Who Can Read the Riddle of the Serpent?

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Theosophy and Theosophists Series · 24 pages

Twenty-four pages with a contents page and abstract of central ideas. *The question it opens with is a genuinely good one*, and it is put in a way that makes the puzzle vivid: why was a cold and selfish creature, voiceless and limbless, chosen as the symbol of kingly power and of occult wisdom?

The file allows itself one joke before getting to work — that perhaps, when St Patrick drove the snakes from Ireland, he was the cause of its soil having ever since produced more wit than wisdom. The unriddling then proceeds along three lines, and they overlap with the shorter treatment in "Blavatsky on the veiled phraseology of the Puranas" earlier in this section, which a reader who wants the compressed version should go to instead. The first answer is evolutionary in form: the serpent is the most ancient symbol because the reptile preceded the bird, and the bird the mammal — so the creature stands for what came first. The second is historical: the serpent was honoured by the Gnostic Ophites because he taught primeval men the mysteries of Kosmos and man, and Serpent and Dragon were among the names given to the Wise Ones, the initiated adepts of olden times — with the important gloss that the Nagas of the Hindu and Tibetan adepts were men, not reptiles, so a whole class of stories about serpent-people is really about human teachers. The third is the reading the file is careful to place lowest rather than first: on the plane of materiality alone, the serpent was adopted as a type of feminine pubescence on account of its sloughing and self-renewal. The ordering is the point — the sexual reading is treated as the last and least of the meanings rather than the key to the rest.

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