When the Serpent Sloughs Off His Skin

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Constitution of Man Series · 8 pages

From Isis Unveiled I, and built around a single symbol. What modern cosmogonist, she asks, could compress within anything as simple as the Egyptian serpent in a circle such a world of meaning — for in that creature is the whole philosophy of the universe: matter vivified by spirit, and the two conjointly evolving out of chaos everything that was to be. The detail she draws attention to is that the Egyptians tied the serpent's tail into a knot, to signify that the elements are fast bound in the cosmic matter it symbolises.

The second emblem is the one the title takes, and she claims it had not been noticed before by the symbolists. As the reptile on casting its coat is freed from a casing of gross matter which cramped a body grown too large for it, and resumes existence with renewed activity, so man by casting off the gross material body enters the next stage of his existence with enlarged powers and quickened vitality — the same figure Tennyson uses of the dragonfly leaving its husk in The Two Voices, also in this batch. The argument is then inverted: the Chaldean kabbalists hold that primeval man, contrary to Darwinian theory purer, wiser and far more spiritual — as the Scandinavian Buri, the Hindu Devatas and the Mosaic sons of God all show — became despiritualised and tainted with matter, and only then took on the condition we now think natural.

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