A Riddle from the East

"The serpent has seven daughters

The first one is asleep as if petrified – she does not see anything

The second one is deeply asleep – she sees multicoloured mists before her eyes

The third one sees dreams and images from afar

The fourth one sees everything around her

The fifth one sees the souls

The sixth one sees the gods

The seventh one sees the sun

The serpent has seven daughters"

The sun rises in the east, and also the sun of the spirit, of which it is the symbol, approaches humanity from the east. It is said that all true spiritual leaders of humanity come from the east. The east symbolises the field of life of the divine reality, which consists of totally different elements than our world. It is eternal and perfect. The longing radiating from the centre of the human system, from the primordial atom, ascends to this field.

   The West European human being is inclined to nurture a profound antipathy towards the serpent, because he knows it from the creation story in the Old Testament. Wasn’t it the serpent that persuaded Eve to eat ‘the fruit of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil’ and give Adam of it, too? But notice the symbolism of the serpent: the serpent is the soul, the consciousness living in the head and in the human spinal canal. Even its form resembles a serpent. Through Jesus, the universal teachings of wisdom also state: ‘Be wise as serpents.’ To truly understand this, we must raise ourselves above the dusty, earthly point of view. Behind the words from the Bible, both the Old and the New Testament, the true knowledge of ‘the human fall’ is hidden. It is unveiled for the human being who is found on the path to his original fatherland. On this path, he experiences that the symbol of the serpent can also have another meaning.

   How and when were these truths, hidden in symbols, planted in our inner being? To approach this mystery, we must realise that all visible energy consists of vibrations. The primordial serpent from long before the familiar mysteries (see the image of the serpent that winds around the Tau symbol) -- initially symbolising the purest energy -- has degenerated to a being that binds the human being to the world of matter. When we see this before us, we also recognise the symbol of the seven-headed dragon arising from the water floods -- the defiled realm of life of the soul: a many-headed monster that seems invincible and can only be defeated by a hero!

   A symbol is a sign with which power impulses are linked. They represent truths of a higher level of vibration, which we can only surmise with our consciousness that vibrates at a lower   level. The power concentrated in it reveals the path, on which the fall may be turned into a resurrection. The wisdom of the original source of life is often represented as a serpent, as the purest energy a human being can achieve. It is one aspect of infinite divinity. This energy addresses the human consciousness as light, as insight, and also as a certain rest. This is why a human being can recognise the dormant state of the primordial atom, the divinity within him.

   When a human being understands this, he receives the biggest chance of his life. Then he has the opportunity to make a new soul, formed from original powers, develop through the awakening of the primordial atom. Then a ‘hero’ is born! In the classical sense of the word, a hero is always ‘the son of God and a human being’. If ‘human being’ and ‘God’ (the spirit-spark atom) merge, this young hero grows: the ‘new man’, who is pervaded of the spirit, develops in the gnostic radiation. This path of development is described in the Bogomil poem. The seven daughters of the serpent symbolise the seven different stages of the soul. The process of its awakening occurs in seven stages.

   In the first stage, a deathlike sleep is described, the blind petrifaction. The second stage describes the soul that hears the call from the divine field of life, which announces itself as a vague notion. In the third stage, the soul is shown the path that may lead it to its true destiny, as in a dream. In the fourth stage, the soul achieves an initial form of consciousness. It experiences that it finds itself in a hardly enviable position: bound to blind matter and separated from the primordial source. On the fifth level, the soul sees. It is one with all and knows that unity is the true goal of all souls. On the sixth level, it enters, as reborn soul, the field of the universal brotherhood: the true realm of life of humanity. The dream world is gradually removed, until the soul ultimately wakes up on the seventh level in the light of the spirit.

   In this way, this veiled poem describes not only a development and does not only reveal a path, but at the same time contains a promise, because: The seventh daughter sees the sun.

   The ancient Egyptians saw the universal energy as a serpent in which a god dwelt. It was called Khepra. This serpent, the power of this serpent that represents the original divine energy, is a part of us.

Through the ages, the serpent has always had a great symbolic significance. With the Australian aboriginals, we find images of serpents in rock drawings that are over 20,000 years old. They represent the ‘heavenly serpent’ as two intertwined serpents, with their heads turned upward, which is very similar to the Caduceus, Hermes’ serpent staff. The original inhabitants believed that the serpent symbolised the God-given energy, and they called this power the serpent life power, corresponding to the Indian concept of kundalini. A direct link was assumed with the bird that symbolised the flight of the soul to the spirit. In his book Voices of the First Day. Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime, Lawlor writes: ‘The serpent is the rainbow of energy. This serpent is the oldest-known cosmological model of universal energy as a spectrum. The electromagnetic spectrum is a radiation field extending from gamma rays to radio waves. Only a small part of this energy is visible: the spectrum of the seven colours of daylight. All radiations have the same speed and electromagnetic nature; the sole difference is determined by frequency and wavelength. The rainbow serpent is a profound metaphor of the unity between the tangible and the invisible worlds.’ 

The Egyptians knew the Bennu bird, the symbol of the resurrection of the soul. An Egyptian story that was passed down orally through the ages, dealt with a famous serpent, according to the author Cyrianus in 252 AD. ‘The great serpent was the guardian of the temple. How often did we not repeat that the symbol was not a personification, but a real serpent in which a god dwelt? And we declare that we, just as thousands of other visitors, saw an enormous serpent in a temple in Cairo, which had lived there for ages and which was shown much respect.’

Sources:

Nikolai Rainov, Im Land der Geister und Dämonen (In the land of spirits and demons). Sophia Press, Sofia, Bulgaria, 1980.
J van Rijckenborgh, The Brotherhood of Shamballa. Rozekruis Pers, Haarlem, The Netherlands, 1953.
J van Rijckenborgh, There is no empty space. Rozekruis Pers, Haarlem, The Netherlands, 1953.
Robert Lawlor, Voices of the First Day. Awakening in the Aboriginal Dreamtime. Inner Traditions International Ltd., Rochester, USA, 1991.

 © Lectorium Rosicrucianum 2006.

Article from Pentagram No 5, 2006