The Serpent King

Living in a world of dragons

Today is 25 March, New Year’s Day and the Feast of the Mother of the Dragon Lord. No, I haven’t got my dates muddled, this isn’t a delayed post, and I have not been rewatching Game of Thrones. All will be revealed. But let’s start local.

My favourite neighbourhood onsen is protected by a nāgarāja. There is even a small Shinto shrine there for its veneration. If you want to know what a nāgarāja is, go there – it’s the Toshima-en bathhouse in northern Tokyo – and by the small waterfall in the garden, you will find a sign with the answer: 竜王, Ryū-ō. It’s a direct translation of the word inherited via China from India. Its meaning is “dragon king.”

There are dragons all over Japan, painted on ceilings and sliding doors, carved on the finials of temples, dancing in city squares; but their main habitat is water. According to the traditional fourfold classification, the lowest degree are guardians of buried treasure, 伏藏龍. Third in rank come the Earth Dragons, 地龍, guardians of rivers and springs. Second are those who control the waters of the sky, the cloud-dwelling Spirit Dragons, 神龍. The top tier are Heaven Dragons, 天龍, guards of the celestial palace. Those active in the realms humans most commonly frequent are the middle two tiers, the dragons of rivers and rain.

Japanese history has known many masters of dragons, capable of persuading them to send or stop rain as needed. Some modern Buddhists like to stress the rationality of their creed and its compatibility with Western scientific thought, opposing it to the supposedly contrary supernaturalism of Christianity. That kind of Buddhist is unlikely to let on that the dragons of Japan are of Buddhist providence, or to tell you the stories of the many Buddhist priests who were, essentially, dragon mages. And yet, ancient sutras speak of a city of the dragon kings beneath the sea, contested between those who uphold the dharma and those who oppose it. And among the many priests who invoked or consoled these dragons was the great Kobo Daishi (774-835), known in his lifetime as Kukai, the bringer to Japan of the esoteric Shingon School.

Once upon a time, the Emperor called on Kukai to resolve a drought afflicting Kyoto. Kukai’s diagnosis was that the Indian nāgarāja Anavapta (in Japanese, Zennyo 善如来) had taken residence in a lake to the East of the city. After several days reciting the appropriate sutras, Kukai persuaded the nāgarāja to bring back the rains. He decreed that henceforth, to keep the rain falling in its due course, a cadre of Shingon priests would be needed to continue reciting the prayers and making proper offerings to Zennyo.

Invocation of the dragons continues to this day. I saw an example myself at Kiyomizu Temple in the eastern mountains of Kyoto in March. The blue dragon, symbolic of the East in Chinese lore, is venerated throughout the Higashiyama quarter. Recently, the ancient tradition of parading the dragon around the streets with prayers for blessing has been restored with lavish new costumes, which you can see in my video below.

This dragon has long been considered the guardian spirit of the sacred spring which gives the temple its name: Kiyomizu means, simply, “pure water.” Yet here, the dragon is also considered an avatar of Kannon, or Avalokiteśvara, the Bodhisattva of Compassion beloved in Japan and often represented as a mother holding a child. As the 60’ paper dragon is processed through the streets of Higashiyama, holy water from the well is sprinkled over the assembled crowds.

The association of dragons with water, heaven, and indeed women is not restricted to Buddhist cultures. These motifs are prevalent also in Western spiritual tradition. Beowulf, St Patrick and St George all vanquish serpents of a sort. But one does not need to resort to the peripheries of Christendom to find dragons. You can find them in the Bible – and at its heart.

The very first story of Scripture famously features an ancient serpent. We should remember that the distinction between snakes and dragons was by no means as clear anciently as it is now. Indeed, the word “dragon” comes from the Greek word drakōn, snake. Nor is the “snake” in Genesis by any means typical of its mundane species. For a start, it speaks. Why, one might ask, is this talking snake in Eden in the first place? Most likely because it is not just a snake, but a seraph. I’ve written before about how the seraphim are that particular order of angels which guard the throne of God, and that their name in Hebrew is cognate with the word for snake. Albeit at a somewhat reductionist level, one might imagine ancient people seeing lightning bolts writhing in the sky and imagining these as fiery serpents, replete with their voice of thunderous chorus. Like the Heaven Dragons of Buddhist lore, then, Jewish Scripture speaks of air-serpents defending and upholding the heavenly court. And what is an air-serpent but – a dragon? The serpent in Eden is one of those fallen spirits who, like the sea-bound dragons who oppose the dharma, oppose the will of God.

We tend rather simplistically to portray the snake in Eden as nothing but a deceiver. However, its celestial origins help us to see why it actually symbolises rather more than that, both in Genesis and beyond.

First, wisdom is one of the snake’s attributes: after all, does Christ Himself not counsel His followers to be “wise as serpents?” (Mt 10.16) Now, this attribution would be less than obvious if the serpent in Eden were merely an asp or adder; but a fallen angel, once privy to the most intimate knowledge of God: that makes sense as a symbol for wisdom, “more subtil than any beast of the field” (Gen 3.1). Look at Genesis 3.6, and that wisdom is exactly what “the woman” (she has not yet been named Eve) seeks from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil:

“And when the woman saw that the tree was good for food, and that is was pleasant to the eyes, and a tree to be desired to make one wise, she took of the fruit thereof...”

There is much to unpack in this verse alone. The tree, we are told, is “in the midst” of the garden: that is, right at the centre, from which pour the four great rivers of the world. It is beautiful and its fruit looks good, nourishing to eat. Eating in Scripture is a common cipher for knowledge, since once receives food through the mouth as one receives words through the ears, which is to say, both through orifices of the head. The one fills the stomach, the other the heart. The tree is solid, upright, stretching up to heaven and down with its roots into the earth, mediating between the two. And like the bipedal hominid whose head is above the heart and belly, for the tree, the good flows down from above.

Conversely, the serpent is associated with chaos and with water. Recall that it is “upon the face of the deep” that the Spirit hovers in the beginning (Gen 1:2). The deep is the formless void, the nothingness or darkness, which God illumines into being through the outbreathing of His Word. The luminous Logos brings order and definition to the chaos of non-being. Time and again, Scripture represents this chaos through the symbol of water, whether the water of the Flood, or the water which Christ subdues with His words and walks upon, showing His mastery over it. And the water is inhabited by denizens which, likewise, manifest its destructive aspect. Chief among them is Leviathan, inherited from Canaanite Baal myths, and once again conceived of as a great watery serpent: in other words, a sea-dragon. In Canaanite myth, Baal conquered the dragon, but Holy Scripture attributes that victory to God. Whether the water comes from the clouds above or the sea below, ancient peoples understood it to be under the dominion of various dragon-like beings which needed to be assuaged.

Then, since the serpent is associated with water, it represents liquidity in contrast to the tree’s earthen solidity. Even the serpent’s movements are liquid, writhing and eddying like the wave. But those movements, as Scripture indicates in Genesis 3.14, are horizontal. In contrast to the upright human, whose head is ordered above the lower regions and rules them, the snake is told, “upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life.” Fallen from wisdom, it becomes a creature governed by appetites and disordered, eating the dead stuff from which Adam was formed and, he is warned, henceforth shall return.

Yet the serpent, even in Scripture, is not an entirely negative figure. Like the Indian and Chinese dragons, snakes have ambivalent roles. Consider the serpent of bronze that Moses is ordered to put on a staff in Numbers 21. This serpent is a sort of homeopathic device for the healing of snakebites. But note again the symbolism: a writhing snake and a straight pole of wood, like the staff of Asclepius. We are back to the Tree and the serpent once again. It seems as though aspects of both are necessary for humans to be fully balanced, healed beings: we must be at once solid and stable, rooted in earth and reaching for heaven; and yet, we must be wise as the serpent, flexible and liquid, not merely vertical and static but moving on the horizontal plane.

That plane, Matthieu Pageau convincingly suggests in his The Language of Creation, is none other than the plane of time itself: hence the ancient image of the serpent in a circle, swallowing its own tail, as a sign of time as en endless cycle. And in many ancient philosophies, that endless cycle is all there is: time has no beginning or end. There are endless aeons or kalpas from which one can only try to escape: in Buddhism, that escape is nirvana, which is neither a state nor a place, but the cessation of the cycle of death and rebirth, and so of suffering. Aristotle too deemed time endless. In Jewish and Christian tradition, however, there is both a beginning and an end of time, and indeed of space. Hence, the need not only for the circle of the serpent, but also the vertical line of the Tree. Moses’ miraculous staff transforms between wood and snake, the straight and the sinuous. Dionysius in his discussion of the movement of the angels combines the circular and linear movements, suggesting a spiral with a forward momentum towards an end: again, it’s that combination of liquidity and solidity, mimesis and telos.

But why such reptilian musings on this day? Because, as I said, it is 25 March. Except, of course, that it isn’t. It is Monday 8 April: but, thanks to Holy Week and Easter Week, the days of which have their own liturgical privilege, it is the first day that the Feast of the Annunciation could legitimately be celebrated. And what an important day it is. As I noted here, from Saxon times until 1752, it was New Year’s Day in England. It was traditionally considered the first day of Creation. It was also, as I wrote here, the day that Sauron was defeated. And this is because 25 March, precisely nine months before 25 December, is the day when the Incarnation of the Lord began: the Lord who would subdue all dragons, including the ringleader of the rebel faction.

The Gospel reading at mass today focusses on the historic portrayal of the angel announcing the conception of Christ to the Blessed Virgin Mary, but the first reading at Mattins was none other than Genesis 3. For there, the Lord tells the serpent, “I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel” (Gen 3.15). The upright seed of Eve will try to crush the serpent’s head and so kill it; the serpent will try to cripple man and bring him down to its own level, the horizontal, bringing him down to its own crawling humiliation.

The Church gives us this passage to reinforce the sense that Our Blessed Lady is the new Eve, as Christ is the new Adam. One may read this in a linear and literal fashion: as Adam was enticed to sin by Eve, so in a kind of chiasmus, Mary conceives the sinless One. While this reading is certainly not without merit, it can be and has been taken as evidence of misogyny, which is then sometimes defended against by reference to Adam’s refusal to take his share of the blame in 3.12. But Genesis is not a comedy to be judged on the psychological states of its players. It is a story not of how things were or might have been, but how things are, and specifically, the story of how the proper relationship between heaven and earth has gone and remains awry.

In an age long before the idea of multiple genders, man and woman were considered symbolically binary and complementary to one another. The story of the woman being made from the rib of man, “bone of my bones, flesh of my flesh,” shows that there is a primal unity, “one flesh,” one humanity between them (Gen 2.23f.). The woman’s error is not, initially, taking the fruit from the tree, but abandoning her husband to elope with the snake. She seeks wisdom, which is good, but does not go through the proper channel, which is to seek it from God in union with her husband. Nor, evidently, would her husband have found wisdom without her. Indeed, it is no coincidence that Holy Scripture personifies Wisdom as a woman.

What, then, of Mary, whom the Church rightly honours today, hymning her the door and gateway to heaven? Our Lady is no less ambiguous than Eve. Virgin and Mother, Mary does not elope with a serpent, for sure, but the father of her child is not her husband. She is not entirely the symbol of wifely stability and predictable procreation. Rather, there is something of Proverbs 9’s simple woman about Our Lady, a hint of waters stolen, and indeed her seed will descend to hell. Yet unlike Eve’s, Mary’s rupturing of the usual familial order is in obedience and harmony to the heavenly powers, assent to the Word of God, proclaimed by an angel, inbreathed into her waters by the selfsame Spirit that hovers always over the Void.

Hence Mary can adopt with impunity, even without sin, the serpentine fluidity which Eve sought to emulate by her own devices. Her Son, too, though bearing the perfect image of the Father, will Himself father no children, will not go forth and multiply. Instead, He will overpower the serpent by the serpent’s own power. He will subdue the waters of chaos. He will descend to the dust and lower still, but in the very act of descent, will crush the head of the dragon. And thereby, He becomes father of a myriad nations, not only of his own race and kin, but of all the peoples once promised to Abraham.

Here in Japan, in times of persecution, as a substitute for forbidden images of Mary, Christians used images of the maternal Kanon Bosatsu. How curious, I thought, in this distant and non-Christian culture, that the very Bodhisattva taken as a type of Our Blessed Lady should be venerated here, in the form of a dragon of Marian blue, and that water should be sprinkled over the streets like the asperges of the Resurrection. How curious that the symbolic imagination of the ancient Hebrew or Canaanite should coincide with that of the Indian, Chinese and Japanese, so vividly rendered even now. What are Christians to make of the nāgarāja considered faithful to the Dharma, who abide by the celestial law? Are their rites falsified by the truth of Christ, or affirmed and completed by it?

The tree planted by the waterside brings forth his fruit in due season. It is, of course, the Tree of the Cross, on which the Servant King hung: or perhaps that should be “Serpent King,” for by His power, the greatest of the rebel Dragon Kings was overcome. By that same power today, Holy Church continues to do battle against the legions left behind, until all the waters of the world are pure, and governed by angels of God’s peace.