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The Wisdom of the Serpent

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Steven B. Herrmann, PhD, MFT
Author of "Walt Whitman: Shamanism, Spiritual Democracy, and the World Soul"

The Wisdom of the Serpent is one of the classical texts on initiation in the field of analytical psychology. Written in 1963 with the assistance of Maud Oakes, Joseph Henderson examines the myths, poems and epics of many world cultures and reveals a basic pattern of initiation that depicts the annihilation and death of the ego and its ultimate release into transcendence and spiritual liberation. The theme of the first chapter is the fear of death, or the ego's fear of the unknown (3). This fear, so common during the passage through mid-life turns out to be a natural part of the process of individuation, where the individual must undergo an excruciating experience of death to the limited ego, surrender to the Self and death to the larger reality of the unknowable. In chapter five, he points out that the number most commonly associated with initiation, the number seven, is a number connoting the steps or stages of an inner, as opposed to an outer, journey. The word initiation, he explains is derived from the Latin in ire, "to enter into," and therefore it denotes a temporary withdrawal from outer actions, and especially adventures of a heroic sort. Henderson is well-known for his positing of a transit beyond the hero myth. Submission is the central characteristic of initiation, a strong element of the archetypal "trial of strength" that is carried over from the earlier heroic phase of life and exemplified by the symbol of the seven stages, represented as seven rungs of a ladder leading to Heaven (42-43). While Henderson finds the therapeutic powers of the shaman in the Hebrew and Christian traditions, he cautions that we need to be careful not to strain the analogy between shamanism and Christianity. He shows in chapter 6 that the classically archetypal figure from which all other mythic ancestors' spring is the aboriginal shaman, who is a master of his own initiation, and who stays humbly true to the pattern of his or her own vocation (63). Henderson views the shamanic impulse as the root of the culture-patterns. He defines initiation as an archetypal process consisting of the following seven stages: 1) spiritual education and psychic liberation, 2) engagement and disengagement, 3) descent and ascent, 4) death and rebirth, 5) incarnation and release, 6) coniunctio (marriage, union and spiritual illumination), and 7) submission and transcendence. Each of these 7 stages are said to represent an ineffable mystery of human existence. Understood psychologically, Henderson says that 7 connotes the fullest development of the numbers 3 and 4, in which confidence and trust in the pattern of individuation is represented numerically; this is not just as a process, Henderson tells us, it is a way of life. As an eloquent example of the experience of the acceptance of death Henderson cites Walt Whitman's 1868 poem "Darest Thou Now O Soul" to end the book. This book was published four years before Thresholds of Initiation. It shows the progression of his thought between his excellent chapter for Man and His Symbols and what many consider to be his masterpiece in 1967, Thresholds. (See my Amazon Review of Thresholds for further reading).