Apocryphal Synaxis
Topic:
Mythology
Year:
January 2025
Coiled paradox
The serpent moves in silence, its body a fluid cipher of earth and sky. It has no wings, yet it ascends. It has no limbs, yet it conquers. Across cultures, the snake and its mythic cousin, the dragon, have been symbols of power, wisdom, and chaos—guardians of hidden knowledge, harbingers of both destruction and renewal. They slither through the human imagination, shape-shifting between villain and deity, threat and protector, ever-refusing to be pinned down to a single meaning.
Across the world, the ouroboros—the serpent eating its own tail—whispers of cycles without end, death folding into birth, time consuming itself in an eternal return. To watch the serpent devour itself is to contemplate the paradox of existence, where destruction and renewal are but the same motion, where nothing truly ends, only shifts shape. Some see in this an elegant philosophy; others, a terrible curse, the inability to break free from an endless loop of fate.
Time again
In ancient Mesopotamia, the serpent was sacred and feared. It wove its way through creation myths, a whispering force of both life and loss. In the Epic of Gilgamesh, it is the silent thief that steals immortality, a reminder that human hands cannot clutch eternity. The gods, amused or indifferent, watch as Gilgamesh’s prize is swallowed by the winding body of the serpent, sinking into the depths. Yet, there is no simple lesson here—what is stolen is also gifted, for what greater teacher of humility exists than impermanence?
Even now in modern China, the dragon is not a bringer of catastrophe but a celestial force, a conduit of balance and change. It rides the storm, carves rivers through mountains, and bestows the rain that nourishes life. Unlike its Western counterpart, which hoards and menaces, the Chinese dragon moves with fluidity, an emblem of transformation, never one thing for too long. It is the breath of the cosmos made visible, a reminder that movement is life and stagnation is death.
Slay of the wild
And so why in the West, where the dragon is so often a hoarder of gold, is she a beast to be slain? Here, the hero’s journey demands confrontation with the shadow. St. George, Siegfried, the countless knights who drive steel into scaled flesh—all must face the dragon within, the primal force coiled in the unconscious, guarding the treasure of self-knowledge. There is something almost tragic in the endless retelling of this tale, as if humanity believes the only way forward is to conquer that which it fears, rather than learn to live alongside it. Why must the dragon always fall beneath the sword? Why must we be at war with our own wildness?
Perhaps the truth is that serpents and dragons do not exist to be conquered, nor worshiped, nor even fully understood. They are the threshold, the riddle, the fire at the gate. They demand that we shed what is dead, that we dive into the unknown. To fear them is to fear our own becoming. To embrace them is to step into the spiral, where endings and beginnings are but the same flicker of the cosmic tongue, where wisdom slithers in the shadows and ascends into light, forever ungraspable, forever calling us onward.
Other articles
S.1
