The First Stage: the Primordial Serpent

The primordial serpent was a widespread mythic figure in archaic and primitive cultures, taking various forms, even surviving into early 'civilized' cultures.  It symbolizes the whole, organic, undifferentiated Psyche/Nature, when all things were One (monist).

It is self-formed, timeless, 'what is'.

Man in these cultures had only germinal self-consciousness and self-control.  There was a tight linkage in his mind of stimulus/perception-to-reaction.  It was automatic, spontaneous.  Persons as we know them hardly existed.  They operated out of habit, tradition, the authority of the group.  These were extremely rigidly conservative cultures.  Thought was analogical (associative)-- prelogical, spontaneous, superstitious; we would call it ignorant.  In the magical, numinous, dreamlike world they knew, anything was possible, anything could become anything.

The Uroboros (Greek for 'tail-biter') was originally from Egypt, and it is the quintessential primordial serpent-- it forms a ring, representing the Oneness of the whole Cosmos.  It chases its tail, which represents an endless cycling-in-place-- like Nature, always going through changeless cycles.

The Norse Jormungandr was similar-- the world-girdling oceanic serpent, though he has been turned into a monster, characteristic of the second stage.

This snake-in-a-ring motif is repeated in the Hindu yogic Kundalini ('ring'), the serpent-energy, which rests like a coiled snake at the base of the spine, which when awakened can rise up the snake-like spinal chord, up through the chakras ('wheels') to the crown of the head, which all seems very uroboric.

The ancient Greek Ophion ('snake') was the first ruler of Olympus, before the Titans, god of the world, presiding over a golden age before civilization.  Also in Greece, as well as India, snakes were seen as guardians of the sacred places-- caityas, temples, entrances to the underworld.  This seems to come out of the primordial stage as well.

In Jungian ideology, particularly in Erich Neumann's The Origins and History of Consciousness (1954), the Uroboros is a powerful symbol of the undifferentiated Unconscious, which characterized the archaic and primitive mind.  Carl Jung himself was more interested in the hermetical and alchemical Serpent, I think, but generally, most scholars of myth seem to see the primordial snake in similar terms-- as original Nature, raw undifferentiated energy, wholeness, the oneness of the vast variousness of the world.  My favorite description of this figure is in John Boorman's movie Excalibur, when Merlin gives young Arthur an awesome experience of it in the deep woods, saying,"It is the Dragon!  He is everywhere!  He is everything!"  I get chills.

In the Mythos, the Alwight (later to become the Drygand) has something of the primordial serpent about him.  He is a sort of serial incubus-daimon, a protean shape-shifter (well, others' shapes) whose fall-back is your basic undifferentiated worm-form.

He enters species-organisms to experience their peculiar life intimately, in an endless meandering through the whole biospheric fauna (and flora on occasion).  He is a kind of trickster, then, not too different from your average tribal male, but unbound from cultural controls.  He is spontaneous, pleasure-seeking, hapless, playful, carefree, phallic.  As with the other forms of the first-stage serpent, he will have great importance in the third stage.  More to follow...

Caitya(Skt)= a sacred place, with a spring or pool, a tree, and a stone or stone railing.
Urwyrm= 'primordial serpent' in Eormanz.