Maps of Meaning

From the Egyptian uroboros to the Satanic serpent to the Rigvedic dragon Vritra, reptilian motifs abound in the book. The serpent motif often appears with other important symbols, such as water (or drought), trees and gardens (as in the Garden of Eden), along with darkness and chaos. The iconography of serpentine creatures includes not just Biblical lore but the European medieval imagery of a knight wrestling a dragon and the Hindu depictions of the Mother Goddess wreathed in snakes. The book associates the snake motif with uroboros, or infinity and chaos. Depicted as a snake swallowing its tail, the symbol is considered Egyptian in origin and is widely embedded in Western philosophy as well as Alchemy. The book describes it as “uroboros, the self-consuming serpent, who represents the union of matter and spirit, and the possibility of transformation” (89). Though uroboros, in a way, precedes creation and experience, it also conflates with nature or the Great Mother, who is ambivalently feminine. For instance, the book notes that in Mesopotamian mythology, Marduk, the hero, fights the “aquatic female dragon” Tiamat (the Mother God), cuts her up in pieces, and restores order. The conflation of the primordial chaos and the Great Mother in certain mythologies with a dragon or a snake is intriguing. It may symbolize fear of the unknown. Because chaos represents the unknown, it takes on the fearsome form of the dragon.

Shades of this motif appear in the old Anglo-Saxon epic poem Beowulf, where Beowulf fights Grendel’s mother, one of his three chief antagonists, who are monstrous and sometimes serpentine. The book explicitly describes the Great Mother, in her terrifying aspect, as often associated with darkness, “the chaos of the night, the insect, ophidian and reptilian worlds” (157). The snake symbolism of uroboros and the Great Mother often appears with water symbolism, depicting the primal waters that in some mythologies covered the earth before creation. In Sumerian mythology, a pictograph of the sea depicts the Goddess Nammu. Water also symbolizes the womb’s safety, childbirth, and the process of rebirth and transformation. Thus, the snake/dragon as Great Mother motif conveys layers of complex, rich meaning.

In its third association, the serpent motif symbolizes Satan, or the Devil, in keeping with Christian theology. In the Bible, the serpent is “more crafty than any other beast of the field that the Lord God had made” (Genesis 3:1, English Standard Version). After the crafty serpent tempts Eve and causes the fall of man, God in the Bible curses the serpent: “[C]ursed are you above all livestock and above all beasts of the field; on your belly you shall go, and dust you shall eat all the days of your life” (Genesis 3:14, ESV). Thus, the serpent in Christian mythology symbolizes evil and negativity. In Maps of Meaning, Peterson describes the serpent as the hero’s antithesis, or flip side, and sometimes depicts the hero as united with the serpent. This is because the serpent also symbolizes self-awareness, knowledge, and change. Medieval alchemy took the Gnostic (or heretical) view that the “Edenic serpent” is a parallel to Christ, that Christ took the form of a serpent to coax humans into a higher state of consciousness:

The Edenic serpent is, above all, the unknown (power) still lurking ‘inside’ the nervous system, inside the ‘world-tree.’ It is the innate capacity of the mind, its ability to generate revelatory thought, its capacity to disrupt the stable cosmos and to extend the domain of consciousness (324).