Snakes and Spirit

On one hot afternoon while I was out for a walk I came across a long, black snake that was partially alive and quite injured.  When I walk I see snakes all the time, but this particular case made me stop and watch for a long time in awe because this snake, not quite dead, was being actively eaten alive by a crow, which would swoop down, peck, swoop up again. 
The bird and the snake were writhing, dancing, and engaging in an act of animal predation and death that was so terrible and beautiful that I could only stand by with my mouth open.  On that hot afternoon it looked like the only colors in the world were black, red, and some unnameable hue of the glaring sun.

I often consider what it is about snakes that captures us, for humans have been riveted for millennia by this strange animal that seems to swim on land without limbs, to coil and to strike, that gives us a strong thrill, either in surprise or fear or both, when we stumble upon one in the wild. 
Of course snakes can be deadly and they can surprise us.  They can hide in plain sight and they can move with incredible speed. 
In the mountains where I live the Chumash people for thousands of years called the Milky Way the Sky Snake, and it was He who gifted fire to the people by flicking his lightning tongue on the earth.  Nearly every single tradition and culture on earth contains the image of the snake, and usually as representing one of the more powerful forces of life: death, power, fertility, and/or resurrection. 
In Egypt several gods are serpentine, and the image of immortality, of death and rebirth, is depicted as a snake eating its own tail, called the Ouroboros.  The Egyptian glyph for serpent is identical to the glyph for Goddess.

I am not the first one to be interested in the snake and its connection with the mystical, probably not even the first person today to talk about it, so connected are the two.  In one lovely piece of writing from The Alphabet Versus the Goddess, author Leonard Shlain says:

Western culture has long reviled the snake, associating it with evil and temptation.  But at the dawn of civilization the snake was a positive symbol of feminine energy. 
Egyptians perceived the snake as a beneficent, vital creature intimately associated with female sexuality, and, by extension, with life.  A snake’s sinuous mode of locomotion is evocative of a nubile woman’s walk and dance.  Her movements in the throes of lovemaking are serpentine in contrast to the mechanical pumping of the male.  In some cultures, orgasm has been likened to releasing the latent energy of a coiled snake.

Snakes also resembled three other important life-affirming images: the meander of rivers, the roots of trees and plants, and the umbilical cord of mammals.  There can be no structure that better symbolizes the idea of a mother/nurturer than an umbilical cord.  Its form resembles two snakes entwined about each other.  Rising out from a placentas sinuous blood vessels, the umbilical cord might easily inspire the notion that snakes were vital to life.  Further, snakes live in deep crevices and fissures in the earth, tying them to the Great Mother.  And, because a snake regularly sheds its skin to begin anew, it can easily be imagined as an immortal creature that does not die, and is thus a potent symbol of rebirth.

In early Indian traditions and symbology the snake goes a step further than even the notion of life, death, earth, and sexuality the concept of Kundalini. 
Kundalini is the primary force of the subtle body of energy that lies within the map of the physical body, coiled in the center of the heart and springing forth to become all of life, all of the universe, and all of the potentiality of existence.  Kundalini relates to the term visarga, which is the dynamic creation and fluidity of consciousness as it crystallizes, thickens, or condenses into the universe.

In Western literature Kundalini was described as far back as the 1880’s in Theosophical Society publications as “the grand pristine force which underlies organic and inorganic matter,” or “the one great primeval force or power which created the universe.”
Carl Jung, in the 1930s, studied and experienced kundalini awakening and applied his personal spiritual experiences to his models of psychology, particularly to psychological development and wholeness.  His notion of the collective unconscious was drawn from these experiences, and from his powerful visions and dreams he drew serpents, linking them with his own psycho-spiritual process that he called individuation.  Jung even stated that “the commonest dream symbol of transcendence is the snake.” 
We don’t have time for dream theory here, but boy am I itching to go off on a snake-dream tangent!  I think we can leave it at this quote and let it hold, clear and straightforward, all the meaning it truly deserves.

The word kundalini comes from the word kundali, or “ring-shaped,” described in the Tantrasadbhava Tantra.  The earliest literature on kundalini comes from a Shakta, or Goddess-worshipping, tradition called Nisvasa, a corpus of Sanskrit texts from the early 700s CE. 
The first such text, uncovered and explained by the scholar (and one of my teachers) Ben Williams, does not yet mention her by name, but states, “Without Siva, there is no liberation, there is no vidya other that Matrka, the creative source of the world.  She is the coiled goddess that moves upward” (Nishvasaguhyasutra 12.41).  This first description of kundalini ties her with the source of sound and sound vibration, for Matrka refers to mantra, or sound vibration that moves from the pre-conceptual vibratory form to the auditory form that can be recited and heard. 

The Nishvasakarika text from the same school finally names this energy, calling her a single point (anu) in the heart.  “She then moves upward to the ears, and then the tip of the tongue, and then expands outwards” (Nishvasakarika, 13.60-62).  Williams comments, “The movement from the heart out through the mouth is seen as a kind of creative movement of the universe, a cosmo-genesis of enunciating language.”

The first time that this cosmic sound vibration is described as a snake comes from the Kubjika tradition, another Shakta tradition that was influential in the development of the early Hatha yoga practices and texts.  These traditions talk about kundalini at the base of the spine, rising, awakening as a snake, and merging with Siva at the top of the head to create awakening or liberation.  Here we catch up to the Tantrasadbhava Tantra, “Enfolding herself into a single point in the heart she assumes the form of a slumbering serpent within” (1,216cd-1.230ab). 

Here still she is awakened by the highest resonance of sound, and quite poetically her coil is said to lengthen and straiten upon spiritual advancement, “Through the union of Shakti and Siva, the churned and the churner, she becomes strait.”

A more modern written account of kundalini is found in a commentary on the Bhagavad Gita by Jnandev, where he calls kundalini, “The great secret of the Naths,” a well known yogic sect that also relate to Hatha yoga by making use of physical postures in yoga. 

Kundalini is described in this text as the “golden serpent,” and she lives in the center of the spine, coiled three and a half times around the base of the spine with her mouth pointing upward.  When she is awakened she rises through the spine and pierces the top of the head, bringing the individual practitioner into a mystical state of unity consciousness. 

In this way the yogis, from the earliest Goddess-worshipping Shakta Tantric sects to the more Brahmanized Hatha yogis, were sequencing the physiology of Enlightenment. 
In the process of kundalini’s ascent the practitioner’s body is purified spiritually, psychologically, and physically, “the waste matter of childhood” is thrown out, and an inner fire is stoked in the body that cleanses the body’s fat, marrow, and stops the breath (from Catharina Kiehnle’s article on The Secret of the Naths: The Ascent of Kundalini according to Jnanesvari).  Kundalini activation, the serpent, and enlightenment have become synonymous thanks to early yoga.

You might wonder if awakening this kundalini energy is a good thing or a dangerous thing- or both.  Many yoga traditions that make use of the body through physical means of chanting mantra, taking physical gestures or mudras, engaging the bandhas, and all of postural yoga, are designed to wake up the great serpent power of kundalini.
In these traditions awakening kundalini is both an organized practice and also an attempt to coax the highly unlikely or almost impossible gift, like playing the lottery every single day with the hopes that someday you’ll hit the jackpot and kundalini will rise.  Kundalini is a great goddess of awakening, the source of god-consciousness in human form, the breaker of all obstacles, and the one that frees us from misery and ignorance.  For all of these traditions, awakening kundalini is the implicit and sometimes explicit goal.

There are many modern people who do not know this history and the intention built into systems and practices with which they engage, sometimes regularly and sometimes with total dedication.  When these people hit that jackpot and experience kundalini energy they may not have the support of knowledge, tradition, or lineage teachers to help them maneuver the phenomenon, and may even fall into temporary or long-term psychosis. 
Modern commentators and “experts” on kundalini can be super interesting. 
There are the false gurus who want to scare us about kundalini.  These teachers can be extremely manipulative.  They are often looking for students, have huge social media groups, warn about evil entities and being possessed and dark forces: they want us to listen to them and be healed by their proprietary power. 

What these teachers are genuinely touching on does have a core of truth, and it’s this: if there is unseen trauma in our system and we have awakened our kundalini through some innocent means (we weren’t actively trying to awaken her), such as yoga or Reiki or acupuncture or therapy or psychedelics or… well, I’m afraid the list is rather long, but if there’s trauma there then that trauma will be seen by the generative and illuminating kundalini process. 
It will not be seen gently.  It will not be seen with ease and comfort.  It will not feel pleasant.  It will not be subtle.  

Built in to all of the mystical practices and traditions that invoke the energetic body is the understanding that you have done some kind of spiritual work in a meaningful way.  You have tried to be ethical.  You have prayed, meditated, chanted, or prostrated yourself to God with some genuine effort. 
When there is no religious context for us and the great serpent awakens we can be haunted and terrorized by our own psychic barriers, traumas, triggers, patterns, and histories.  It’s real, and to say it’s unpleasant is the understatement of the century.

When this happens we may not know that kundalini is the intelligence of the divine.  There is no outside darkness or force, no entity or possession, only a place hidden within ourselves that contains real pain and that needs to be looked at until it has cleared. 
The process can be savage but it is always complete and ripe with empowerment, agency, and reverence if we allow ourselves to turn toward our spiritual questions and triggers and if we listen to our hearts.  This is where having allies, friends, teachers, and networks of therapists is essential in the awakening process.  There is no greater act of mystical divinity than to throw the net large and wide, to call out to the world and to God: hi, I hear you, help me, what can I do to open my heart to you?  I will do anything for you.  I will die for you.

So this is where the serpent power comes back again: where the snake bites its own tail.  Religious death is not the same as physical death. 
Religious death is enlightenment.  It is resurrection and it is immortality.  When the ego dies only the shining, awake, aware present moment remains.  It’s like the lightning tongue flickers out of the heavens and brings us warmth, fire, illumination, but then we realize that the illumination has always been exactly what and who we are, and that is synonymous with God and life.

In many wisdom and religious teachings the divine patterns itself on every level, from the microcosm to the macrocosm.  In the Hebrew Bible, God is said to have made man in His own image.  In yoga every aspect of being is a contraction of an expansion of existence (or intelligence), consciousness, and bliss, referred to as Satchitananda,or sat-chit-ananda. (Tantra says cit-ananda, saying we can wake up to divinity while we are still alive).

When we see the snake in yoga we think of energy, but not that thing we burn when we go for a run (well, ok, that too).  It’s the energy of life- the expansion of our hearts toward warmth and knowledge and intelligence, toward honesty and kindness and the divine things that make us feel good. 

The great God of consciousness, the deity that represents no-thing-ness, is named Siva.  Siva, when he’s depicted at all, has matted up dreadlocks all intertwined by black serpents.  Shakti, the feminine power and the consort to pure silence, represents all things that have form, vibration, light, movement, or transience. All that shimmers is gold, and all that’s gold is Shakti, shimmering.  She is the golden serpent of kundalini (also called in full form kundalini shakti). 

Our poet friend Jnandev, who I mentioned above, says she is “the mother of the world,” and that in the union of Siva and Shakti (emptiness and form), “beginning and end merged,” and “under the pretext of (being) matter, the absolute energy the absolute, just as the ocean (drawn up) by the mouth of the cloud fell into the stream (and thus) came to itself.”  If the Ouroboros were described in prose this would be a hard line to beat.

So the deity that represents silence is wrapped in snakes; the deity that represents movement is herself a snake.  The snake wraps itself around the tree of life. 
The snake represents the highest form of the sacred in fertility and human creation to the Celts, the Chinese, and the Mayans, to name only a few.  I am tempted to call this the best case of polyvalence, where the snake represents multiple things simultaneously. 
And with that, I’ll leave this musing with two quotes- this little gem by Carl Jung: “the serpent shows the way to hidden things,” and this cute little innuendo by the great Nisargadatta Maharaj, “In peace and silence, the skin of the ‘I’ dissolves and the inner and the outer become one.”