Powerful deities are often hidden in plain sight. For many immersed in Buddhist lore, the realm of the nagas is very significant. These half-serpent, half-human beings are present in the natural world. For others, the serpentine appearances are almost unseen or at the most, simply tied in with one particular deity or myth. You may have seen the snake heads protruding from many a Buddha crown or the great Shakyamuni statues with the cobra Mucalinda protecting him as he reached enlightenment. These images tend to be more about the central figure, the Buddha, and Mucalinda merely representing, usually symbolically, a certain mythic or aesthetic part of that narrative.

The nagas appear malevolent in some stories, in opposition to the noble bird-like deity Garuda. Conversely Mahayana practitioners see them as benevolent deities lurking in cavernous underwater palaces, and as such they are often seen flanking the doors of sacred spaces. In religious imagery, snakes are also typically seen sitting around the neck of a supreme being, as in Hinduism’s Shiva, or wrapped around the stomach or even as an adornment of a great deity. Beyond Buddhism or Hinduism, the snake is apparent in nearly every religion, spiritual practice, and country around the world. And like many before me, I wondered why.

There are those who suggest that the serpent represents sexual energy, not least as it has been thought to be indicative of male genitalia, often by the phallus worshipers found in a few parts of the world. In India, we have the Hindu lingham, and there are male fertility festivals in Bhutan, Japan, and ancient Egypt. Evidence of this possible phallic serpentine relationship is also found in Brittany, France, with the granite Menhir de Champ in Dolent at Dol-de-Bretagne and interesting carvings found down in Carnac, the vishap (Vishapakar) stones in Armenia, and erect rocks in Cappadocia, Turkey.

Almost all serpentine stories mention a staff, typically indicative of our spinal column, with the snake pictured wrapping around it. Many claim that it is Kundalini or Shakti energy represented, since the serpent coils its way seven times up the chakras ascending our backbone. Could it symbolize the dual nature of reality or brain hemispheres, as the double helix shaped snakes also ascend the central rod as in the Grecian caduceus? The cobra encircled itself seven times around Gautama as he reached enlightenment before protecting him from seven days of storm. Similarly, serpents have been portrayed with a world tree, and tree worship is also thought to be one of the earliest subjects of worship and viewed as feminine, so perhaps this was an obvious marriage of early symbols representing fertility. But the serpent is also often wrapped around an egg or eating its own tail, protruding and protecting a deity, or held and subjugated somehow.

It is curious that nearly every great god or goddess has a serpent as their familiar, and that aside from its phallic association by those aforementioned, if we go back far enough to more gender egalitarian times, back to ancient Egypt, we find that they are often actually considered a feminine energy when the sun was still considered the ultimate feminine creator. For this reason I have been referring to the serpent as “her.”And if it were ever obvious, childbirth is the most obvious example of creation, so perhaps it should be no surprise that archaeological evidence suggests that ophiolatry seemed to accompany Mother Goddess worship. But why is the snake considered creative?

We know the snake is a glorious representation of resurrection thanks to its skin sloughing and reemerging in a shiny new one, which does have an sense of rebirth about it. This ecdysis, or skin shedding, rendered snakes an embodied example of personal creation, personal alchemy. And with this “new self” generally comes some wisdom, embodied in the serpent. Is it a coincidence that of all his teachings that the Buddha said humanity was not ready for, it was the Prajnaparamita texts? And of all candidates to safeguard them it was the watery naga who protected the scriptures until they were revealed to Nagārjuna and these ultimate wisdom texts became personified as the motherly embodiment of wisdom—Prajnaparamita?

I am sceptical of the patriarchal contexts in which many scriptures were written, so while the teachings are inherently valuable, in my next article I’ll be looking at some creational stories but with a view behind the names and genders, and then further back to art and artifact to see what else is lurking in plain sight.