Serpent Symbolism

[kbs2244]

John;
You are tantalizing me!
Is there some cosmic thing I am missing due to it‘s being blindingly obvious?

[john]

John;
You are tantalizing me!
Is there some cosmic thing I am missing due to it‘s being blindingly obvious?

Red Ochre.

John

[Beagle]

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Red_ochre

Ochre was one of the first pigments to be used by human beings. Pieces of hematite, worn down as though they had been used as crayons, have been found at 300,000 year old Homo heidelbergensis sites in France and Czechoslovakia. Neandertal burial sites sometimes include ochre as a grave good. The oldest evidence of mining activity, at the "Lion Cave" in Swaziland, is a 43,000 year old ochre mine. In Germanic rune lore, red ochre was often used in place of blood to redden, or tint, the runes and thereby instilling the spirit of life into the rune, enabling it to be used for magical purposes.

The clay used to produce red ochre is thought to be the "red earth" from which God created Adam in the Book of Genesis. In fact, the etymology of the name "Adam" is ancient Hebrew for "man of red earth." Red ochre can be found in great quantities in the mountains rimming the river basin where archeologists place the biblical Garden of Eden, now in modern day Iraq. For the early writers of the Christian Bible, one can imagine the vibrant red color of this natural clay evoking the color of human blood.

Another candidate for the earliest use of red ochre and a biblical reason for it's worldwide use.

Interestingly, Homo heidelbergensis is considered to be the progenitor of Neanderthal and he had a brain capacity larger than modern humans.

[kbs2244]

If it was used instead of blood to give the rocks “life“,
then it is a symbol of life, not death.
And then, giving it a grave goods or painting a corpse with it means giving life.
Life after death.
That is a pretty strong symbolism for 300,000 plus years ago.

[Ishtar]

Hi Beagle

Just caught up with this one.

Most, if not all, of the serpent symbolism comes from shamanic cultures, as the serpent is always very prevalent in the mystical journey of the shaman and plays a major part of his experience in other worlds.

[Beagle]

Most, if not all, of the serpent symbolism comes from shamanic cultures,

I know that it does, but I'm wondering how it came to be there. It seems like a dim racial memory of some kind.

[Ishtar]

I know that it does, but I'm wondering how it came to be there. It seems like a dim racial memory of some kind.

Hi Beags

Good to talk to you again. No, in my experience, it's not a dim racial memory but a common present day phenonema.

Before I explain my reasoning, though, I should probably ‘fess up here...and then you can all drum me off the board/condemn me as a total whacko if you like. But for the past umpteen years, I have been studying shamanism. In fact, my interest in archaeology is only as a result of my interest in shamanism — and not the other way round — and during the past year, my interest in shamanism has moved out of the theory of the study and into the field, as I am now learning shamanic techniques under a recognised shaman teacher.

So anyway, it seems to me that one of the common mistakes made by archaeologists is of assuming that because there is a common motif in the ancient cave paintings — say, if there are snake paintings in caves in Africa and snake paintings in caves in America — this means that there must have been some sort of migratory activity which spread the culture. But this, imho, isn’t necessarily so. Snakes (and birds) are the most common motifs in all shamanic cultures — from Siberia to North America, from Australia to Africa, from India to South America, etc etc — and this is because the shamans travelled - and still do travel - in vision into the same extra dimensionary worlds with the help of these animal ‘spirit guides’ and, therefore, shared (and share) a common consciousness, or common ground.

Here’s a modern day example. Say, you and I both love The Simpsons. But this isn’t necessarily because I’ve been to America, where The Simpsons is made, and watched it there. It’s because you and I share a common ground, and that common ground is called ‘television’.

From Online Etymological Dictionary
http://www.etymonline.com/index.php?sea ... hmode=none

"Tele:comb. form meaning "far, far off," from Gk. tele-, combining form of tele "far off, afar, at or to a distance," related to teleos (gen. telos) "end, goal, result, consummation, perfection," lit. "completion of a cycle," from PIE *kwel-es- (cf. Skt. caramah "the last," Bret. pell "far off," Welsh pellaf "uttermost"), from base *kwel- (see cycle)."

I know now, from my study of shamanism, both theoretical and practical, that shamans shared (and still do share) a ‘television’, a common vision in which the snake, or serpents play a major role.

The most respected expert on this was the late, great Mircae Eliade who was Professor of Ancient Religions at Harvard until about the 1950s. He was the first one to study, and notice and record, how similar the shamanic cultures were all over the world, and he has written a book on it called “Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy” and this is an excerpt:

“The helping spirits in animal form play an important role in the preliminaries to the shamanic seance, that is, in preparations for the ecstatic journey to the sky and the underworld. Usually their presence is manifested by the shaman imitating animal cries or behaviour. The Tungus [Siberian] shaman who has a snake as a helping spirit attempts to imitate the reptile’s motions during the seance; another, having the whirlwind as [spirit helper] behaves accordingly. Chukchee and Eskimo shamans turn themselves into wolves. Lapp [Scandinavian] shamans become wolves, bears, reindeer, fish – the Semang [Malayan] shaman can change into a tiger, as can the Sakai shaman [Malayan] and those of Kelantan [Malayan].”

and


“The Goldi, the Dolgan and the Tungus [all Siberian] say that, before birth, the souls of the children perch on the branches of the Cosmic Tree and the shamans go to find them. This mythical motif, which we have already encountered in the initiatory dreams of future shamans, is not confined to Central and North Asia; it is attested, for example, in Africa and Indonesia. The cosmological schema Tree-Bird (= Eagle), or Tree with Bird at its top and a Snake at its roots, although typical of the peoples of Central Asia and the ancient Germans, is presumably of Oriental origin, but the same symbolism is already formulated on prehistoric monuments.”

I don't know if ME knew this (as Indian studies are not everyone's cup of tea and so most researchers allude to the "mystical East" rather than actually go and get down and dirty there) but the cosmological creation myth of the Indian Vedanta is of Vishnu lying in the coils of Seshanga, the Cosmic Snake, in the Cosmic Ocean, and the Eagle/bird is Garuda.

Hope this helps.

[john]

All -
Find a copy of "Shamanism: Archaic Techniques of Ecstasy", written by Mircea Eliade. Bollingen Press. Even though it was first published damn near sixty years ago, to me it still has no rival as regards worldwide shamanic cultures.

john

[Ishtar]

It's here:

http://www.amazon.com/Shamanism-Archaic ... 176&sr=8-1

[kbs2244]

Don’t we have snakes and birds (angels) as guide to bad and good in Genesis?

[Ishtar]

Don’t we have snakes and birds (angels) as guide to bad and good in Genesis?

The shaman typically travels between three worlds - from this one, the middle world, he either goes down to the lower world (and this world is associated with the snake) or up to the upper world (associated with birds).

The Christians did a mash up of it, and made the lower world (with its evil serpent) Hell and the upper worlds (iwith its birds/angels) Heaven. In reality, the lower and upper worlds are different in terms of their landscapes and there are more animals in the lower world, but otherwise, they are the same - neither are heaven or hell, but each contain benevolent tutelary spirits.