(no subject)

So, I was reading The Gnostic Jung today, (as I sometimes do if I start to feel like my mind's not working as well as it should--sorta the same principle as throwing a person into the deep end if you want to get them to swim), and I came across some interesting passages on the symbolism of the snake. Thought I'd put it down for posterity, as it gives me one more reason why I want my ouroboros tattoo...

"...The serpent is an equivalent of the fish. The consensus of opinion interpreted the Redeemer equally as a fish and a serpent; he is a fish because he rose from the unknown depths, and a serpent because he came mysteriously out of the darkness. Fishes and snakes are favourite symbols for describing psychic happenings or experiences that suddenly dart out of the unconscious and have a frightening or redeeming effect. That is why they are so often expressed by the motif of helpful animals. The comparison of Christ with the serpent is more authentic than that with the fish, but, for all that, it was not so popular in primitive Christianity. The Gnostics favoured it because it was an old-established symbol for the "good" genius loci, the Agathodaimon, and also for their beloved Nous. Both symbols are of inestimable value when it comes to the natural, instinctive interpretation of the Christ-figure. Theriomorphic symbols are very common in dreams and other manifestations of the unconscious. They express the psychic level of the content in question; that is to say, such contents are at a stage of unconsciousness that is far from human consciousness as the psyche of an animal... The snake does in fact symbolize "cold-blooded," inhuman contents and tendencies of an abstractly intellectual as well as a concretely animal nature: in a word, the extra-human quality in man."

"... The agent is an animate, autonomous being, the serpent. It appears spontaneously or comes as a surprise; it fascinates; it's glance is staring, fixed, unrelated; it's blood is cold, and it is a stranger to man: it crawls over the sleeper, he finds it in a shoe or in his pocket. It expresses his fear of everything inhuman and his awe of the sublime, of what is beyond human ken. It is the lowest (devil) and the highest (son of God, Logos, Nous, Agathodiamon). The snake's presence is frighening, one finds it in unexpected places at unexpected moments. Like the fish, it represents and personifies the dark and unfathomable, the watery deep, the forest, the night, the cave. When a primitive says "snake," he means an experience of something extrahuman. The snake is not an allegory or metaphor, for it's own pecular form is symbolic in itself, and it is essential to note that the "Son" has the form of a snake and not the other way round: the snake does not signify the "Son."

"When, in treating a case of neurosis, we try to supplement the inadequate attitude (or adaptedness) of the concious mind by adding to it contents of the unconscious, our aim is to create a wider personality whose centre of gravity does not necessariy coincide with the ego, but which , on the contrary, as the patient's insights increase, may even thwart his ego-tendencies. Like a magnet, the new centre attracts to itself that which is proper to it, the "signs of the Father," i.e., everything that pertains to the original and unalterable character of the individual ground-plan. All this is older than the ego and acts towards it as the "blessed, nonexistent God" of the Basilidians acted towards the archon of the Ogdoad, the demiurge, and--paradoxically enough--as the son of the demiurge acted towards his father. The son proves superior in that he has knowledge of the message from above and can therefore tell his father that he is not the highest God. This apparent contradiction resolves itself when we consider the underlying psychological experience. On the one hand, in the products of the unsonscious the self appears as it were a priori, that is, in well-known circle and quaternity symbols which may already have occurred in the earliest dreams of childhood, long before there was any possibility of consciousness or understanding. On the other hand, only patient and painstaking work on the contents of the unconscious, and the resultant synthesis of the conscious and unconscious data, can lead to a "totality," which once more uses circle and quaternity symbols for purposes of self-description. In this phase, too, the original dreams of childhood are remembered and understood. The alchemists, who in their own way knew more about the nature of the individuation process than we moderns do, expressed this paradox through the symbol of the uroboros, the snake that bites it's own tail..."

Shortly after this, he starts spouting Greek and French (which he doesn't bother to translate) and me with out my Bable Fish... but those were the passages that struck me, anyway... Nifty huh?