This is how I see it as well.Alexander wrote: ↑May 14th, 2022, 11:47 amIt was a Seraph/serpent which tempted Eve and gave her forbidden knowledge; an angel of light, burning one, or messenger.seeker of knowledge wrote: ↑May 27th, 2015, 6:14 pm I've been wondering this for a long time, why did Satan choose the snake to temp Eve? out of all the other animals.
A snake may only eat one mouse in an entire month. Mice easily out produce snakes.Niemand wrote: ↑May 14th, 2022, 12:50 pm Snakes do perform a useful role in nature. They keep the numbers of rats and mice down, for example.
There are a number of ideas as to why a snake. Some people say that it is a male symbol, some the kundalini energy wrapped around the spine (as the Hindus think), others for the simple reason that snakes and trees have a long association.
The World Health Organisation uses a snake as its logo. There is a Greek mythological background to this, but it is an odd choice for a medical symbol in the modern age.
Cats are preferable to snakes for sure. But I know in India that some people tolerate large snakes because they do keep rodents down. Less efficiently than cats of course.Fred wrote: ↑May 28th, 2022, 12:11 pmA snake may only eat one mouse in an entire month. Mice easily out produce snakes.Niemand wrote: ↑May 14th, 2022, 12:50 pm Snakes do perform a useful role in nature. They keep the numbers of rats and mice down, for example.
There are a number of ideas as to why a snake. Some people say that it is a male symbol, some the kundalini energy wrapped around the spine (as the Hindus think), others for the simple reason that snakes and trees have a long association.
The World Health Organisation uses a snake as its logo. There is a Greek mythological background to this, but it is an odd choice for a medical symbol in the modern age.
When I bought my place, I had millions of chipmunks and mice which thrived on the pine nuts. The few snakes had no significant impact on the rodent population. I brought in a dozen cats which multiplied. Within just a couple or 3 years, there was nary a rodent to be found. Cats are natural born killers. They do it for fun. They do not always eat their prey. They eat snakes and rodents.
Hey, Frank, I didn’t want to hijack the other thread, so I’m bringing this over here.FrankOne wrote: ↑July 1st, 2022, 4:41 pmThen there is the idea that Yaldobaoth is also known as Jehovah. I've never been able to find anything yet that makes that correlation in ancient script. Perhaps others have?
The premise is that Satan and Lucifer are distinct entities. Satan was the serpent in the garden story, but Lucifer is a being with a very different intent and that is to force people to be good by removing free will. Satan is all about perversion and destruction and is now being used as a pawn by Lucifer to bring down all govts and organizations of the world before he steps in and rules the world with an iron fist .
I very much enjoy the perspective of Jung due to his brilliant manner of considering how we interpret the many facets of our existence and the cosmology of 'powers'. He does a great job of bringing everything back to the responsibility of the individual. Whether characters such as Satan or Lucifer actually exist is almost irrelevant because it's the idea of them that drives our motivations for "good" or "evil". I've never had a direct encounter with either, but I do tend to believe that they exist simply because "power" for both "good" and "evil" is represented by entities on all levels of existence in this temporal realm.Thinker wrote: ↑July 3rd, 2022, 6:02 pmHey, Frank, I didn’t want to hijack the other thread, so I’m bringing this over here.FrankOne wrote: ↑July 1st, 2022, 4:41 pmThen there is the idea that Yaldobaoth is also known as Jehovah. I've never been able to find anything yet that makes that correlation in ancient script. Perhaps others have?
The premise is that Satan and Lucifer are distinct entities. Satan was the serpent in the garden story, but Lucifer is a being with a very different intent and that is to force people to be good by removing free will. Satan is all about perversion and destruction and is now being used as a pawn by Lucifer to bring down all govts and organizations of the world before he steps in and rules the world with an iron fist .
I hadn’t previously considered how distinct Satan & Lucifer may be - possibly the antithesis of Christ & God.
It is a fascinating, somewhat perplexing notion how God (&/or Christ) can seem contradictory. Maybe it’s something to do with “opposition in all things”/yin-yang. Either way, symbolic scripture is meant to be likened to us, so that’s good to keep in mind.
Here are some notes I gathered…
“…The New Testament authors just rewrote Satan into the Genesis account…
Satan is consistently portrayed as Leviathan-Nahash throughout Scripture….
…prior to this curse, the serpent was NOT crawling on its belly. This means the serpent had arms and legs. What do you call a serpent with arms and legs?? A DRAGON!
…war arose in heaven, Michael and his angels fighting against the dragon; and the dragon and his angels fought, but they were defeated and there was no longer any place for them in heaven. And the great dragon was thrown down, that ancient serpent, who is called the Devil and Satan, the deceiver of the whole world—he was thrown down to the earth, and his angels were thrown down with him. (Revelation 12:1-3,7-9)
…Jesus slays the Dragon that Adam failed to fight.
Adam & the Dragon is the ORIGIN of the Dragon Archetype. This is why knights slaying dragons became a motif in the story-telling of the entire the world and throughout all history…” https://www.thescottsmithblog.com/2018/ ... t.html?m=1
“Dragon
A complex symbol representing the unknown parts of the dreamers personality that is often very destructive. Unconscious feelings of anger, rage and hate are manifested as a dragon, the dreamers main goal is to search and kill it. What is the dragon in your life?” https://www.dreamdictionary.org/d/
“Introduced as "the most clever of all of the beasts of the field that YHWH God had made," the serpent in the Garden of Eden is portrayed as just that: a serpent. Satan does not make an appearance in Genesis 2-3, for the simple reason that when the story was written, the concept of the devil had not yet been invented…
The noun satan, Hebrew for “adversary” or “ACCUSER,” occurs nine times in the Hebrew Bible: five times to describe a human military, political or legal opponent, and four times with reference to a divine being…
In Job, “the satan” is a member of God’s heavenly council—one of the divine beings, whose role in Job’s story is to be an “accuser,” a status acquired by people in ancient Israel and Mesopotamia for the purposes of particular legal proceedings. In Job’s case, what’s on trial is God’s assertion that Job is completely “blameless and upright” vs. the satan’s contention that Job only behaves himself because God has rewarded him. God argues that Job is rewarded because he is good, and not good because he is rewarded. The satan challenges God to a wager that if everything is taken away from poor Job, he won’t be so good anymore, and God accepts…” https://www.biblicalarchaeology.org/dai ... ame-satan/
“The serpent/dragon represents the saviour. Satan came as a serpent because he wanted to be the saviour and came as a mere imitation.” (Comment)
“Christ first had to become his Antichrist, his under worldly brother… Christ did not remain in Hell, but rose to the heights in the beyond. ~Carl Jung
“… in the darkest Middle Ages…. they spoke of the devil, today we call it a neurosis.”
Jung
Jung refers to the devil in several ways: as aspects of God, as a force in life, and as a psychological phenomenon. “The left hand of God,”“the left side of God,” the “other side of God,” “God’s own dark side,”Satanaël, God’s first son, the Antichrist, the figure opposed to Christ, and “the counterpart of Christ that represents evil” are some of the terms Jung used for the evil aspect of God. As a force in human life, the devil shows up as “the dark antagonist,” “the principle of evil” and the “ungodly intellect,” while, in psychological contexts Jung felt the devil was “… the diabolical aspect of every psychic function that has broken loose from the hierarchy of the total psyche and now enjoys independence and absolute power…,” “… the grotesque and sinister side of the unconscious…” and, on the collective level, “… the objective psyche that held all the peoples of the Roman Empire under its sway….”
“… By not being aware of having a shadow, you declare a part of your personality to be non-existent. Then it enters the kingdom of the non-existent, which swells up and takes on enormous proportions. When you don’t acknowledge that you have such qualities, you are simply feeding the devils. In medical language, each quality in the psyche represents a certain energic value, and if you declare an energic value to be non-existent, a devil appears instead….”
We need to recognize the shadow and the myriad forms this inner devil can take.
But this does not mean we want to identify with the devil because it is an archetype, and identifying with an archetype is very dangerous: “It causes exaggeration, a puffed-up attitude (inflation), loss of free will, delusion, and enthusiasm in good and evil alike….”. Rather we must “religiously bear in mind”
“the autonomy of this ambivalent figure… for it is the source of that fearful power which drives us toward individuation… We neither can nor should try to force this numinous being, at the risk of our own psychic destruction, into our narrow human mold, for it is greater than man’s consciousness and greater than his will.”
Jung regarded the Lucifer myth as a “therapeutic myth.” As a healing myth it fosters our coming to consciousness, in both positive and negative ways: via dream work, analysis, conscious work to become aware of our “inner city,” and via accidents, broken relationships, patterns of self-destructive behavior, and personal loss and turmoil—all of which are meant to be “wake up” calls for us to grow and change.
The devil within us provides us with initiative, the impetus to do things, to start things, to challenge the gods: Eve ate the apple, in the “fall that made us great.”
…the devil can be an agent provocateur, an intrusive, unwelcome, disturbing force that shakes us up, perhaps destroying long-cherished dreams (which we come to recognize in time really would not have served us), while also opening up new avenues of living.
…discern which conscience is operative at the moment…. “ https://jungiancenter.org/jung-devil-reality-evil/
The translation is serpent, not snake.seeker of knowledge wrote: ↑May 27th, 2015, 6:14 pm I've been wondering this for a long time, why did Satan choose the snake to temp Eve? out of all the other animals.
Awesome!FrankOne wrote: ↑July 3rd, 2022, 8:49 pmI very much enjoy the perspective of Jung due to his brilliant manner of considering how we interpret the many facets of our existence and the cosmology of 'powers'. He does a great job of bringing everything back to the responsibility of the individual. Whether characters such as Satan or Lucifer actually exist is almost irrelevant because it's the idea of them that drives our motivations for "good" or "evil". I've never had a direct encounter with either, but I do tend to believe that they exist simply because "power" for both "good" and "evil" is represented by entities on all levels of existence in this temporal realm.
I see our existence as one of climbing to a great height , then figuring out how to let go of all the negative adherents to our experience while scaling back down to the point of origin. The negative adherents mainly being fear, vanity, condemnation, and guilt. Satan, Lucifer, YHVH, and Christ all being necessary for us to complete the round trip. All being divine creations as we are. This implying that the fall is a part of salvation as much as the atonement. The fall giving us an experience of separation and the at-one-ment bringing us back. The Father's plan was perfect before it ever started.
Time itself is likely less than a blink to the Father. The movie "Inception" comes to mind and how the closer to the 'real' we are, the faster time goes.
What is now happening on earth is a trend to fear for the body while safety and security become paramount. The desire for safety and security only magnifies fear. The body is nothing and fear can only pertain to bodies. The more fearful the individual, the more they do not recognize what they are, which is an immortal, indestructible soul.
well..it appears that I've digressed, lol.
haha,loved that , "thinking with integrity is paradoxical". Absolutely. My perspective is that there are "Lords" or managers of planets such as this one, that are called by the masses "Gods". Their job is to teach the basics of good and evil and create order or to create enough structure for man to go out of ignorance and to move forward. <This is done by working with motivational tools such as fear, guilt and reward. As man progresses, he starts to take note of all of the contradictions such as "fear is not of God"...yet we are to "fear God". Or that Christ forgives all men that accept him, yet it is constantly reinforced that we need to fear judgment.Thinker wrote: ↑July 5th, 2022, 8:57 pmAwesome!FrankOne wrote: ↑July 3rd, 2022, 8:49 pmI very much enjoy the perspective of Jung due to his brilliant manner of considering how we interpret the many facets of our existence and the cosmology of 'powers'. He does a great job of bringing everything back to the responsibility of the individual. Whether characters such as Satan or Lucifer actually exist is almost irrelevant because it's the idea of them that drives our motivations for "good" or "evil". I've never had a direct encounter with either, but I do tend to believe that they exist simply because "power" for both "good" and "evil" is represented by entities on all levels of existence in this temporal realm.
I see our existence as one of climbing to a great height , then figuring out how to let go of all the negative adherents to our experience while scaling back down to the point of origin. The negative adherents mainly being fear, vanity, condemnation, and guilt. Satan, Lucifer, YHVH, and Christ all being necessary for us to complete the round trip. All being divine creations as we are. This implying that the fall is a part of salvation as much as the atonement. The fall giving us an experience of separation and the at-one-ment bringing us back. The Father's plan was perfect before it ever started.
Time itself is likely less than a blink to the Father. The movie "Inception" comes to mind and how the closer to the 'real' we are, the faster time goes.
What is now happening on earth is a trend to fear for the body while safety and security become paramount. The desire for safety and security only magnifies fear. The body is nothing and fear can only pertain to bodies. The more fearful the individual, the more they do not recognize what they are, which is an immortal, indestructible soul.
well..it appears that I've digressed, lol.
Digress away - I often do! And there’s a lot to think about & explore. And so much is connected. Eg., Recently, I was painting - playing with colors I came up with an unusual color of purple… which served as a background, which I painted a daisy over it. A few hours later, I come across a woman with a shirt of that same strange purple color & a daisy. Serendipity, a little message indicating there’s more connected than apparent?
What you mentioned about, ”… climbing to a great height , then figuring out how to let go of all the negative adherents to our experience while scaling back down to the point of origin…” reminds me of survival shows… when unsure of which direction they want to travel & surrounded by jungle, they may climb up a tree to get a lay of the land… then descend the tree, knowing which way to go.
So true: “the fall is a part of salvation as much as the atonement.” Meat idea, not milk. I’m not sure how to digest it. They say, “thinking with integrity is paradoxical thinking.” God is both chaos & order… both needed to propel us forward.
I would ask who has interpreted the serpent to be Christ? Please share a reference, thanks.
Thanks for the reference, I had forgotten those passages.cab wrote: ↑July 5th, 2022, 10:25 pm
2 Nephi 25
20 And now, my brethren, I have spoken plainly that ye cannot err. And as the Lord God liveth that brought Israel up out of the land of Egypt, and gave unto Moses power that he should heal the nations after they had been bitten by the poisonous serpents, if they would cast their eyes unto the serpent which he did raise up before them, and also gave him power that he should smite the rock and the water should come forth; yea, behold I say unto you, that as these things are true, and as the Lord God liveth, there is none other name given under heaven save it be this Jesus Christ, of which I have spoken, whereby man can be saved.
Helaman 8
14 Yea, did he not bear record that the Son of God should come? And as he lifted up the brazen serpent in the wilderness, even so shall he be lifted up who should come.
15 And as many as should look upon that serpent should live, even so as many as should look upon the Son of God with faith, having a contrite spirit, might live, even unto that life which is eternal.
FrankOne wrote: ↑July 5th, 2022, 10:43 pmThanks for the reference, I had forgotten those passages.cab wrote: ↑July 5th, 2022, 10:25 pm
2 Nephi 25
20 And now, my brethren, I have spoken plainly that ye cannot err. And as the Lord God liveth that brought Israel up out of the land of Egypt, and gave unto Moses power that he should heal the nations after they had been bitten by the poisonous serpents, if they would cast their eyes unto the serpent which he did raise up before them, and also gave him power that he should smite the rock and the water should come forth; yea, behold I say unto you, that as these things are true, and as the Lord God liveth, there is none other name given under heaven save it be this Jesus Christ, of which I have spoken, whereby man can be saved.
Helaman 8
14 Yea, did he not bear record that the Son of God should come? And as he lifted up the brazen serpent in the wilderness, even so shall he be lifted up who should come.
15 And as many as should look upon that serpent should live, even so as many as should look upon the Son of God with faith, having a contrite spirit, might live, even unto that life which is eternal.
In Nephi 25:20 , I do not see a correlation that Jesus Christ is the serpent. The reference to Christ does not appear to be connected with the serpent.
In Helaman 8:14 , My interpretation is that the serpent was lifted in the wilderness to lead the Israelites and that in a future time, Christ will rise to guide the people in the millenium. I personally do not see it meaning that Christ is the serpent, but instead, the example was given to bring a corollary to being an ensign or guide.
In the days of Moses, under the law of Moses, a serpent was raised to guide, yet in the future, under the new law of Christ, Christ himself will be raised as the savior.
8:15, same comments as above.
I can't say that I'm right, but it's how I see it.
