The Golden Serpent (2019)
“Why did I behave as if that serpent were my soul? Only, it seems, because my soul was a serpent… I wanted my serpent soul to communicate her wisdom to me.”
(C. G. Jung)
One of my original inspirations for this image came from author Philip Pullman’s re-imagining of daimones or “daemons” in the His Dark Materials series; in Pullman’s alternate universe, the anima or animus within a person manifests as an animal. (The daemon’s shape reveals the person’s essential nature; exceptional daemons take the form of exceptional animals.)
Classical daimones guided the inner lives of individuals through the manifestations of their true nature. Is the serpent a familiar? a teacher? a manifestation of kundalini? (Kundalini in Sanskrit means “coiled” (like a serpent). This serpent shines like alchemical gold in symbiosis with this man; they share an epiphany of the inner light.
“Where there is the tree of knowledge, there is always Paradise: so say the most ancient and most modern serpents.”
(Friedrich Nietzsche)