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Serpent Soul

Origen, in Against Celcus (6:24-25), relates the description of a diagram, drawn by Celcus, of ten separate circles joined by a single circle that represented the universal soul. The name of the universal soul was ‘Leviathan’ (The multi-headed sea serpent of Hebrew mythology) , its name given to both the centre and the circumference of the circle.

This serpentine representation of the cosmos is mirrored by Plato’s conception of the anima mundi, or World-Soul, that both surrounds and is united with the cosmos at its centre (Timaeus 34b). It is the World-Soul (comprised of both an inner and outer circle), that sets the universe in motion, that Plato called “an eternal moving image of the eternity which remains for ever at one” (Timaeus, Lee, D ‘trans’, 1977, p.51).

Origen believed that the diagram of the universal soul was partly based on the beliefs of the Gnostic Ophites (From the Greek ophis, meaning snake), who revered the serpent because it bestowed the gift of Knowledge (gnosis) upon Adam and Eve in the garden of Eden.

The ocean serpent that surrounds the cosmos, was recognized within Gnosticism as the Ouroboros, or Tail-Biting Serpent, and is mentioned in Pistis Sophia 4:126, as a realm of ‘outer darkness’ encompassing the world that contains twelve purgatories, and again in the Acts of Thomas 31-32, as the sibling of the serpent of Eden.

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