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Lunar beasts (part five)

1. Lunar Beasts (part 1)
2. Lunar Beasts (part 2)
3. Lunar Beasts (part 3)
4. Lunar Beasts (part 4)
5. Lunar Beasts (part 5)
6. Lunar Beasts (part 6)
7. Lunar Beasts (part 7)
8. Lunar Beasts (part 8 )

From Bull to Serpent

The horns of the bull and the horns of the Moon are equated. The Moon is that celestial sphere that dies and is resurrected. It carries its own death within it; the principle represented in the Moon is the power of life that conquers death. The bull symbolizes that lunar character, and thus, since the Moon is the sacrificial planet, the bull becomes the sacrificial animal.
Another animal that sheds death is the serpent, which sloughs its skin to be reborn, and so the serpent, like the bull, becomes a symbol linked with the Moon—a symbol of death and rebirth.
Campbell, Joseph, 2003, ‘Myths of Light: Eastern Metaphors of the Eternal’, p.13 (New World Library)

The Serpent that Sheds its Skin

Like, Joseph Campbell, Mircea Eliade understood the serpent to be primarily a lunar beast, intuitively linked in an array of lunar symbols (moon-rain-fertility-woman-serpent-death-periodic- regeneration), indicatory of the ever-revolving and self-sustaining nature of the cosmos.

Horned Serpent

One of Dionysus-Zagreus transformations, when set upon by the Titans, was the form of a horned serpent, which may of been a composite of bull and snake (Like the Celtic Ram headed/horned serpent, featured alongside various representations of the god Cernunnos), although the species of ‘horned’ snake (Cerastes cornutus) from North Africa and Asia, may of also assisted in the formulation of the symbol of the ‘horned serpent.’ Like the horns of the bull, the horns of the serpent are reminiscent of the waxing and waning crescent moon.

Lunar-Cosmic Serpent

The moon is also connected with the ocean’s tides, and the serpent is symbolic of the ocean that surrounds the cosmos, and further, to the primordial waters transformed into earth and sea and sky.

Serpent at the Threshold of Death and Life

At the threshold of life and death, between the old and new moons, where the head (symbolic of the female principle) and the tail (symbolic of the male principle) of the serpent become one, the lunar and the solar also become one, opening up the gateway beyond time’s realm, to procure the ambrosial boon. The Cosmic Goddess, herself serpentine, is both lover and mother of the serpent, and the watery threshold is her womb.

Ambrosial Serpent

Like other lunar beasts, the serpent both partakes and shares the ambrosial boon (solar aspect), functioning as a conduit (mediator) of divine light, providing for our physical, spiritual and mental needs in abundance, ever transforming darkness into light.

But the Serpent also withholds the ambrosial boon, transforming light again into darkness, until the circle returns and creation dissolves back into chaos, to be again, until time’s end, re-transformed, converging and diverging, like the serpent circles of Hermes’ Caduceus, symbolic of the Axis-Mundi: The Cosmic Tree of Life and Death.

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