The Alexandrian Neo-Platonists asserted that to become real Chaldees or Magi, one had to master the science or knowledge of the periods of the Seven Rectors of the World, in whom is all wisdom. And Jamblichus is credited with another version, which does not, however, alter the meaning, for he says:
The Assyrians have not only preserved the records of seven and twenty myriads of years, as Hipparchus says they have, but likewise of the whole apocatastases and periods of the Seven Rulers of the World.[662]
The legends of every nation and tribe, whether civilized or savage, point to the once universal belief in the great wisdom and cunning of the Serpents. They are “charmers.” They hypnotize the bird with their eye, and man himself very often does not overcome their fascinating influence; therefore the symbol is a most fitting one.
The Crocodile is the Egyptian Dragon. It was the dual symbol of Heaven and Earth, of Sun and Moon, and was made sacred, in consequence of its amphibious nature, to Osiris and Isis. According to Eusebius, the Egyptians represented the Sun in a Ship as its pilot, this ship being carried along by a Crocodile, “to show the motion of the Sun in the Moist (Space).”[663] The Crocodile was, moreover, the symbol of Lower Egypt herself, the Lower being the more swampy of the two [pg 441] countries. The Alchemists claim another interpretation. They say that the symbol of the Sun in the Ship on the Ether of Space meant that the Hermetic Matter is the principle, or basis, of Gold, or again the philosophical Sun; the Water, within which the Crocodile is swimming, is that Water, or Matter, made liquid; the Ship herself, finally, representing the Vessel of Nature, in which the Sun, or the sulphuric, igneous principle, acts as a pilot, because it is the Sun which conducts the work by his action upon the Moist or Mercury. The above is only for the Alchemists.
The Serpent became the type and symbol of evil, and of the Devil, only during the Middle Ages. The early Christians as well as the Ophite Gnostics, had their dual Logos: the Good and the Bad Serpent, the Agathodæmon and the Kakodæmon. This is demonstrated by the writings of Marcus, Valentinus, and many others, and especially in Pistis-Sophia—certainly a document of the earliest centuries of Christianity. On the marble sarcophagus of a tomb, discovered in 1852 near the Porta Pia, one sees the scene of the adoration of the Magi, “or else,” remarks the late C. W. King, in The Gnostics and their Remains, “the prototype of that scene, the ‘Birth of the New Sun’.” The mosaic floor exhibited a curious design which might have represented either Isis suckling the babe Harpocrates, or the Madonna nursing the infant Jesus. In the smaller sarcophagi that surrounded the larger one, many leaden plates rolled like scrolls were found, eleven of which can still be deciphered. The contents of these ought to be regarded as final proof of a much-vexed question, for they show that either the early Christians, up to the VIth Century, were bonâ fide Pagans, or that dogmatic Christianity was borrowed wholesale, and passed in full into the Christian Church—Sun, Tree, Serpent, Crocodile and all.
On the first is seen Anubis ... holding out a scroll; at his feet are two female busts: below all are two serpents entwined about ... a corpse swathed up like a mummy. In the second scroll ... is Anubis, holding out a cross, the “Sign of Life.” Under his feet lies the corpse encircled in the numerous folds of a huge serpent, the Agathodæmon, guardian of the deceased.... In the third scroll ... the same Anubis bears on his arm an oblong object, ... held so as to convert the outline of the figure into a complete Latin cross. ... At the god's foot is a rhomboid, the Egyptian “Egg of the World,” towards which crawls a serpent coiled into a circle.... Under the ... busts ... is the letter ω, repeated seven times in a line, reminding one of the “Names.”... Very remarkable also is the line of characters, apparently Palmyrene, upon [pg 442]the legs of the first Anubis. As for the figure of the serpent, supposing these talismans to emanate not from the Isiac but the newer Ophite creed, it may well stand for that “True and perfect Serpent,” who “leads forth the souls of all that put their trust in him out of the Egypt of the body, and through the Red Sea of Death into the Land of Promise, saving them on their way from the Serpents of the Wilderness, that is, from the Rulers of the Stars.”[664]
And this “true and perfect Serpent” is the seven-lettered God who is now credited with being Jehovah, and Jesus one with him. To this seven-vowelled God the candidate for Initiation is sent by the “First Mystery,” in the Pistis-Sophia, a work earlier than St. John's Revelation, and evidently of the same school. “The (Serpent of the) Seven Thunders uttered these seven vowels,” but “seal up those things which the Seven Thunders uttered, and write them not,” says Revelation. “Do ye seek after these mysteries?”—inquires Jesus in Pistis-Sophia. “No mystery is more excellent than they [the seven vowels]; for they shall bring your souls unto the Light of Lights”—i.e., true Wisdom. “Nothing, therefore, is more excellent than the mysteries which ye seek after, saving only the mystery of the Seven Vowels and their forty and nine Powers, and the numbers thereof.”
In India, it was the mystery of the Seven Fires and their Forty-nine Fires or aspects, or “the numbers thereof.”
These Seven Vowels are represented by the Svastika signs on the crowns of the seven heads of the Serpent of Eternity, in India, among Esoteric “Buddhists,” in Egypt, in Chaldæa, etc., and among the Initiates of every other country. They are the Seven Zones of post mortem ascent, in the Hermetic writings, in each of which the “Mortal” leaves one of his Souls, or Principles; until arrived on the plane above all Zones, he remains as the great Formless Serpent of Absolute Wisdom, or the Deity Itself. The seven-headed Serpent has more than one signification in the arcane teachings. It is the seven-headed Draco, each of whose heads is a star of the Lesser Bear; but it was also, and preëminently, the Serpent of Darkness, inconceivable and incomprehensible, whose seven heads were the seven Logoi, the reflections of the one and first-manifested Light—the Universal Logos.