Cosmic Serpents: Teli & Apep

Cosmic Serpents play a central role in the cosmologies of various traditions around the world. Whether the primordial Chronos Serpent encircling the World Egg of the Orphic-Pythagorean mysteries, the Gnostic Ouraborus, or the Jörmungandr of the Norse traditions these giant serpents - or dragons - are a pervasive symbol of the perpetual tension between Order & Chaos and the creation-destruction cycles of the the manifest Universe.

One such Cosmic Serpent is the Teli of the Kabbalah who “in the Universe is like a king on his throne”(Sefer Yetzirah 6:2). The Teli according to some Kabbalists is the constellation of Draco while others identify it as the Milky Way. Regardless of the astronomical specifics, all interpretations hinge on the concept of a celestial serpent or dragon closely linked to the notion of cycles (galag) as in the verse “He set them in the Teli, the Galag, and the Lev [‘heart’]” (Sefer Yetzirah 6:1).

According to the commentaries on the Sefer Yetzirah, this triadic division of Serpent, Cycle and Heart corresponds to the Hebrew alphabet and the 12 Elemental, 7 Doubles, and 3 Mother letters. Within the alphabet, Teli reigns over the 12 Elemental letters and thus over the 12 zodiacal constellations aligning this celestial serpent with the Solar path and the cyclic Universe.

Interestingly, the word teli never appears in the Bible, it does however occur in the Bahir where it is discussed as the world axis upon which the celestial globe and world of manifestation hangs. In Hebrew teli means ‘to hang’ or literally ‘that which hangs from one’ begging the question of where did its association to a celestial serpent arise?

Nightly Path of Draco around the Celestial Pole

Definitely by the medieval period the association between Teli and the Pole Serpent (Draco) was concrete. As Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan in his translation and commentary on the Sefer Yetzirah discusses, for medieval Kabbalists Teli was seen as one of two Leviathans – the female version being the water serpent of earth, the male corresponding to the Pole Serpent of the sky, Teli. This likely arose from Rabbi Shimon’s exegesis on the creation of the male and female Leviathans as the upper and lower “Waters” in the Zohar. He further states that the world of manifestation “hangs from the fins of the Leviathan” placing this serpent in direct context of the polar axis mundi.

Kapplan and Leonara Leet in her “Secret Doctrine of the Kabbalah” discuss the associations between Teli and the constellation Draco (the serpent/dragon that circles the north celestial pole) in depth and I highly suggest that those interested turn to these sources. The notion of the Pole Serpent that hangs/coils around around the axis mundi sheds a whole new light on the biblical narrative of the Serpent in the Tree and the fall of Man, but this is contemplation for another day.

The Kabbalistic teachings of the two Leviathans help clarify Isaiah 27:1 where both these agents of the manifest world are said to be destroyed on the day of final judgment :

On that day (the day of judgment) with His great
sharp sword, God will visit and overcome the Leviathan, the Pole
Serpent, and the Leviathan, the Coiled Serpent, and He will kill the
dragon of the sea.

Keep this verse in mind as we move forward with this discussion. One final association to point out regarding Teli is that the earliest Kabbalists referred to it by its Arabic name Al Jaz’har meaning “knot” or “node”. Thus also putting Teli in the astronomical context of the lunar nodes – which in traditional astrology are fittingly called the Dragon’s Head and the Dragon’s Tail (again, see Leet and Kaplan and references therein). These nodes are the ONLY places along the ecliptic where a full solar or lunar eclipse can occur.

Let us take a moment to summarize and unpack the Teli. What do we have?

A celestial Pole Serpent that is in the Universe “like a king on his throne”, an axis-mundi upon which the world of manifestation hangs, a cyclic principle of space-time exemplified by the 12 constellations of the zodiac, a force that devours the Sun in eclipse, and a beast that upon final judgment must be destroyed with God’s “great sharp sword”.

These very principles exemplified by the Teli are what we find in yet another Celestial or Cosmic Serpent of great importance in the Western Magical traditions, the Egyptian Apep or Apophis. This serpent is the devourer of the Sun and the dissolving and destructive force of time that Pharaoh as the Solar Hero ( Re/ Osiris) must defeat in the Duat in order to be reborn. He constantly threatens dissolution into Chaos for should Apep succeed in devouring the solar bark, the sun would cease to rise and life as we know it would come to an end. The ancient Egyptians were reminded this possibility and Apep’s omnipresence through the mythic narrative of Re’s nightly journey through the 12 gates of the underworld to be reborn in the East and the astronomical phenomenon of a Solar eclipses.

From an esoteric perspective these cosmic and celestial dragons/serpents represent the limits of the manifest Universe linked to the Solar Journey and our own spiritual ascension. They reside at the very pivot of the celestial sphere and liminal threshold between the manifest and unmanifest. They are reminders of a primordial chaos of non-existence and the cycles of life and death that must be transcended by the initiate aspiring to escape the death and dissolution of mortality and - like the Solar Hero - be reborn into eternal existence.

Originally published December 6, 2010 in Reflections from the Black Stone

Gnosis and Logos

As the Catholic Church became a political institution it simultaneously distanced itself from the Pythagorean sciences inherited by the early Christian initiates. Primarily threatening to the ecclesiastic spiritual hegemony was the notion of gnosis as the means by which one could share intimate experiences with divinity without a mediating institution. The Church responded by quantifying spirituality and declaring Gnosticism a heresy.

As masterfully explained by David Fideler in “Jesus Christ Sun of God” (1993), the original doctrine of the Christian logos was related to this concept gnosis and to the Pythagorean teachings of universal harmony (Harmonia). Greek logos was poorly translated into Latin as verbatum and then finally into English as ‘word’ whereby it lost all meaning.

In Greek, logos has several meanings: order, pattern, ratio, reason, mediation, and harmony. Only in the most mundane and topical sense does logos mean “word” (as in oration, or ‘spoken word’). But even in the meaning as ‘word’, our English equivalent misses the mark. We must of course place the spoken word in traditional context as the animating principle of creation and a cosmogonic act. To say something, is to manifest that thing.

And God said, “Let there be light,” and there was light…

 And God said, “Let the water under the sky be gathered to one place, and let dry ground appear.” And it was so…

And God said…And it was so.

(Genesis, Book 1)

This is further evident in the vibrational and transformational properties of the spoken words in traditional meditative and magical practices. The Divine names of the Hebrew Kabbalah, the mantras of Vedas, the mambos of African traditional religions, and the formulaic Voces Magicae of Greco-Egyptian magic, to name a few. It is through speaking, singing or chanting such words of power that initiates and practitioners of these traditions partake in acts of creation to manifest intended results and experience gnosis of the Divine.

This traditional doctrine of logos can be traced at least as far back as ancient Egypt , and in particular to Thoth as the patron god of speech, writing, wisdom, astronomy, mathematics, music, medicine, and magic. In fact, among his dynastic period (c. 3000 – 330 BCE) epithets was ‘Lord of Ma’at (Order)’, ‘Lord of Divine Words’. And ‘Tongue of Re’, associating him with the ordering process of creation ; for in Egyptian cosmology (as in the Biblical excerpt above) Re by speaking the divine names of the gods created and set the universe in motion.

In a wall painting from the tomb of Seti in Abydos (above), Thoth- as psychopomp- initiates the Pharaoh into the mysteries of death by performing the “Opening of the Mouth Ceremony”. This magical rite grants Seti the logos of divine speech so that his soul may recite the necessary God-names to cross the gates of the Duat and ascend to eternity and immortal spiritual existence.

Thoth was later called Hermes by the Hellenized Egyptians (the Hermetic Philosophers) who saw in him the same principle of Gnostic revelation and logos that the early Christian’s saw in Christ. In the Corpus Hermetica, attributed to the Hermes Trismegistus – the third incarnation of Thoth, we find explicit references to logos as the ordering principle, as the “son of God”, and as the “shepard of man” (Poimandres).

‘That Light.’ [Poimandres] said, ‘is I, even Mind, the first God, who was before the watery substance which appeared out of the darkness; and the Logos which came forth from the Light is son of God.’… ‘Learn my meaning,’ said he, ‘by looking at what you yourself have in you; for in you too, the logos is son, and the mind is father of the logos’…The watery substance, having received the Logos, was fashioned into an ordered world (Kosmos), the elements being separated out from it…’

(Corpus Hermetica, Libellus I)

Throughout the classical Greco-Roman world (c.a. 800 BCE – AD 500), the doctrines of gnosis and logos were transmitted by the initiates of the Orphic-Pythagorean Mysteries and later with the Mithraitic, Bacchic, and early Christian Cults. The initiates into these Mysteries learned the Pythagorean universal harmonia of mathematics, astronomy, geometry, and music. Through mythic symbols and mythic narratives, the patterns and underlying order of the Kosmos was unveiled to the initiate as perpetual manifestation of harmonic logos.


Originally published November 17, 2008 in Reflections from the Black Stone

The Philosophic Mind

Manly P. Hall writes that there are “two fundamental groups of human intellect- one philosophic, the other incapable of appreciating the deeper mysteries of life.” Hall is referring to the two basic paths of understanding the universe and consequently ourselves. There is the initiated and esoteric doctrine of union with the object of knowledge, the gnosis of the classical Philosopher. And, there is the uninitiated and exoteric doctrine of relativism whereby knowledge arises from external sensible perceptions.

Unfortunately, for the most part, the modern mind falls under the later, not because we are incapable of greater Philosophical thought, but because we fail to see reality as a spectrum of truths, opting instead for discrete units of quantification. From a very young age we are taught to quantify experience into two opposing buckets of information: 1) the rational, conscious, and “real”, and, 2) the irrational, subconscious, and “imaginative”. We not only learn to separate experience, but also to rank it on an arbitrary and rather biased scale of “reality”. The prevailing sentiment in the western world is that experiences that can be analyzed and understood rationally are more “real” than those that are irrational and “imaginative”.

This “left-brain”/” right-brain” schism does not exist in the initiated Philosophical Mind, which instead accepts the Unity of all things. It does not differentiate between the physical manifestation and the metaphysical principle; the symbol does not represent meaning, the symbol IS the meaning.

Reality for the Philosophical Mind is the “bubble” in which both the rational and the irrational are merely manifestations of underlying transcendent principles.

Instead of struggling between the dualities of sacred being and profane existence, the “rational” and the “irrational”, the “real” and the “imaginative”, etc., etc., etc. ; the Philosophical Mind will only see in these polarities different perspectives through which to perceive the spectrum of transcendent truth.

One who desires to break the bindings of material and physical existence and truly explore the realm of the Spiritual and Eternal must first transmute their modes of thinking from the mind of relativism to the universal Philosophical Mind. Only with this Promethean power of Mind, can one aspire to steal the immortal Fire from the gods.

Originally published October 10, 2009 in Reflections from the Black Stone