Who can read the Riddle of the Serpent?: Why a cold and selfish creature, voiceless and limbless, was chosen as the symbol of kingly power and occult wisdom?

On the lowest plane of materiality, the Serpent was adopted as a type of feminine pubescence, on account of its sloughing and self-renewal.

The Serpent and the Tree of Life are indissolubly connected. These sacred symbols have never been so degraded by antiquity as they are now, in this age of the breaking of idols, not for truth’s sake but to glorify gross matter. In the beginning of their joint existence as a glyph of Immortal Being, the Tree and Serpent were divine imagery, truly.

In the days of the divine Dynasties on Earth, the now dreaded reptile, emblem of the heaven-born Logos, was regarded as the first beam of light that radiated from the abyss of Divine Mystery. As the Serpent, originally dwelling beyond absolute space and infinite time, fell into the space and finite time, he was made to assume various forms: cosmic and astronomical, theistic and pantheistic, abstract and concrete. There is a universal belief that serpents are wise, cunning, and fascinating.

The dragons and serpents of antiquity are seven-headed, one head for each root-race.

The Crocodile is the Egyptian Dragon, the pre-planetary form of Saturn, Sevekh’s Word-Logos. He was the dual symbol of Heaven and Earth, of Sun and Moon, made sacred to Osiris and Isis because of its amphibious nature.

The Serpent was degraded as the symbol of evil and devil, only during the middle ages, when the Sun, Tree, Serpent, Crocodile, and other ancient symbols were imported wholesale by dogmatic Christianity and passed in full into the Christian Church.

The “True and Perfect Serpent,” the Dark Serpent of Absolute Wisdom of the Ophite creed, is the seven-vowelled God, represented by the Swastika — the seven-fold androgyne Logos unfolding out of its own essence the faculties and powers latent in Saptaparna, the seven-leaved Man-plant.