F
ear of serpents by humans is an ancient one that extends to other species as well. Birds and small animals have a natural fear of one of their efcient predators that can make off with eggs or young chicks from the nest. Humans fear snakes from the experience of the bite of venomous reptiles, but also from a deeper psychic fear of self-awareness. The experience of the snake is primal and potentially transformative. The primitives imagined that the snake is biting, not the observer, but its own self and in the process forms a circle. The self-completing circle is a symbol of wholeness and perfection. Paradise is thus, not the garden, but the snake, where wholeness is achieved and masculine and feminine are joined psychically to give birth to the wholeness of the individuated self. The Uroborus is a heavenly serpent, that most ancient and powerful image found in prehistoric and historic worlds of meaning. The snake biting its tail is a sign of the continuing process of achieving a “perfect” world of wholeness, unity, and non-differentiation. The Uroborus is both an unrealizable dream and a shorthand textbook of a rather poetic biology that is found in symbol systems, artifacts, and documents everywhere. When the circuit of self-awareness and connection with the larger self of the world is completed, humans become grounded and lled with light at the same time. The completed act of biting makes a circle, a sphere, and an egg. The egg, in its three-dimensional integrity and paradoxical strength-in-a-fragile-shelled weakness, is another symbol of self. The ovum is the sphere from which we all came, where opposites have been united, where heaven and earth have been joined, and the world parents became as one. When the Abrahamic religious patriarchy turned the snake into evil, the natural order was turned on its head. Millennia of erroneous religious thinking is directly related to the state of the world we nd ourselves in now.