If you’re suffering from all the drama and the karma, then this latest transmission may be for you. I’ve synthesised the teachings of the Gnostics, who revered the serpent as a wise teacher, and set it all to rock.
The Gnostics were the original Christians, who were suppressed by the Roman Catholic Church. They were almost certainly the Christians who were thrown to the lions in the Colosseum. Their writings were discovered in 1945, in the form of 13 leather bound codices buried in a cave in the part of the Egyptian desert called Nag Hammadi. Hence, these books became known as the Nag Hammadi Gospels.
What made the Gnostics different?
Many religions and spiritual systems conflate transcendence with ascending — going upwards. The idea is that the realm of immortality is Heaven, and that Heaven is “up there” somewhere. This, despite the great advances in space technology that can send pictures back from tens of billions of light years away…yet there’s still no sign of Heaven.
However, followers of The Way turn our attention downwards — at first, anyway — to follow our chthonic serpent guide into the Underworld. Only when we’ve met him and are in full relationship with him does he attract our attention upwards, to the Upper World, where we merge with his form of divine light.
I’m explaining this is to curtain-raise the reframing of an idea. The idea is that of the serpent in the Garden of Eden being regarded as some kind of godhead, rather than the demonic reptile that he was turned into by the ignorant priesthood. That notion would not have sounded at all out of place to some of the early Gnostic Christians, like the Ophites. They viewed the serpent and the dragon with great reverence. To them, he was the bestower of the gnosis or knowing that was necessary to help humans find a way to “burrow out” of this dimension.
It is unclear whether the Ophites were a discreet Gnostic group, or whether the term was used to describe such groups that had a similar view of the goodness and wisdom of the serpent. But they were not alone among Gnostics in believing that this world was ruled by a flawed, blind creator god. They called him Jaldabaoth, and he seemed to have many of the less desirable traits of the jealous and vengeful Yahweh of the Old Testament.
We find similar ideas in many of the Gnostic gospels, notably Pistis Sophia. All ‘oph‘ words are related to reptiles in ancient Greek. The word sophia meant ‘wisdom’. However, the snake is obvious, to those with the ears to hear his hiss announcing his presence in the first letter: Ssssss…ophia.
By the 4th century, when Christian doctrine was rubber-stamped into imperial law, all the Ophite writings had been destroyed by the “church fathers”. So until their writings were unearthed from the desert in 1945, most of what was known about them was written by their detractors, who accused them of heresy and devil-worship.
All the public shaming and accusations of sinning over the past 1500 years had the effect of intimidating people, and gaslighting them away from the truth. The truth is that we are here on Earth to learn…that much is already known by many. But what are we here to learn? Perhaps we are here to learn that we owe nothing to any god… and then we can learn how to burrow out…to escape the seemingly endless cycles of reincarnation.
In a sense, we could regard The Way as a means of tunnelling out of a prison camp… like the prisoners-of-war in World War 2! And who better to help shift all that soil than the worm. That indefatigable shifter of the earth takes its name in our language from the old Saxon wyrm, which means, in German, dragon!
If you want to know more about the wisdom of the serpent, you’ll find much more in my book, The Way of the Serpent, Immortality Through Sacred Lovemaking. It’s available on an Amazon near you as a paperback or an e-book. However, if you’re in the US, you can also get it as an audio book completely FREE when you sign up to the free trial of their Audible deal.
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