From Joseph Campbell's The Power of Myths:
The power of life causes the snake to shed its skin, just as the moon sheds its shadow.The serpent sheds its skin to be born again, as the moon its shadow to be born again. They are equivalent symbols. Sometimes the serpent is represented as a circle eating its own tail. That's an image of life. Life sheds one generation after another, to be born again. There is somethingtremendously terrifying about life when you look at it that way. And so the serpent carries in itself the sense of both fascination and the terror of life.Furthermore, the serpent represents the primary function of life, mainly eating. Life consists in eating other creatures. The serpent is a traveling alimentary canal, that's about all it is. And it gives you that primary sense of shock, of life in its most primal quality. There is no arguing with that animal at all. Life lives by killing and eating itself, casting off death and being reborn, like the moon.
The snake in most culture is given a positive interpretation. In India, even the most poisonous snake, the cobra, is a sacred animal, and the mythological Serpent King is the next thing to the Buddha. The serpent represents the power of life engaged in the field of time, and of death, yet eternally alive. The world is but its shadow—the falling skin.The serpent was revered in the American Indian traditions, too. The serpent was thought of as a very important power to make friends with. The interplay of man and nature is illustrated in this relationship with the serpent. A serpent flows like water and so is watery, but its tongue continually flashes fire. So you have the pair of opposites together in the serpent.
The serpent was the one who brought sin into the world. And the woman was the one who handed the apple to man. This identification of the woman with sin, of the serpent with sin, and thus of life with sin, is the twist that has been given to the whole story in the biblical myth and doctrine of the Fall.
The idea in the biblical tradition of the Fall is that nature as we know it is corrupt, sex in itself is corrupt, and the female as the epitome of sex is a corrupter. Why was the knowledge of good and evil forbidden to Adam and Eve? Without that knowledge, we'd all be a bunch of babies still in Eden without any participation in life.
Woman brings life into the world.
Eve is the mother of this temporal world.
Formerly you had a dreamtime paradise there in the Garden of Eden—no time, no birth, no death—no life. The serpent, who dies and is resurrected, shedding its skin and renewing its life, is the lord of the central tree, where time and eternity come together.
Why are the Serpent and Eve seen as negative figures?
There is actually a historical explanation based on the coming of the Hebrews into Canaan. The principal divinity of the people of Canaan was the Goddess, and associated with the Goddess is the serpent. This is the symbol of mystery of life. The male-god-oriented group rejected it. In other words, there is a historical rejection of the Mother Goddess implied in the story of the Garden of Eden. It does seem that this story has done women a great disservice by casting Eve as responsible for the Fall. Women represent life. Man doesn't enter life except by woman, and so it is woman who brings us into this world moving out of the mythological dreamtime zone of the Garden of Paradise, where there is no time, and where man and women don't even know that they are different from each other. The two are just creatures. God and man are practically the same. God walks in the cool of the evening in the garden where they are. And then they eat the apple, the knowledge of the opposites. And when they discover they are different, the man and women cover their shame. You see, they had not thought of themselves as opposites. Male and female is one opposition. Another opposition is the human and God. God and evil is a third opposition. The primary oppositions are the sexual and that between human beings and God. Then comes the idea of good and evil in the world. And so Adam and Eve have thrown themselves out of the Garden of Timeless Unity, you might say, just by that act of recognizing duality. To move out into the world, you have to act in terms of pairs of opposites.
So this is the shift ofconsciousness from the consciousness of identity to the consciousness of participation in duality.And then you are into the field of time.
We always think in terms of opposites. But God, the ultimate, is beyond the pairs of opposites, that is all there is to it.. In theOld Testament story God points out the one forbidden thing. Now, God must have known very well that man was going to eat the forbidden fruit. But it was by doing that that man became the initiator of his own life. Life really began with that act of disobedience. The human psyche is essentially the same all over the world. The psyche is the inward experience of the human body, which is essentially the same in all human beings, with the same organs, the same instincts, the same impulses, the same conflicts,the same fears. Out of this common ground have come what Jung has called the archetypes,which are the common ideas of myths. These ideas Jungspoke of as archetypes of the unconscious. The Jungian archetypes of the unconscious are biological. All over the world and at different times of human history, these archetypes, or elementary ideas, have appeared in different costumes.
Adapted from: Joseph Campbell, The Power of Myths with Bill Moyers. New York, Doubleday, 1988.
