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Moses pointing to the poled serpent he constructed to heal Hebrews who had been bitten by the fiery serpents known as seraphim. |
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Moses pointing to the poled serpent he constructed to heal Hebrews who had been bitten by the fiery serpents known as seraphim. |
Wasson’s interpretation of the the Allegory of the Fall can also explain a number of other things about that allegory far better than traditional interpretations. For instance, Wasson’s interpretation can more adequately explain why a serpent, of all creatures, promotes the forbidden fruit in the Allegory of the Fall, because serpents were anciently known, as they still are, for their toxins. Hence serpents were intimately associated with or symbolic of toxins in many biblical stories besides the Allegory of the Fall. For example, Psalms 58:4 states, "Their poison is like the poison of a serpent: they are like the deaf adder that stoppeth her ear. Psalms 140:3 states, "They have sharpened their tongues like a serpent; adders' poison is under their lips." And Numbers tells of Yahweh ordering Aaron to cast his rod on the ground where it turns into a serpent which Aaron then uses — not coincidentally — to poison Egypt’s water.
In addition, Numbers tells of Moses fastening the graven image of a serpent to a pole to cure Hebrews who were bitten by the fiery serpents Yahweh had paradoxically sent earlier to torment and kill them:
And the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live. And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived. Numbers 21:8-9.
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| Left: Seal of the American College of Surgeons depicting Aesculapius with his serpent-staff, and an Indian medicine man besides the Tree of Knowledge. Right: The caduceus bearing the serpents that anciently symbolized the relationship between entheogens, knowledge, and immortality. | |
From the above passage, it can be inferred that Moses' poled serpent was equivalent to the serpent-bearing staff of the prototypal, Greek physician Aesculapius and to the caduceus, which physicians later used to symbolize the curative powers of drugs that had once been derived mainly from plants. In fact, according to a spokesman for the American College of Surgeons, their official seal shows "Aesculapius, the symbol of European learning, and an American Indian Medicine Man seated beneath a Tree of Knowledge, making offering of their symbols of healing in common service to mankind."6
Another reason why a serpent would have been an ideal representative, personification and/or symbol of the A. muscaria is that serpents have traditionally been known for their ability to shed their skins — thereby calling to mind physical death, ego death and the spiritual rebirth that has traditionally been associated with both. This ability apparently caused ancient artists and mythopoets to use serpents as harbingers and symbols of immortality, for instance, in the Sumerian epic of Gilgamesh, wherein a serpent steals the herb of immortality from Gilgamesh.
A serpent also figures prominently in an ancient Greek story of how Glaukos, the son of the Cretan king Minos, was herbally resurrected by the seer Polyeidus who had seen a snake use the same herb to resurrect a companion, and in the Grimms' fairy tale version of that story, The Three Serpent Leaves, wherein a serpent is credited with the ability to raise the dead. As John Fiske summarizes the latter story:
A prince is buried alive with his dead wife, and seeing a serpent approaching her body, he cuts it in three pieces. Presently another serpent, crawling from the corner, saw the other lying dead, and going, away soon returned with three green leaves in its mouth; then laying the parts of the body together so as to join, it put one leaf on each wound, and the dead serpent was alive again. The prince, applying the leaves to his wife’s body, restores her also to life.7
The shedding of a serpent’s skin is a transformative act. So serpents were also used as symbols of spiritual transformation in many ancient stories about someone who was transformed, reborn, or rendered divine in one or more ways when he touched, ate or was bitten by a serpent. According to one such Greek story, the seer Teiresias was said to have been reborn as a female seer after he touched or killed one of two copulating serpents, while another story tells how the ancient Greek seer Melampus obtained his ability to prognosticate, cure people, and understand the language of birds after serpents spoke in his ear.
Seers were anciently considered the earthly embodiments of gods because of their seeming ability to tap into and channel divine knowledge, which was often represented by or otherwise associated with birds. The A. muscaria has been known, probably from time immemorial, particularly for its ability to induce prophetic visions, from which such knowledge can be tapped. Therefore a serpent would have also been a particularly ideal symbol of the A. muscaria’s ability to psycho-spiritually transform Adam and Eve in a way that opened their eyes to divine knowledge, including the very nature of good and evil.
This psycho-spiritual transformation is often reported to include the feeling that one has been rendered psychologically, spiritually and perceptually defenseless to stimuli and to the emergence of repressed feelings, in accord with Freud's view that the removed defenses are ego functions that must be overcome to achieve psychological wholeness. Hence Wasson’s theory that the Allegory of the Fall was originally a prohibition on A. muscaria ingestion can also explain why Adam and Eve reportedly felt naked after they had eaten the forbidden fruit.
Wasson’s theory that the Allegory of the Fall was originally a prohibition on A. muscaria ingestion finds still more support in the fact that serpents and toxic mushrooms were intimately associated with each other in antiquity, to the extent that people believed that the toxins in one could be transferred to the other. For instance, the ancient Greek poet Nicander wrote that serpents could contaminate plants by their presence, and mushrooms sucked up the venom of serpents in the ground beneath them.8 Similarly, the Roman naturalist Pliny stated that "if the hole of a serpent has been near the mushroom, or should a serpent have breathed on it as it first opened, its kinship to poisons makes it capable of absorbing the venom. So, it would not be well to eat mushrooms until the serpent has begun to hibernate."9
More recently, John Allegro wrote in his controversial book The Sacred Mushroom and the Cross:
It is not difficult to see the reasoning behind the ancient connection between the serpent and the mushroom, which played such a large part in mushroom folk-lore and mythology. Both emerged from holes in the ground in a manner reminiscent of the sexually awakened penis, and both bore in their heads a fiery poison which the ancients believed could be transferred from one to the other.10
The theory that the forbidden fruit was an A. muscaria can also more than adequately explain why Adam and Eve were told that they would die even if they just touched the forbidden fruit, for a well known principle of sympathetic magic holds that touching a food can cause the person to absorb its spirit. It therefore appears that the author of the Allegory of the Fall was referring to a real fruit that was indeed toxic, rather than to a symbolic fruit, because he implicitly invokes this principle of sympathetic magic in having God warn Adam and Eve that they should not even touch the forbidden fruit.
It is well known that Christianity, as we now know it, grew by incorporating, reinterpreting and, at the same time, disparaging pagan and divergent Christian motifs and practices, but that many of these motifs neverthless managed to come down through history in pagan and early Christian writings that survived Christianity’s heresiological movements. One such early Christian and, more specifically Gnostic, writing which calls the assumed infallibility and very validity of the Judeo-Christian version of the Fall into question is The Origin of The World, particularly in that it treats the serpent as an instructor who came to liberate Adam and Eve by inducing them to eat the forbidden fruit.
More specifically, in this Gnostic treatise, the same spirit that is personified in Genesis as the serpent says to Eve:
"What did God say to you? Was it do not eat from the tree of acquaintance (gnosis)."
She [Eve] said, "He said, ‘Not only do not eat from it, but do not touch it, lest you die.'"
He said to her, "Do not be afraid. In death you shall not die. For he knows that when you eat from it, your intellect will become sober and you will come to be like gods, recognizing the difference that obtains between evil men and good ones. Indeed, it was in jealousy that he said this to you, so that you would not eat from it.
Now Eve had confidence in the words of the instructor. She gazed at the tree and saw that it was beautiful and appetizing, and liked it; she took some of its fruit and ate it; and she gave some also to her husband, and he too ate it. Then their intellect became open. For when they had eaten, the light of acquaintance [gnosis] had shone upon them."11
It can be observed that this Gnostic treatise credits the forbidden fruit with the ability to open Adam’s and Eve’s eyes, not in any negative way, but in a way that would enable them to reason and thereby differentiate good from evil. In fact, in another Gnostic treatise, The Apocryphon of John, the author posits that the instructor was actually Christ who persuaded Adam and Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, after he had observed the couple being kept in darkness by a group of demigods, known in Gnosticism as Archons:
Christ: "But what they call the tree of knowledge of good and evil, which is the Epinoia of the light, they [the Archons] stayed in front of it in order that he (Adam) might not look up to his fullness and recognize the nakedness of his shamefulness. But it was I who brought about that they ate. "12
