Ii — Serpent Symbol
Better is he who is above temptation, than he who, being tempted, overcomes, since the latter but suppresses the evil inclination stirring in his breast which the former has not. Whoever is tempted has so far sinned as to entertain the tempting lust within, betraying his lapse from singleness or holiness. The virtuous choose, are virtuous by choice; the holy, being one, deliberate not—their volitions answering spontaneously to their desires. It is the cleft personality, or other within, which seduces the Will, and is the Adversary and Deuce we become individually, and impersonate in the Snake.
Chaste love’s a maid,
Though shapen as a man.
But one were an Œdipus to expound this serpent mythology; whereby is symbolized the mysteries of genesis, and of The One rejoining man’s parted personality, and thus recreating mankind. Coeval with flesh, the symbol appears wherever traces of civilization exist; a remnant of it in the ancient Phallus worship having come to us disguised in our Mayday dance. Nor was it confined to carnal knowledge merely. The serpent symbolized divine wisdom, also; and it was under this acceptation that it became associated with those “traditionary teachers of mankind whose genial wisdom entitled them to divine honors.” An early Christian sect, called Ophites, worshipped it as the personation of natural knowledge. So the injunction, “Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves,” becomes the more significant when we learn that seraph in the original means a serpent; cherub, a dove. And these again symbolize facts in osteological science as connected with the latest theories of the vertebrated cranium,K which view Nature as ophiomorphous—a series of spines, crowned, winged, webbed, finned, footed in structure—set erect, prone, trailing, as charged with life in higher potency or lower; man, holding the sceptre of dominion as he maintains his inborn rectitude, or losing his prerogative as lapsed from his integrity—hereby debasing his form and parcelling his gifts away in the prone shapes distributed throughout nature’s kingdoms. Or, again as aspiring for lost supremacy, he uplift and crown his fallen form with forehead, countenance, speech,—thus liberating the genius from the slime of its prone periods, and restoring it to rectitude, religion, science, fellowship, the ideal arts.
“Unless above himself he can
Erect himself, how poor a thing is man.”