This is NOT a blog post….just something I found in my files as I was getting ready to transfer my blog. They are notes I took while researching what in the world some of the ancient symbols represented in the creation story of Genesis. This was from the Fall of 2012 when I was first awakening as a woman…and was shocked that the ancient writers didn’t mean a literal snake had tempted Eve…but that this was a common symbol for women’s sexuality and reproduction. Have fun reading and perhaps go out and do a little research on your own!
Original date written: September 2012
Date of Notes: November 15, 2013
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in religion, mythology, and literature, serpents and snakes represent fertility or a creative life force. As snakes shed their skin through sloughing, they are symbols of rebirth, transformation, immortality, and healing.[4] The ouroboros is a symbol of eternity and continual renewal of life.
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In the Abrahamic religions, the serpent represents sexual desire.[5] According to the Rabbinical tradition, in the Garden of Eden, the serpent represents sexual passion.[6] In Hinduism, Kundalini is a coiled serpent, the residual power of pure desire.[7] –
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Serpent_(symbolism)
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Snakes were central to many mythologies because of their perceived quality of being both familiar and exotic. The behaviour of snakes and their facial features (e.g. the unblinking, lidless eyes) seemed to imply that they were intelligent, that they lived by reason and not instinct, and yet their thought-processes were as alien to humans as their ways of movement.
In some cultures snakes were fertility symbols, for example the Hopi people of North America performed an annual snake dance to celebrate the union of Snake Youth (a Sky spirit) and Snake Girl (an Underworld spirit) and to renew fertility of Nature. During the dance, live snakes were handled and at the end of the dance the snakes were released into the fields to guarantee good crops. “The snake dance is a prayer to the spirits of the clouds, the thunder and the lightning, that the rain may fall on the growing crops..”[1] In other cultures snakes symbolised the umbilical cord, joining all humans to Mother Earth. The Great Goddess often had snakes as her familiars– sometimes twining around her sacred staff, as in ancient Crete – and they were worshipped as guardians of her mysteries of birth and regeneration.[2]
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Snakes_in_mythology
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serpent in Gen 3:1 said to represent wisdom…and wisdom is the personification of God in the feminine
The raising up of the serpent in the dessert…all those who looked onto it would be healed.
* raising up of the feminine side of God…just as Jesus was the incarnation of Wisdom
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Great_Goddess
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Eller concludes that “inventing prehistoric ages in which women and men lived in harmony and equality is a burden that feminists need not, and should not bear.” In her view, the “matriarchal myth” tarnishes the feminist movement by leaving it open to accusations of “vacuousness and irrelevance that we cannot afford to court.”
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Myth_of_Matriarchal_Prehistory
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When God was a Woman Drawing upon the work of Margaret Murray and Robert Graves, Stone postulates a prehistoric matriarchal religion, painting ancient societies, including Ancient Egypt as matriarchal paradises, destroyed by the patriarchal Indo-Europeans. She concludes that the Hebrew Levites, because of their clearly patriarchal outlook “must have been Indo-Europeans”, alleging misogyny and hatred of goddess worship within Israelite society, which she connects to the later development of Christianity. According to her the Bible was an attempt to change that symbolism and celebrate the victory of male oriented rites and gods.
Sept 2012 ME: I disagree with Stone…I think the bible was Her way of giving us clues as to what happened in the world and to show that She was going to help society work its way back to equality of the sexes!
Note: 11/15/13….nope I moved pass even thinking the bible was a Goddess ordained masterpiece…
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Note: these were my thoughts and questions I was writing for myself while looking at all of this research. So fun to see where I was a year ago!
ME: Could it be that in prehistoric times people did live in a more equal status as seen in Gen 1 & 2….but then something happened…something happened to sever the people from each other, from their source of life in the Earth – God in the feminine – and that the Genesis story is simply an account of what had happened in the ancient world to divide men from women. Whoever wrote the Genesis account wasn’t trying to create a patriarchal society – but that a patriarchal society was created somehow and this story of the snake and Eve was a story to tell us how this happened. It was a reflection of how women came to be haters of their very core…how women substituted their own knowledge of who they were for a definition by men. Could the Genesis story be not about God desiring to oppress women…but a story to explain what had already happened in society??
What does this mean to me?
Was the Garden of Eden prehistoric society??? Was it more than just a few days? Did an entire society flourish for a while? Is this where Cain’s wife came from? Were Adam and Eve literal people or just part of the story? Did they just symbolize society? Were any of them real? Does it matter if they were real? Or is the importance that their stories are symbols, are “dances” to show me the “dancer”?
What happened to society to make this break?
