind of men’s manifesto, called 12 Rules for Life: An Antidote to Chaos. “Order is where the people around you act according to well-understood social norms. . . . Chaos, by contrast, is where—or when—something unexpected happens.” And just in case it wasn’t clear, Peterson sexes both sides of the paradigm; according to Taoist symbolism, he claims, “Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart.” Chaos is the thing that Peterson and his devout readers were searching for an antidote to in their struggle to reimpose . . . order.

Niflheim: the world of primordial darkness, cold, mist, and ice Norns: the three sisters who control the fate of men and women Ormstunga: means serpent’s tongue, from orm (serpent) and stunga (tongue) Prow: the front end of a ship or boat Ragnarök: the final battle between the gods and giants which will bring an end to the gods of Asgard. Sax-knife: a large single-edged knife Skald: a poet, a storyteller Skjaldborg: a shield wall Sleipnir: Odin’s eight-legged horse Snekkja: a viking longship used for battle Stern: the back end of a ship or boat Suðrikaupstefna: Southern Market, from the words suðr (south) and kaupstefna (market) Surtr: a fire giant who leads his kin into battle against the gods of Asgard during Ragnarök Svartalfheim: the world inhabited by the dwarves Tafl: a strategy board game Thrall: a slave Valhalla: Odin’s hall where those who died in battle reside Valknut: a symbol made of three interlocked triangles, also known as Odin’s Knot. It is thought to represent the transition from life to death, Odin, and the power to bind and unbind

Only hinted at in some of these tales, and clearly stated in others, it is apparent that there was a long and continuing conflict between paganism and Christianity in the early centuries A.D. This may also be the explanation behind other well creation tales, such as the slaying by St Barry of a 'great serpent' in County Roscommon. The saint thrust his crozier at it before it disappeared into Lough Lagan, and where his knee touched the ground, a holy well, Tobar Barry, sprang up. Although the serpent may represent paganism, and the saint's victory is therefore the victory of Christianity over paganism, we cannot entirely ignore the possibility that some of the serpents in similar Irish tales may have been real water monsters, which are still seen from time to time in the lakes of Ireland and Scotland. These eerie, ugly monsters, with their aura of primeval mystery, appropriately symbolize the uncouth savagery which the Christians attributed to all non-Christian beliefs; but that is not to say that the monsters were totally symbolic and did not have a reality of their own.

Now, let the reader mark well: According to the classic Pagan story, there was no serpent in that garden of delight in the "islands of the blest," to TEMPT mankind to violate their duty to their great benefactor, by eating of the sacred tree which he had reserved as the test of their allegiance. No; on the contrary, it was the Serpent, the symbol of the Devil, the Principle of evil, the Enemy of man, that prohibited them from eating the precious fruit--that strictly watched it--that would not allow it to be touched. Hercules, one form of the Pagan Messiah--not the primitive, but the Grecian Hercules--pitying man's unhappy state, slew or subdued the serpent, the envious being that grudged mankind the use of that which was so necessary to make them at once perfectly happy and wise, and bestowed upon them what otherwise would have been hopelessly beyond their reach. Here, then, God and the devil are exactly made to change places. Jehovah, who prohibited man from eating of the tree of knowledge, is symbolised by the serpent, and held up as an ungenerous and malignant being, while he who emancipated man from Jehovah's yoke, and gave him of the fruit of the forbidden tree--in other words, Satan under the names of Hercules--is celebrated as the good and gracious Deliverer of the human race. What a mystery of iniquity is here!

The development briefly outlined here seems to have been anticipated in medieval and Gnostic symbolism, just as the Antichrist was in the New Testament. How this occurred I will endeavour to describe in what follows. We have seen that, as the higher Adam corresponds to the lower, so the lower Adam corresponds to the serpent. For the mentality of the Middle Ages and of late antiquity, the first of the two double pyramids, the Anthropos Quaternio, represents the world of the spirit, or metaphysics, while the second, the Shadow Quaternio, represents sublunary nature and in particular man’s instinctual disposition, the “flesh”—to use a Gnostic-Christian term—which has its roots in the animal kingdom or, to be more precise, in the realm of warm-blooded animals. The nadir of this system is the cold-blooded vertebrate, the snake,30 for with the snake the psychic rapport that can be established with practically all warm-blooded animals comes to an end. That the snake, contrary to expectation, should be a counterpart of the Anthropos is corroborated by the fact—of especial significance for the Middle Ages—that it is on the one hand a well-known allegory of Christ, and on the other hand appears to be equipped with the gift of wisdom and of supreme spirituality.31 As Hippolytus says, the Gnostics identified the serpent with the spinal cord and the medulla. These are synonymous with the reflex functions.

This fear of life is not just an imaginary bogy, but a very real panic, which seems disproportionate only because its real source is unconscious and therefore projected: the young, growing part of the personality, if prevented from living or kept in check, generates fear and changes into fear. The fear seems to come from the mother, but actually it is the deadly fear of the instinctive, unconscious, inner man who is cut off from life by the continual shrinking back from reality. If the mother is felt as the obstacle, she then becomes the vengeful pursuer. Naturally it is not the real mother, although she too may seriously injure her child by the morbid tenderness with which she pursues it into adult life, thus prolonging the infantile attitude beyond the proper time. It is rather the mother-imago that has turned into a lamia.63 (Cf. pls. XXXVIIIa, XLVIII.) The mother-imago, however, represents the unconscious, and it is as much a vital necessity for the unconscious to be joined to the conscious as it is for the latter not to lose contact with the unconscious. Nothing endangers this connection more in a man than a successful life; it makes him forget his dependence on the unconscious. The case of Gilgamesh is instructive in this respect: he was so successful that the gods, the representatives of the unconscious, saw themselves compelled to deliberate how they could best bring about his downfall. Their efforts were unavailing at first, but when the hero had won the herb of immortality (cf. pl. XIX) and was almost at his goal, a serpent stole the elixir of life from him while he slept.

Medusa is a good example of how Goddess in her dark aspect became demonized in the patriarchal context. Gimbutas points out that the earliest Greek gorgons were not terrifying symbols, but were portrayed with symbols of regeneration – bee wings and snakes as antennae102. Medusa with her serpent hair had been a widely recognized symbol of Divine Female Wisdom – the serpent representing Knowledge of Change, the very essence of Being, never-ending renewal, and thus immortality. Medusa was a face of Ultimate Mystery, of the One – She was “All that has been, that is, and that will be103.” In our cultural mythology Perseus was celebrated as hero for being able to defeat her and cut off her head with its so called deadly gaze. It was said that her gaze was so fearsome it turned mortals to stone. There is no doubt that it is fearsome to look into the eye of the Divine; but patriarchal gods have carried the same characteristic, Yahweh for example, without threat of the same retribution. In the patriarchal context, is it really the gaze of the Female that is deadly? It is women who are the chronically gazed upon, whether as sex object or on a pedestal; perhaps this epitomizes Medusa’s/Goddess’ imprisonment – how She is “kept an eye on”. The beheading of Medusa – one who is icon of Wisdom, may be understood as a story of dis-memberment of the Female Metaphor/Goddess104. The hera’s journey today is to go against the patriarchal injunction and look Medusa straight on, as philosopher Helene Cixous suggests105. She is at first fearsome, but the Dark Goddess’ fierceness nurtures a strength in a woman, gives her back the “steel in her stomach” that she needs to live her life. This Old Wisdom tradition is about recognizing the Power within, and daring to take the journey into that Self-knowledge.

Kircher’s system shows certain affinities with our series of quaternios. Thus the Second Monad is a duality consisting of opposites, corresponding to the angelic world that was split by Lucifer’s fall. Another significant analogy is that Kircher conceives his schema as a cycle set in motion by God as the prime cause, and unfolding out of itself, but brought back to God again through the activity of human understanding, so that the end returns once more to the beginning. This, too, is an analogy of our formula. The alchemists were fond of picturing their opus as a circulatory process, as a circular distillation or as the uroboros, the snake biting its own tail, and they made innumerable pictures of this process. Just as the central idea of the lapis Philosophorum plainly signifies the self, so the opus with its countless symbols illustrates the process of individuation, the step-by-step development of the self from an unconscious state to a conscious one. That is why the lapis, as prima materia, stands at the beginning of the process as well as at the end.113 According to Michael Maier, the gold, another synonym for the self, comes from the opus circulatorium of the sun. This circle is “the line that runs back upon itself (like the serpent that with its head bites its own tail), wherein that eternal painter and potter, God, may be discerned.”114 In this circle, Nature “has related the four qualities to one another and drawn, as it were, an equilateral square, since contraries are bound together by contraries, and enemies by enemies, with the same everlasting bonds.” Maier compares this squaring of the circle to the “homo quadratus,” the four-square man, who “remains himself” come weal come woe.115 He calls it the “golden house, the twicebisected circle, the four-cornered phalanx, the rampart, the city wall, the four-sided line of battle.”116 This circle is a magic circle consisting of the union of opposites, “immune to all injury.

You're a Parselmouth. Why didn't you tell us?" "I'm a what?" said Harry. "A Parselmouth!" said Ron. "You can talk to snakes!" "I know," said Harry. "I mean, that's only the second time I've ever done it. I accidentally set a boa constrictor on my cousin Dudley at the zoo once- long story- but it was telling me it had never seen Brazil and I sort of set it free without meaning to- that was before I knew I was a wizard-" "A boa constrictor told you it had never seen Brazil?" Ron repeated faintly. "So?" said Harry. "I bet loads of people here can do it." "Oh, no they can't," said Ron. "It's not a very common gift. Harry, this is bad." "What's bad?" said Harry, starting to feel quite angry. "What's wrong with everyone? Listen, if I hadn't told that snake not to attack Justin-" "Oh, that's what you said to it?" "What d'you mean? You were there- you heard me-" "I heard you speaking Parseltongue," said Ron. "Snake language. You could have been saying anything- no wonder Justin panicked, you sounded like you were egging the snake on or something- it was creepy, you know-" Harry gaped at him. "I spoke a different language? But- I didn't realize- how can I speak a language without knowing I can speak it?" Ron shook his head. Both he and Hermione were looking as though someone had died. Harry couldn't see what was so terrible. "D'you want to tell me what's wrong with stopping a massive snake biting off Justin's head?" he said. "What does it matter how I did it as long as Justin doesn't have to join the Headless Hunt?" "It matters," said Hermione, speaking at last in a hushed voice, "because being able to talk to snakes was what Salazar Slytherin was famous for. That's why the symbol of Slytherin House is a serpent." Harry's mouth fell open. "Exactly," said Ron. "And now the whole school's going to think you're his great-great-great-great-grandson or something..." "But I'm not," said Harry, with a panic he couldn't quite explain. "You'll find that hard to prove," said Hermione. "He lived about a thousand years ago; for all we know, you could be.

Cultures are always built by the telling of stories. Within them are contained symbols and values that can be passed easily through the generations. Thousands of goddess tales are being unearthed and retold, and many new ones are being created. These tales are like threads with which we can weave our magic. In many stories the goddess is described in three phases—the Maiden, the Mother, and the Crone. This is a wonderful female trinity with infinite correspondences in life and nature. Cycles Three, Four, and Five will deal with each of these goddess-phases in turn. Some of the old goddess tales were twisted to suit the takeover of male powers, in order to win converts to their new gods. For example, Pandora (All-Gifts) was originally a Great Mother Goddess, whose box (womb, cauldron, cave, cup) was a reservoir of beauty and life-sustaining gifts. Patriarchal myth tells us that Her box contained all manner of destructive demons, which once unleashed upon the world, brought evil and suffering to all. Eve was also a Mother Goddess, whose tree was the Tree of Life. The serpent was her own sensual wisdom, and the apple was her sacred fruit. Athene, whom we are told was born fully grown out of the head of Zeus, dressed in armor and ready for war, was originally the daughter of the matriarchal goddess Metis. (Meter, method, measure, matter, mother…) Both mother and daughter were worshipped by the Amazons at Lake Triton, and were born parthenogenetically—without sperm. The examples of mythic misogyny are endless. Medusa is another; the patriarchs would have us believe that one look upon her face would turn the viewer to stone, because they did not wish us to know her true nature. One source reveals that the Medusae were a tribe of Amazon women; another that their snaky-haired masks were used over temple doorways to protect the Mysteries from irreverent intruders. Whenever we hear about a serpent in myth or fairy-tale, we can usually be sure that it hails back to an ancient Goddess and Her powers. The serpent, before the heyday of Freud and phallic symbols, meant transformation and kundalini energy.

According to Egyptian texts, to eat of this fruit was to eat of the flesh and the fluid of the Goddess, the patroness of sexual pleasure and reproduction. According to the Bible story, the forbidden fruit caused the couple's conscious comprehension of sexuality. Upon eating the fruit, Adam and Eve became aware of the sexual nature of their own bodies, "And they knew that they were naked." So it was that when the male deity found them, they had modestly covered their genitals with aprons of fig leaves. But it was vitally important to the construction of the Levite myth that they did not both decide to eat the forbidden fruit together, which would have been a more logical turn for the tale to take since the fruit symbolised sexual consciousness. No, the priestly scribes make it exceedingly clear that the woman Eve ate of the fruit first - upon the advice and counsel of the serpent. It can hardly have been chance or coincidence that it was a serpent who offerred Eve the advice. For people at that time knew that the serpent was the symbol, perhaps even the instrument, of divine counsel in the religion of the Goddess. It was surely intended in the Paradise myth, as in the Indo-European serpent and dragon myths, that the serpent, as the familiar counsellor of women, be seen as a source of evil and be placed in such a menacing and villainous role that to listen to the prophetesses of the female deity would be to violate the religion of the male deity in the most dangerous manner. {...} We are told that, by eating the fruit first, women possessed sexual consciousness before man and in turn tempted man to partake the forbidden fruit, that is, to join her sinfully in sexual pleasures. This image of Eve as a sexually tempting but god-defying seductress was surely intended as a warning to all Hebrew men to stay away from the sacred women of the temples, for if they succumb to the temptations of these women, they simultaneously accepted the female deity - Her fruit - Her sexuality and, perhaps most important, the resulting matrilineal identity for any children who might be conceived in this manner. It must also, perhaps even more pointedly, have been directed at Hebrew women, cautioning them not to take part in the ancient religion and its sexual customs, as they appear to have continued to do so, despite the warnings and punishments meted out by the Levite priests.

Or, in your case, as wide. Wait. Did you just say Gandalf?” “He is the founder of our order, and the first of the Five Warlocks. He comes from afar across the Western Ocean, from Easter Island, or perhaps from Japan.” “No, I think he comes from the mind of a story writer. An old-fashioned Roman Catholic from the days just before First Space Age. Unless I am confusing him with the guy who wrote about Talking Animal Land? With the Cowardly Lion who gets killed by a Wicked White Witch? I never read the text, I watched the comic.” “Oh, you err so! The Witches, we have preserved this lore since the time of the Fall of the Giants, whom we overthrew and destroyed. The tale is this: C. S. Lewis and Arthur C. Clarke were led by the Indian Maiden Sacagawea to the Pacific Ocean and back, stealing the land from the Red Man and selling them blankets impregnated with smallpox. It was called the Lewis and Clarke Expedition. When they reached the Pacific, they set out in the Dawn Treader to find the sea route to India, where the sacred river Alph runs through caverns measureless to man down to a sunless sea. They came to the Last Island, called Ramandu or Selidor, where the World Serpent guards the gateway to the Land of the Dead, and there they found Gandalf, returned alive from the underworld, and stripped of all his powers. He came again to mortal lands in North America to teach the Simon Families. The Chronicle is a symbolic retelling of their journey. It is one of our Holy Books.” “Your Holy Books were written for children by Englishmen.” “The gods wear many masks! If the Continuum chooses the lips of a White Man to be the lips through which the Continuum speaks, who are we to question? Tolkien was not Roman. He was of a race called the hobbits, Homo floresiensis, discovered on an isle in Indonesia, and he would have lived in happiness, had not the White Man killed him with DDT. So there were no Roman Catholics involved. May the Earth curse their memory forever! May they be forgotten forever!” “Hm. Earth is big. Maybe it can do both. You know about Rome? It perished in the Ecpyrosis, somewhat before your time.” “How could we not? The Pope in Rome created the Giants, whom the Witches rose up against and overthrew. Theirs was the masculine religion, aggressive, intolerant, and forbidding abortion. Ours is the feminine religion, peaceful and life-affirming and all-loving, and we offer the firstborn child to perish on our sacred fires. The First Coven was organized to destroy them like rats! When Rome was burned, we danced, and their one god was cast down and fled weeping on his pierced feet, and our many gods rose up. My ancestors hunted the Christians like stoats, and when we caught them, we burned them slowly, as they once did of us in Salem. What ill you do is returned to you tenfold!” “Hm. Are you willing to work with a Giant? I saw one in the pit, and saw the jumbo-sized coffin they pried him out from. What if he is a baptized Christian? Most of them were, since they were created by my pet pope and raised by nuns.” “All Christians must perish! Such is our code.” “Your code is miscoded.” “What of the Unforgettable Hate?” “Forget about it.

Healing and protection are long-standing themes for the serpent: the wand of Asclepius, Greek god of medicine, wrapped by a single serpent, inspires the symbols of the American Medical Association and the World Health Organization. Hermes’ winged staff, entwined by a pair of snakes, forms the caduceus, a symbol of alchemy and commerce, and a second symbol of medicine. Jung considered ouroboros, the snake swallowing its own tail, to be the one archetypal symbol that explained absolutely everything.

The fatal effects of sin can be removed only by the provision that God has made. The Israelites saved their lives by looking upon the uplifted serpent. That look implied faith. They lived because they believed God's word, and trusted in the means provided for their recover. So to sinner may look to Christ, and live. He receives pardon through faith in the atoning sacrifice. Unlike the inert and lifeless symbol, Christ has power and virtue in Himself to heal the repenting sinner.

with sin. Eve was tempted by a serpent (a phallic power symbol). It is interesting to note that the serpent has always been a symbol of power rather than a symbol of either good or evil in and of itself. Its ability to shed its skin makes it an especially appropriate symbol of eternal life. While snakes generally have a bad name even in our modern times, we might remember that Moses used serpents to prove that he was a more powerful magician than the Pharaoh's magicians. (Ex 8:1-12) "And the Lord spake to Moses ... take thy rod and cast it before Pharaoh and it shall become a serpent." Moses' supreme

May the frightfulness become so great that it can turn men's eyes inward, so that their will no longer seeks the self in others but in themselves.236 I saw it, I know that this is the way: I saw the death of Christ and I saw his lament; I felt the agony of his dying, of the great dying. I saw a new God, a child, who subdued daimons in his hand.237 The God holds the separate principles in his power, he unites them. The God develops through the union of the principles in me. He is their union. If you will one of these principles, so you are in one, but far from your being other. If you will both principles, one and the other, then you excite the conflict between the principles, since you cannot want both at the same time. From this arises the need, the God appears in it, he takes your conflicting will in his hand, in the hand of a child whose will is simple and beyond conflict. You cannot learn this, it can only develop in you. You cannot will this, it takes the will from your hand and wills itself Will yourself that leads to the way:238 ' But fundamentally you are terrified ofyourself and therefore you prefer to run to all others rather than to yourself I saw the mountain of the sacrifice, and the blood poured in streams from its sides. When I saw how pride and power satisfied men, how beauty beamed from the eyes ofwomen when the great war broke out, I knew that mankind was on the way to self-sacrifice. The spirit of the depths239 has seized mankind and forces self-sacrifice upon it. Do not seek the guilt here or there. The spirit of the depths clutched the fate of man unto itself as it clutched mine. He leads mankind through the river of blood to the mystery: In the mystery man himself becomes the two principles, the lion and the serpent. Because I also want my being other, I must become a Christ. I am made into Christ, I must suffer it. Thus the redeeming blood flows. Through the self-sacrifice my pleasure is changed and goes above into its higher principle. Love is sighted, but pleasure is blind. Both principles are one in the symbol of the flame. The principles strip themselves ofhuman form.24o The mystery showed me in images what I should afterward live. I did not possess any of those boons that the mystery showed me, for I still had to earn all of them.241 finis. part. prim. (End of part one)

Exodus 7:8–13 relates the story of Moses and Aaron changing their staff into a serpent.8 This activity by the Hebrew leaders is an attack on Pharaoh and the Egyptians, and it strikes at the very heart of Egyptian belief. In the first place, on the front of Pharaoh’s crown was an enraged female serpent/cobra called a uraeus. The Egyptians believed this serpent was energized with divine potency and sovereignty. It was considered the very emblem of Pharaoh’s power; it symbolized his deification and majesty. “When Moses had Aaron fling the rod-snake before Pharaoh, he was directly assaulting that token of Pharaonic sovereignty—the scene was one of polemical taunting. When Aaron’s rod swallowed the staffs of the Egyptian magicians, Pharaonic deity and omnipotence were being denounced and rejected outright. . . . Yahweh alone was in control of the entire episode.” 9

A mission of over abundant crops, it's a vision of mansions and Ferrari drop tops. Lay me in a tomb wearing a crown with a serpent on its midpoint; it's a symbol of perfect consciousness, a knowledge of my power as limitless. Take a look to the Bible and turn back to Yahweh standard of perfectionists.

To encounter divinity in all His fullness would be impossible for man, so he sees a light, a burning bush, an angel, an apparition on a cross, and he calls it God. But with the usual arrogance of man, he then starts believing that that small part he has taken is the All. The carved stone is a symbol. Anything you worship can become God because God exists in every living and dead thing you see. He is everywhere and in everything. If one believed enough in a piece of rock, that rock will one day open its eyes, and show the God that lives in it. It doesn’t matter if one decided to worship a stone, a man, a tree, or a snake. Believe and it will be. ‘God will manifest Himself to you in whatever form will fill your eyes with tenderness. What difference to God if it is a dying man on a cross or a serpent that is used to remind his devotee of Him? It is important only to love Him with all your heart.

The Mexican Eve is called Suchiquecal. A messenger from heaven announced to her that she should bear a son, who should bruise the serpent's head. He presents her with a rose. This was the commencement of and Age, which was called the Age of Roses." (Is this the age when angels became the husbands of pure-minded women--an age fitly symboled by the rose, the flower of perfect love? Note, also, the resemblance between this tradition and the Christian tradition, concerning the angel's offering Mary a lily-branch at the Annunciation. Evidently, these are two different aspects of the same symbolism.)

You made a good choice for your Naga,” she assured me. “Danica is more graceful on a dais than half the serpents I know.” “Provided she isn’t blushing too brightly to see,” another quipped. “The first time I saw our queen perform, I thought she was a lost cause--far too uptight, like most avians--but I’m glad to be proved wrong.” I knew I was grinning. I had never doubted that Danica could learn the serpent art. Much of her loved my world; a part of her craved dance as surely as anyone else in this nest did. Perhaps that thirst came from her time dancing with the currents of air far above where we earthbound creatures roamed, or perhaps it came from the expressive nature her own world forced her to hide. Similar conversation flowed among us until A’isha’s musical voice commanded me, “Zane, admire your queen.” The words brought our attention to the back of the room, where Danica had emerged, looking so beautiful that she took my breath away. In response to her teacher’s words, Danica smiled and shook her head, causing her golden hair to ripple about her face. It made my heart speed and my breath still, as if I was afraid the next movement would shatter the world. She was a spark of fire in sha’Mehay. The serpiente dress rippled around the hawk’s long legs, the fabric so light it moved with the slightest shift of air. The bodice was burgundy silk; it laced up the front with a black ribbon, and though it was more modest than many dancers’ costumes, it still revealed enough cream-and-roses skin to tantalize the imagination. On Danica’s right temple, A’isha had painted a symbol for courage; beneath her left collarbone lay the symbols for san’Anhamirak, abandon and freedom. “You dance every day with the wind. This is not so different,” A’isha said encouragingly to Danica. “Now, look at the man you love and dance for him.” The nest hushed, faces turning to their Naga. Her cheeks held more color than usual, which A’isha addressed with a common dancers’ proverb. “There is no place for shame, Danica. If Anhamirak had not wanted beauty admired, she would not have made our eyes desire it. You are art.” Danica stepped out of A’isha’s grip. “If my mother could see me now,” she murmured, but she smiled as she said it.

Since 'Panther' is an ambiguous word that can refer to different leopards, jaguars, or mountain lions, it can also refer to a melanistic or black cat; hence, the name 'black panther'. It can also be crossed with a lioness for example which gives us an indication of the role which the lion had in ancient Egyptian symbolism in relation with the black panther on feminine figures. Panther/Lioness feminine emblems for Sekhmet, Bastet and Maftet were portaying that aggressive and wild nature of the big cats; they served as guardians and the latter was called as 'slayer of serpents' and protected against snakes. That was also a role which Atem played, therefore, they represent the perpendicular authority in contrast to that of the Sun (i.e., parallel authority). What proves my assertion that the Sun cult showed up later on in opposition to the upper heavens' authority is to be witnessed on the figurine which shows Tutankhamun subjugating a black panther using a sceptre which looks different than that of Thoth (stripped off from its fork and top ends); avenging thereby his cult. The Egyptian Museum guide does state that he is [assimilated to the Sun by the golden tan of his skin] and the [panther represented the night sky]. So it is evident that the warriors of the upper heavens on Earth were feminine who tried to resurrect their legacy in contrast to Isis who restores her husband's body to allow for his resurrection (referring to Sirius and Orion); intending probably thereby to give him back his role as a lion hunter. The task on the lionesses is therefore reduced to protection and guardianship against this scheme but there were no resurrection of some entity for them to take part into since the authority on whose behalf they fight were already present even though no complete submission to it were delivered.

Insignificance by Stewart Stafford From the emerald Draco star, Fell the coiled Rosslyn figure, Unwinding into elongated form, The golden crozier of St Patrick. Faded gods upon ruined temples, All came alive, screeching creeds, Overwhelming minds and bodies, Fanatics expiring from confusion. In the shamanic ritualistic dance, Of an in-out, Hokey-Cokey culture, Spins the stained mah-jongg piece, The missing link apes checkmate. © Stewart Stafford, 2022. All rights reserved.

It’s that I shall pass because of the rhythm into its paroxysm—I shall pass to the other side of life. How can I tell you this? It’s terrible and threatens me. I feel that I can no longer stop and I’m scared. I try to distract myself from the fear. But the real hammering stopped long ago: I’m being the incessant hammering in me. From which I must free myself. But I can’t: the other side of me calls me. As if ripping from the depths of the earth the knotted roots of a rare tree, that’s how I write to you, and those roots as if they were powerful tentacles like voluminous naked bodies of strong women entwined by serpents and by carnal desires for fulfilment, and all this is the prayer of a black mass, and a creeping plea for amen: because the bad is unprotected and needs the approval of God: that is creation. Could I have gone without feeling it to the other side? The other side is a throbbingly hellish life. But there is the transfiguration of my terror: so I give myself over to a heavy life all in symbols heavy as ripe fruits. I choose mistaken resemblances but that drag me through the tangle. A trace memory of the common sense of my past keeps me brushing against this side here. Help me because something is coming toward me and laughing at me. Quick, save.

Order and chaos are the yang and yin of the famous Taoist symbol: two serpents, head to tail. Order is the white, masculine serpent; Chaos, its black, feminine counterpart. The black dot in the white—and the white in the black—indicate the possibility of transformation: just when things seem secure, the unknown can loom, unexpectedly and large. Conversely, just when everything seems lost, new order can emerge from catastrophe and chaos. For the Taoists, meaning is to be found on the border between the ever-entwined pair. To walk that border is to stay on the path of life, the divine Way.

He removed the high places and brake the images, and cut down the groves; and brake in pieces the brazen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it. (II Kings, 18:3–4) The reference is particularly significant because a staff topped by a bronze serpent was the symbol of Pharaoh’s authority.

Lifting the heavy curtain of the flesh He stood upon a threshold serpent-watched, And peered into gleaming endless corridors, Silent and listening in the silent heart For the coming of the new and the unknown. He gazed across the empty stillnesses And heard the footsteps of the undreamed Idea In the far avenues of the Beyond. He heard the secret Voice, the Word that knows, And saw the secret face that is our own. The inner planes uncovered their crystal doors; Strange powers and influences touched his life. A vision came of higher realms than ours, A consciousness of brighter fields and skies, Of beings less circumscribed than brief-lived men And subtler bodies than these passing frames, Objects too fine for our material grasp, Acts vibrant with a superhuman light And movements pushed by a superconscient force, And joys that never flowed through mortal limbs, And lovelier scenes than earth’s and happier lives. A consciousness of beauty and of bliss, A knowledge which became what it perceived, Replaced the separated sense and heart And drew all Nature into its embrace. 01.03_006:018-023

You will increasingly have these kinds of sublime realizations about the block universe and your own unconscious role in fulfilling your fate the more you become attuned to precognitive dreaming. PAY IT FORWARD Earlier I mentioned the possibility of sowing seeds in our past for a better tomorrow via establishing habits of honoring our dreams and other potentially precognitive experiences. Among the positive values of Jung’s writings and teachings was his emphasis on honoring and commemorating the miraculous in one’s life. He encouraged his patients to draw or paint their dreams, for instance, and he commemorated his own synchronicities in the grand style that his and (mostly) his wife’s wealth allowed. For instance, during a period in 1933 when he was studying the relationship between Christianity and Alchemy, he encountered a snake that had choked to death trying to swallow a fish. This seemed to him like a concrete symbol of the fatal inability of both systems of thought—the Christian fish and the Alchemical serpent—to integrate each other. He honored this synchronistic discovery with a stone engraving that can still be seen at his Bollingen tower retreat on the shore of Lake Zurich, where he had found the animals.1 Developing personal habits and rituals to honor our dreams is an important part of precognitive dreamwork. Writing dreams down in the morning in a notebook dedicated for the purpose is the most fundamental part of it. But drawing or painting striking images from dreams is also a common practice. However you choose to honor your dreams, such honoring is a crucial feed-forward component helpful in manifesting precognition with regularity. As with any habit or skill we wish to improve upon, it is important to build positive associations with it, so these little celebratory acts of honoring can contribute to those associations and in some cases even serve as the target of our precognition. Some of these targets may become powerful personal symbols and associations that you will then find have fed back into your prior dreamlife.

Southpaw Serpent by Stewart Stafford She was a left-handed artist, More paint on her face than on canvas, 'Here, take this,' she said to me, 'It takes you to the snake with the atlas.' I grasped the nettle of her riddle, An eyeball roulette elixir of time. Each sandy step I took after that Veered from horrific to the sublime. I found myself at a beach house party, Remorse coiled in laundry bags hissed, They reeked of promise unfulfilled, And of sweet opportunities missed. Girls morphed into southpaw painters, Pointing and urging me to go on, A police raid, I fled to the rooftop, As dawn cracked open the sun. I frantically crafted glitter collages, Kaleidoscopes of close friends and I, The leftie girlie dyed her hair, judging, The winner was a mirrored all-seeing eye. © 2024, Stewart Stafford. All rights reserved.

Serpents are symbols of change and renewal. Like the earth they renew their fertility by replacing old skin with new. Since they could slither above and below the earth, they were considered keepers of the earth’s secrets and hence symbols of occult lore.

What exactly are we looking for, by the way?” “A body in a trunk would be ideal,” said Reggie. “Or bloodstains.” “Long knives with serpents carved into the hilt,” Colin volunteered. “Evil symbols scratched in the wall.” Reggie laughed and then shrugged as she tried to come up with a serious answer. “Anything with a name on it that we don’t recognize, I suppose. Or pictures or maps. I hadn’t really thought about it.” “Shocking,” said Edmund, rolling his eyes. Stepping past time, Reggie toed him in the side with one booted foot. “A little less sarcasm there, if you please.” “Watch out, Reggie—if I fall over, this whole place could come down.” “Quite likely,” said Colin, looking up at the rafters. He raised a hand and tapped one of his long fingers against the wood. “Nobody breathe too hard, hmm?

Because the serpent slips in subtly, luring Christ's bride away through plausible lies and pleasant compromises, the church must also overcome by staying pure. The white garments of the victors symbolize their victory over defiling temptation and consequently their fitness to enter God's temple as the kingdom of priests, to serve gladly in his presence (Rev. 3:4-5, 17-18; 22:14-15). Though their white linen presents a portrait of their righteous deeds (19:7-8), the purity that makes them presentable before the thrice-holy God is not their personal achievement but the result of the costliest of cleansers: "they have washed their robes and made them white in the blood of the Lamb" (7:14).

precious look on John’s face. A mixture of revelation and confusion, like he doubted what he had been proclaiming might actually be coming true. Jesus had chuckled and thought of dunking John in the water as a playful prank, but thought better of it because of the seriousness of the moment. Baptism was a serious sacrament indeed. It was a symbolic ritual that recapitulated the cleansing waters of the Great Deluge. In the days of Noah, the fallen Sons of God had not merely come to earth to draw worship away from Yahweh. They also sought to corrupt humanity by violating the holy separation between heaven and earth. They mated with human women who gave birth to unholy hybrids of human and angel. These offspring were giants called Nephilim, and they were mighty warriors of old. The angelic/human crossbreeding had a second purpose: to corrupt the bloodline of the Messiah that was promised through the fully human bloodline of Eve. In the curse on the Serpent of the Garden. Yahweh had said, “I will put war between you and the woman, and between your seed and her seed; he shall crush your head, and you shall strike his heel.” The violent sins of men and angels brought the judgment of Yahweh to cleanse the earth from abomination. But it was only the beginning of a war that would not cease until the promised Messiah came to crush the Serpent’s head.

The seven-serpents headed Aryan symbol is yet another indication for the Aryan origins of the Jew identity which preserved the Symbol of the Menorah in its tradition.

The 'Naga' is an Aryan symbol (e.g., in Hinduism: Manasa, in Buddhism: Mucalinda) that is used for protection and etymologically means 'Savior' and yet also 'Filth, Impurity' in the pure Semitic tongue. It is the very same symbol used by the Jews in their Menorah while replacing the serpent symbolism (to protect themselves from the Semites) with fire after being influenced by and intermixed with Zoroastrians. To the Semites, the seven-headed snake was -contrary to the Aryans (i.e., Indians, Jews, Persians ..etc)- slain by Ninurta, patron god of Lagash who was for hunting and war. This reverse symbolism marks the difference in culture between Semitic and Aryan identities, and gives us an indication for the foreign Jewish culture to the Semitic lands. It is yet even more astounding to observe that Perseus slaughtered Medusa (whose hair was of serpents) using a sickle, which is a tool whose name were derived in the Semitic tongue from the same root of 'Naga'. We can even see traces of animosity towards this Aryan culture in the New Testament in the book of Revelation 12:3-4 where a seven headed serpent/dragon is trying to devour a new born baby.

When sometimes a true sea-serpent, complete and undecayed, is found or caught, a shout of triumph will go through the world. "There, you see," men will say, "I knew they were there all the time. I just had a feeling they were there." Men really need sea-monsters in their personal oceans. And the Old Man of the Sea is one of these. [...] For this reason we rather hope he is never photographed, for if the Man of the Sea should turn out to be some great malformed sealion, a lot of people would feel a sharp personal loss—a Santa Claus loss. And the ocean would be none the better for it. For the ocean, deep and black in the depths, is like the low dark levels of our minds in which the dream symbols incubate and sometimes rise up to sight like the Old Man of the Sea. And even if the symbol vision be horrible, it is there and it is ours. An ocean without its unnamed monsters would be like a completely dreamless sleep.

In yoga this chakra is thought of as the home of Kundalini energy. Its symbol is a coiled serpent asleep at the base of the spine. Kundalini is seen as the active power of the great goddess Shakti, the force that animates all creation. For the shaman this is the primordial serpent who swallows its own tail, Ouroboros, and portrays an unconscious state of self-absorption.

Whatever form it takes, the monster is there- he’s called the Dobarcu- that means “Dark wet hound”. It’s an otter, actually, in our symbolism. But it refers to a water monster, even a serpent-like one. Otters are like hairy snakes, to see them swim. It’s the guardian of the underworld, the dark wet hound. Everyone has to go through the Underworld eventually, and no one gets through without facing the Dobarcu and its terror.

The biblical King David was also a sacred shepherd. His sensual and ecstatic songs of earthly love, so untypical of the Bible, derive from the ancient love rites of the shepherd king and the Goddess—her Canaanite names were Asherah, Astarte, Ashtoreth. The settled people of the Old Testament, like everyone else in the Near East, practiced Goddess worship. The Old Testament is the record of the conquest and massacre of these Neolithic people by the nomadic Hebrews, followers of a Sky God, who then set up their biblical God in the place of the ancient Goddess. The biblical Hebrews were a nomadic pastoral and patriarchal people, tribes of sheepherders and warriors who invaded land belonging to the matriarchal Canaanites. Both Hebrews and Canaanites were Semitic people. The Canaanites lived in agricultural communities and worshiped the orgiastic-ecstatic Moon Mother Astarte. As Old Testament stories relate, the Hebrews sacked, burned, and destroyed village after village belonging to the Canaanites, massacring or enslaving the people—a series of brutal invasions and slaughters described typically by theologians and preachers as “a spiritual victory.” In this way the Hebrews established themselves on the land, along with the worship of their Sky-and-Thunder God Yahweh (Jehovah), calling themselves his “chosen people.” Yahweh’s male prophets and priests, however, despite their political victory over the Canaanites, had to carry on a continuous struggle and fulmination against their own people, who kept “backsliding” into worship of the Great Mother, the Goddess of all their Near Eastern neighbors. For she had originally been the Goddess of the Hebrews themselves. This constant fight against matriarchal religion and custom is the primary theme of the Old Testament. It begins in Genesis, with the takeover of the Goddess’s Garden of Immortality by a male God, and the inversion of all her sacred symbols—tree, serpent, moon-fruit, woman—into icons of evil. Of the two sons of Eve and Adam, Cain was made the “evil brother” because he chose settled agriculture (matriarchal)—the “good brother” Abel was a nomadic pastoralist (patriarchal). The war against the Goddess is carried on by the prophets’ rantings against the “golden calf,” the “brazen serpents,” the “great harlot” and “Whore of Babylon” (the Babylonian Goddess Ishtar), against enchantresses, pythonic diviners, and those who practice witchcraft. It is in the prophets’ war against the Canaanite worship of “stone idols”—the Triple Moon Goddess worshiped as three horned pillars, or menhirs. One of her shrines was on Mount Sinai, which means “Mountain of the Moon.” Moses was commanded by “the Lord” to go forth and destroy these “idols”—who all had breasts. We are told monotheism began with the Jews, that it was the great “spiritual invention” of the religious leader Moses. This is not so. The worship of one God, like everything else in religion, began with the worship of the Goddess. Her universality has been duly noted by everyone who has ever studied the matter. “Monotheism, once thought to have been the invention of Moses or Akhnaton, was worldwide in the prehistoric and early historic world,” i.e., throughout the Paleolithic and Neolithic ages. As E. O. James wrote in The Cult of the Mother Goddess, “It seems that Evans was correct when he affirmed that it was a ‘monotheism in which the female form of divinity was supreme.” The original monotheism of the Goddess is perhaps most clearly shown by the fact that, in Elizabeth Gould Davis’s words, “Almighty Yahweh, the god of Moses and the later Hebrews, was originally a goddess.” His name, Iahu ’anat, derives from that of the Sumerian Goddess Inanna.

In general, the chakra system branched into two sections: the Vedic and the Tantric (now alive within Ayurvedic medicine and Tantric yoga, for example). The term tantra comes from two words: tanoti, or to expand; and trayati, or to liberate. Tantra therefore means “to extend knowledge that liberates.” Tantra is a life practice based on teachings about the chakras, kundalini, hatha yoga, astronomy, astrology, and the worship of many Hindu gods and goddesses. Tantric yoga originates in pre-Aryan India, around 3000 to 2500 BC. Many other varieties of Tantric yoga or spirituality have arisen from it, including Tantric Buddhism. Each system derived from Tantric yoga has a unique view on the chakras and their related gods, cosmology, and symbols. The history of chakras, as complex as it sounds so far, is even more complicated. The chakra system is intertwined with—and maybe even created by—several different cultures. Although usually associated with India, Tantric yoga was also practiced by the Dravidians, who originated from Ethiopia, as is revealed in the many similarities between predynastic Egyptian and African practices and ancient Indian Tantric beliefs.6 For example, numerous Hindu deities are rooted in “India’s black civilizations, which is why they are often depicted as black.”7 Some historians point out that early Egyptians were greatly affected by African beliefs,8 and in turn influenced Greek, Jewish, and, later, Islamic and Christian thought, in addition to the Indian Hindu.9 Other cultures also exchanged chakra ideas. Many practices of the early Essenes, a religio-spiritual community dwelling in Palestine in the second century BC through the second century AD, mirrored those of early India.10 The Sufis—Islamic mystics—also employed a system of energy centers, although it involved four centers.11 The Sufis also borrowed the kundalini process from Tantric yoga, as did certain Asian Indian and American Indian groups.12 As we shall see, the Maya Indians of Mexico, the Inca Indians of Peru, and the Cherokee Indians of North America each have their own chakra method. The Maya believe that they actually taught the Hindu the chakra system. The chakra system was brought to the West in yet another roundabout way. It was first thoroughly outlined in the text Sat-Chakra-Nirupana, written by an Indian yogi in the sixteenth century. Arthur Avalon then delivered chakra knowledge to Western culture in his book The Serpent Power, first published in 1919. Avalon drew heavily upon the Sat-Chakra-Nirupana as well as another text, Pakaka-Pancaka. His presentation was preceded by Theosophic Practica, a book written in 1696 by Johann Georg Gichtel, a student of Jakob Bohme, who refers to inner force centers that align with Eastern chakra doctrines.13 Today, many esoteric professionals rely on Anodea Judith's interpretation of Avalon’s work, to which she has added additional information about the psychological aspects of the chakras.

Carvings plastered the walls now, huge eyes that spanned from floor to ceiling, suns and stars spiraling in their depths—the symbol of Alarus, because death always watched.

Shiva’s world-destroying dance is another potent symbol that can be understood both cosmologically and psychologically. From a yogic perspective, the dance disentangles all the mental webs by which we have imprisoned ourselves through our incessant karmic activities or volitions. Shiva, as Natarāja (“Lord of Dance”), is the destroyer of our delusions and illusions. He is an inner force that undermines our laboriously created conceptualizations of the world, so that we may see reality “as it is” (yathā-bhūta). The Goddess Mohinī (“She who deludes”) is thought to tempt us with misconceptions and delusional fantasies, so that only serious spiritual seekers can find their way to Reality. The elephant-headed, pot-bellied God Ganesha, again, is traditionally called upon to remove all such obstacles. Each deity represents a particular symbolic function whose depth we can plumb only when we delve into our own psyche by means of Yoga. The artistic representations of the numerous deities of Hinduism, Buddhism, and Jainism all are full of yogic symbolism. That symbolism is most prominent in the profound teachings of Tantra. To appreciate this fact, we just need to look at the esoteric meaning of hatha—as in Hatha-Yoga, a branch of Tantra. The dictionary meaning of the term hatha is simply “force” or “power,” and the commonly used ablative hathāt means “by force of.” Esoterically, however, the syllables ha and tha—quite meaningless in themselves—are said to symbolize “Sun” and “Moon” respectively. Specifically, they refer to the inner luminaries: the “sun” or solar energy coursing through the right energetic pathway (i.e., the pingalānādī) and the “moon” or lunar energy traveling through the left pathway (i.e., the idā-nādī). Hatha-Yoga utilizes these two currents—corresponding to the sympathetic and parasympathetic nervous systems respectively—in order to achieve a psychoenergetic balance and mental tranquillity. When this energetic harmony is achieved, the central channel (i.e., the sushumnā-nādī) is activated. As soon as the life force (prāna) flows into and up the central channel, it awakens the serpent power (kundalinī-shakti) and pulls it into the central channel as well. Thereafter the kundalinī rises to the crown of the head, leading to a sublime state of mind-transcending unified consciousness (or nirvikalpa-samādhi, “formless ecstasy”).

Far away from Oshoro in Nara Prefecture on the island of Honshu, there is a sacred mountain called Miwa-Yama. In a pattern with which I was now becoming familiar, this entire pyramid-shaped mountain is considered by Japan's indigenous Shinto religion to be a shrine, possessed by the spirit of a god who 'stayed his soul' within it in ancient times. His correct name is Omononushino-Kami (although he is also popularly known as Daikokusama) and according to the ancient texts he is 'the guardian deity of human life' who taught mankind how to cure disease, manufacture medicines and grow crops. His symbol, very strikingly, is a serpent -- and to this day serpents are still venerated at Mount Miwa, where pilgrims bring them boiled eggs and cups of sake.

The Roman Church maintains that it was not so much the seed of the woman, as the woman herself, that was to bruise the head of the serpent. In defiance of all grammar, she renders the Divine denunciation against the serpent thus: "She shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise her heel." The same was held by the ancient Babylonians, and symbolically represented in their temples. In the uppermost storey of the tower of Babel, or temple of Belus, Diodorus Siculus tells us there stood three images of the great divinities of Babylon; and one of these was of a woman grasping a serpent's head. Among the Greeks the same thing was symbolised; for Diana, whose real character was originally the same as that of the great Babylonian goddess, was represented as bearing in one of her hands a serpent deprived of its head. As time wore away, and the facts of Simiramis's history became obscured, her son's birth was boldly declared to be miraculous: and therefore she was called "Alma Mater," "the Virgin Mother." That the birth of the Great Deliverer was to be miraculous, was widely known long before the Christian era.

The primitive character of the new atheism shows itself in the notion that religions are erroneous hypotheses. The Genesis story is not an early theory of the origin of species. In the fourth century AD, the founding theologian of western Christianity, St. Augustine, devoted fifteen years to composing a treatise on The Literal Meaning of Genesis, never completed, in which he argued that the biblical text need not be understood literally if it goes against what we know to be true from other sources. Before Augustine, and more radically, the first-century Greek-speaking Jewish philosopher Philo of Alexandria presented Genesis as an allegory or myth–an interweaving of symbolic imagery with imagined events that contained a body of meaning that could not easily be expressed in other ways. The story of Adam and Eve eating from the Tree of Knowledge is a mythical imagining of the ambiguous impact of knowledge on human freedom. Rather than being inherently liberating, knowledge can be used for purposes of enslavement. That is what is meant when, having eaten the forbidden apple after the serpent promises them they will become like gods, Adam and Eve find themselves expelled from the Garden of Eden and condemned to a life of unceasing labour. Unlike scientific theories, myths cannot be true or false. But myths can be more or less truthful to human experience. The Genesis myth is a more truthful rendition of enduring human conflicts than anything in Greek philosophy, which is founded on the myth that knowledge and goodness are inseparably connected. From the eighteenth-century English theologian William Paley…to twenty-first century exponents of creationism, apologists for theism have tried to develop theories that explain the origins of the universe and humankind better than prevailing scientific accounts. In doing so they are conceding to science an unwarranted authority over other ways of thinking. Religion is no more a primitive type of of science than is art or poetry. Scientific inquiry answers a demand for explanation. The practice of religion expresses a need for meaning, which would remain unsatisfied even if everything could be explained.

Deity Candle Colors Images and Symbols Pan Purple, brown, green Goat, pan pipes, caves, mountain forests Gaia Green, blue, brown Serpent, bees, harvested crops, green calcite, amber, honeysuckle Hecate Black, orange Snake, black dog, raven Venus Pink, white Spring flowers, pine cones Bacchus Red, purple Chalice, lion, bull Diana Silver, white Bow and arrow, forest animals, vegetation

The myths of Hylas, Adonis, Lityerses, and Linus describes the annual mourning for the sacred king of his boy-surrogate, sacrificed to placate the goddess of vegetation. The same surrogate appears in the legend of Triptolemus, who rode in a serpent-drawn chariot and carried sacks of corn to symbolize that his death brought wealth. Plutus (‘wealthy’), begotten in the ploughed field from whom Hades euphemistic title ‘Pluto’ is borrowed.

The purpose of the Genesis story is to explain the loss of that long, slow paradise that today we call the Paleolithic—an epoch of history in which our ancestors lived not only in a sustainable relationship to the Earth but in a joyous and loving one as well. In one of the greatest bait and switches of all time, that loss is blamed on Eve, whose name means, tellingly, “Mother of All Life.” In a final bid for patriarchal power, the Bible separates the Goddess from one of her oldest animal allies. For tens of thousands of years before Genesis was written, the serpent was the ultimate symbol of reincarnation and renewal. The ouroboros (a snake swallowing its own tail) signified the eternal cycles of birth, death, and rebirth that were the source of the Goddess’s power. In Genesis that life-sustaining circle is broken, and the serpent becomes evil instead. The natural world was no longer considered sentient and divine. The mutilation and exploitation of our Mother’s body could continue uninterrupted down to the present day. And yet, the final victory is always hers. Empires rise and fall. Whole civilizations vanish into vast deserts of geological time. But life remains. The Mother remains.

The Serpent in Genesis offers the knowledge to the primal, ignorant woman (recognized as equal to man in Luciferianism) in the metaphor of an apple to the animalistic man. This knowledge gives the divine spark which opens the eyes of woman and man. The Serpent, traditionally a symbol of fertility, renewal and knowledge gives the gift which he explains “God knows that your eyes will be opened as soon as you eat it, and you will be like God, knowing both good and evil.

DRACO & THUBAN The Dragon ﻥﺎﺒﻌﺛ thuʿbān Thuban and Al Tinnin is from the Arabic title for a star in the constellation of Draco (Azhdeha). Draco, in Greek mythology was the serpent which guarded the Golden Apples in the garden of the Hesperides. Thuban itself translates ‘snake’. In the Zoroastrian Bundahishn, Gochihr, a dragon of Ahriman, identified as the Draco constellation is like a snake (dragons and serpents have interchangeable root word associations) with the head in Gemini (Pahlavi ‘do-pahikar’) and tail in Centaurus (nemasp). The head of Gochihr, (Gochihr Sar) was identified as the demon (daeva) of eclipses under the rule of Ahriman. In the Bundahishn, two Daevas (demons) are enemies of the stellar constellations and threaten the order of the cosmos. Gochihr and Pairika Mush Parig both are serpent-like with tail and wings. The Bundahishn reveals several astrological symbols and the lore of the Dragon. “As Gochihr falls in the celestial sphere from a moon-beam on to the earth, the distress of the earth becomes such-like as that of a sheep when a wolf falls upon it.” -Bundahishn Chapter 30 The eclipsing power of the Gochihr is partially thwarted by establishing parameters in which the demons are restrained to. The Bundahishn describes “Gochihr and Mushpar, provided with tails, unto the sun and moon and stars. The sun has attached Mushpar to its own radiance by mutual agreement, so that he may be less able to do harm”. In Manichaean lore also recognized the eclipsing Dragon as Anabibazon and Katabibazon (Head and Tail of the Dragon). Gochihr or Draco is known in the Brahmanic tradition as Rahu, demon of eclipses. Using the Algol Ritual, call forth your shadow and take the eclipsing power of Azhdeha as the form of the sorcerer.

HECATE TRIMORPHIS Antiquity provides the inspired Witch or Warlock with a vast body of knowledge concerning one of the most ancient, revered and feared deity known as Hecate. From ancient Greek and Greco-Roman myth, religion and magick traditions and her many epithets and masks, the Triple Goddess is incarnated in various forms and names in Celtic, Norse, Germanic, Thracian, Scythian and the Hellenistic world through the Christian period. The lore and wisdom of the circle reveals that the feminine and masculine powers which embody the Lord and Lady of the Sabbat are of equal quality. To be awakened as Baphomet – Cain, the Luciferian must attain a beginning of balance between Samael and Lilith. Be it known, these are Names of Power and there are numerous types of Deific Power within the elements and this world of flesh and spirit. Lilith is one mask of the goddess, representing a type of manifestation of that power. The goddess Hecate is another equally terrible and beautiful Deific Mask which is a foundation for the Luciferian Path. Hecate tests, challenges and reveals the complete circle of Above and Below. The Left-Hand Path is one of the Crooked Serpent; the Leviathanic-dragon which emerges from the deepest darkness, coiling upward to be Crowned in the Emerald and Amethyst brilliance of the sun. In this is found metaphor and knowledge, mark well the keys to your Apotheosis upon this path. You will not bow before another; all symbols and powers are incarnated in your flesh and spirit. To join the gods in the Sabbatic Circle of the Dream is to bring under your power the spirits of ancient forces which will be consumed in the diabolic ecstasies of nocturnal flight. Hecate has many faces, names and forms. To understand this great power, we must know her names and the whispers often too soft for the uninitiated to hear. In the Chaldean Oracles, Neoplatonism elevates Hecate to a goddess who has numerous incarnations and a wide authority of power. In the Oracles, Hecate is the Queen of Daimons; she personifies powers of matter and nature. The Chaldean Hecate reflects as a mirror the nature of the soul embodied in matter; she equals in approach the internal condition of the soul and matter. There are several traditions and variations of the Names of Power and Deific Masks Hecate assumes as a Triad, I have listed three examples. HECATE TRIODOTIS (of the Crossroads or Three-ways) Phoibie – Holds a key in her right hand and a blazing torch in her left hand. Dione – Holds a whip in her right hand and a burning torch in her left hand. Nychie – Holds a serpent in her right hand and dagger in her left hand. A second example of the Triad: HECATE TRIMORPHIS (Three-formed) Luna Lucifera (the Moon) in Heaven Diana Artemis on Earth, Hecate Phosphoros (Bringer of Light, Carrier of the Torch, the Morning Star) Hecate Chthonia (of the Underworld)

[T]here really could be no self if it were not in relation; the self and individualism exclude each other. The self is relatedness. Only when the self mirrors itself in so many mirrors does it really exist-then it has roots. You can never come to your self by building a meditation hut on top of Mount Everest; you will only be visited by your own ghosts and that is not individuation: you are all alone with yourself and the self doesn't exist. The self only exists inasmuch as you appear. Not that you are, but that you do is the self. The self appears in your deeds, and deeds always mean relationship; a deed is something that you produce which is practically outside of you, between yourself and your surroundings, between subject and object-there the self is visible. So the symbol is the sun encoiled by the serpent. Jung, C. G.. Nietzsche's Zarathustra: Notes of the Seminar given in 1934-1939. Two Volumes: 1-2, unabridged (Jung Seminars) (p. 795). Princeton University Press.