Section X. Tree, Serpent, and Crocodile Worship.
Object of horror or of adoration, men have for the serpent an implacable hatred, or prostrate themselves before its genius. Lie calls it, Prudence claims it, Envy carries it in its heart, and Eloquence on its caduceus. In Hell it arms the whip of the Furies; in Heaven Eternity makes of it its symbol.
De Châteaubriand.
The Ophites asserted that there were several kinds of Genii, from God to man; that the relative superiority of these was decided by the degree of Light that was accorded to each; and they maintained that the Serpent had to be constantly called upon and to be thanked for the signal service it had rendered humanity. For it taught Adam that if he ate of the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of good and evil, he would raise his Being immensely by the learning and wisdom he would thus acquire. Such was the exoteric reason given.
It is easy to see whence is the primal idea of the dual, Janus-like character of the Serpent—the good and the bad. This symbol is one of the most ancient, because the reptile preceded the bird, and the bird the mammal. Hence the belief, or rather the superstition, of the savage tribes who think that the souls of their ancestors live under this form, and the general association of the Serpent with the Tree. The legends about the various meanings it represents are numberless; but, as most of them are allegorical, they have now passed into the class of fables based on ignorance and dark superstition. For instance, when Philostratus narrates that the natives of India and Arabia fed on the heart and liver of Serpents in order to learn the language of all the animals, the Serpent being credited with that faculty, he certainly never meant his words to be accepted literally.[651] As will be found more than once as we proceed, Serpent and Dragon were names given [pg 435] to the Wise Ones, the Initiated Adepts of olden times. It was their wisdom and their learning that were devoured or assimilated by their followers, whence the allegory. When the Scandinavian Sigurd is fabled to have roasted the heart of Fafnir, the Dragon, whom he had slain, and thence to have become the wisest of men, the meaning is the same. Sigurd had become learned in the runes and magical charms; he had received the “Word” from an Initiate of the name of Fafnir, or from a sorcerer, after which the latter died, as do many, after “passing the word.” Epiphanius lets out a secret of the Gnostics in trying to expose their “heresies.” The Gnostic Ophites, he says, had a reason for honouring the Serpent: it was because he taught the primeval men the Mysteries.[652] Verily so; but they did not have Adam and Eve in the Garden in their minds when teaching this dogma, but simply that which is stated above. The Nâgas of the Hindû and Tibetan Adepts were human Nâgas (Serpents), not reptiles. Moreover, the Serpent has ever been the type of consecutive or serial rejuvenation, of Immortality and Time.
The numerous and extremely interesting readings, the interpretations and facts about Serpent worship, given in Mr. Gerald Massey's Natural Genesis, are very ingenious and scientifically correct. But they are far from covering the whole of the meanings implied. They divulge only the astronomical and physiological mysteries, with the addition of some cosmic phenomena. On the lowest plane of materiality, the Serpent was, no doubt, the “great emblem of Mystery in the Mysteries,” and was, very likely, “adopted as a type of feminine pubescence, on account of its sloughing and self-renewal.” It was so, however, only with regard to mysteries concerning terrestrial animal life, for as the symbol of “re-clothing and re-birth in the [universal] mysteries,” its “final phase,”[653] or shall we rather say its incipient and culminating phases, was not of this plane. These phases were generated in the pure realm of Ideal Light, and having accomplished the round of the whole cycle of adaptations and symbolism, the Mysteries returned from whence they had come, into the essence of immaterial causality. They belonged to the highest Gnôsis. And surely this could have never obtained its name and fame solely on account of its penetration into physiological and especially feminine functions!
As a symbol, the Serpent had as many aspects and occult meanings as the Tree itself; the “Tree of Life,” with which it was emblematically [pg 436] and almost indissolubly connected. Whether viewed as a metaphysical or a physical symbol, the Tree and Serpent, jointly, or separately, have never been so degraded by antiquity as they are now, in this our age of the breaking of idols, not for truth's sake, but to glorify the most gross matter. The revelations and interpretations in General Forlong's Rivers of Life would have astounded the worshippers of the Tree and Serpent in the days of archaic Chaldean and Egyptian wisdom; and even the early Shaivas would have recoiled in horror at the theories and suggestions of the author of the said work. “The notion of Payne Knight and Inman that the Cross or Tau is simply a copy of the male organs in a triadic form is radically false,” writes Mr. G. Massey, who proves what he says. But this is a statement that could be as justly applied to almost all the modern interpretations of ancient symbols. The Natural Genesis, a monumental work of research and thought, the most complete on that subject that has ever been published, covering as it does a wider field, and explaining much more than all the Symbologists who have hitherto written, does not yet go beyond the “psycho-theistic” stage of ancient thought. Nor were Payne Knight and Inman altogether wrong; except in entirely failing to see that their interpretations of the Tree of Life, as the Cross and Phallus, fitted the symbol only in the lowest and latest stage of the evolutionary development of the idea of the Giver of Life. It was the last and the grossest physical transformation of Nature, in animal, insect, bird and even plant; for bi-une, creative magnetism, in the form of the attraction of contraries, or sexual polarization, acts in the constitution of reptile and bird as it does in that of man. Moreover, the modern Symbologists and Orientalists, from first to last, being ignorant of the real Mysteries revealed by Occultism, can necessarily see but this last stage. If told that this mode of procreation, which the whole world of being has now in common on this Earth, is but a passing phase, a physical means of furnishing the conditions to and producing the phenomena of life, and that it will alter with this and disappear with the next Root-Race, they would laugh at such a superstitious and unscientific idea. But the most learned Occultists assert this because they know it. The universe of living beings, of all those which procreate their species, is the living witness to the various modes of procreation in the evolution of animal and human species and races; and the Naturalist ought to sense this truth intuitionally, even though he is yet unable to demonstrate [pg 437] it. How could he, indeed, with the present modes of thought! The landmarks of the archaic history of the Past are few and scarce, and those that men of Science come across are mistaken for finger-posts of our little era. Even so-called “universal (?) history” embraces but a tiny field in the almost boundless space of the unexplored regions of our latest, Fifth Root-Race. Hence, every fresh sign-post, every new glyph of the hoary Past that is discovered, is added to the old stock of information, to be interpreted on the same lines of preëxisting conceptions, and without any reference to the special cycle of thought which that particular glyph may belong to. How can Truth ever come to light if this method is never changed!
Thus, in the beginning of their joint existence as a glyph of Immortal Being, the Tree and Serpent were divine imagery, truly. The Tree was reversed, and its roots were generated in Heaven and grew out of the Rootless Root of All-Being. Its trunk grew and developed; crossing the planes of the Plerôma, it shot out crossways its luxuriant branches, first on the plane of hardly differentiated matter, and then downward till they touched the terrestrial plane. Thus, the Ashvattha Tree of Life and Being, whose destruction alone leads to immortality, is said in the Bhagavadgîtâ to grow with its roots above and its branches below.[654] The roots represent the Supreme Being, or First Cause, the Logos; but one has to go beyond those roots to unite oneself with Krishna, who, says Arjuna, is “greater than Brahman, and First Cause ... the indestructible, that which is, that which is not, and what is beyond them.”[655] Its boughs are Hiranyagarbha (Brahmâ or Brahman in its highest manifestations, say Shrîdhara Svâmin and Madhusûdana), the highest Dhyân Chohans or Devas. The Vedas are its leaves. He only who goes beyond the roots shall never return; that is to say, shall reïncarnate no more during this Age of Brahmâ.
It is only when its pure boughs had touched the terrestrial mud of the Garden of Eden, of our Adamic Race, that this Tree became soiled by the contact and lost its pristine purity; and that the Serpent of Eternity, the Heaven-Born Logos, was finally degraded. In days of old, of the Divine Dynasties on Earth, the now dreaded reptile was regarded as the first beam of light that radiated from the abyss of Divine Mystery. Various were the forms which it was made to assume, and numerous the natural symbols adapted to it, as it crossed the æons of Time; as from Infinite Time (Kâla) itself it fell into the space and [pg 438] time evolved out of human speculation. These forms were cosmic and astronomical, theistic and pantheistic, abstract and concrete. They became in turn the Polar Dragon and the Southern Cross, the Alpha Draconis of the Pyramid, and the Hindû-Buddhist Dragon, which ever threatens, yet never swallows the Sun during its eclipses. Till then, the Tree remained ever green, for it was sprinkled by the Waters of Life; the Great Dragon remained ever divine, so long as it was kept within the precincts of the sidereal fields. But the Tree grew and its lower boughs at last touched the Infernal Regions—our Earth. Then the Great Serpent Nidhögg—he who devours the corpses of the evil-doers in the “Hall of Misery” (human life), so soon as they are plunged into Hwergelmir, the roaring cauldron (of human passions)—gnawed the reversed World-Tree. The worms of materiality covered the once healthy and mighty roots, and are now ascending higher and higher along the trunk; while the Midgard Snake coiled at the bottom of the Seas, encircles the Earth, and, through its venomous breath, makes her powerless to defend herself.