the serpent bearer
a universal image
whoever speaks in primordial images speaks with a thousand voices; he enthrals and overpowers...he transmutes our personal destiny into the destiny of mankind, and evokes in us all those beneficent forces that ever and anon1 have enabled humanity to find refuge from every peril and to outlive the longest night
〰 C.G. Jung 〰
The Red Book
for years i've been intrigued
by a figure whose meaning
eludes all conclusions
transcends definitions and continents
across time and places
he may not be an angel
but nevertheless, a message he carries
arising from the conjunction
of two poles, two cosmic serpents
drawn by my relatives and yours
with vast distributions
motifs and names:
the fanged one
the pale one
the son of the sun
the divine master
the golden one
the kneeling one
in the awe of its mystery
where image is meaning
idol is icon
and pattern is form
its unspeakable meaning
springs and slips through
once there is no mining to his expression
a slight sense of understanding arises:
it's the image
who searches for communion
and once it finds us
a bond in the unseen is created
that shapes how we see
and read the world
interconnecting one’s ecology
with paradigms of unified knowing
and cognitive artifacts
of archaic consciousness
the serpent bearer
is a prism of truth
of the animate itself
by the means of primordial image that speaks
what only the heart-mind can know:
that serpentine poles
are held in form
and they hold the power to be-come
to shed, to transform
and re-connect
the human soul
with the world
emergent new understandings
by the hand of ancestry
dancing to the drumbeat
of resonant entanglements
between the earthly and the cosmic
the heavenly and the oceanic
the unbounded and graspable
the magic and mundane
the holy and the wild
the human
and the blue
it is invisible.
it is an energy field, like that of a magnet,
onto which we project images.
the archetype is more than everyday human energy.
it is energy that bursts through us from some sacred place, [...] someplace that manifests imagery shared by human beings from many cultures and many eras〰 Marion Woodman 〰
ever and again