The Farmer's Daughter and the Serpent: The Mythic Ties to “Father” and “Mother” in American Culture

Kris Seraphine
Hunting & Agricultural Mythologies - MS 725
David Miller, PH.D.
Spring 2004

The Farmer's Daughter and the Serpent: The Mythic Ties to “Father” and “Mother” in American Culture

It’s difficult to decide whose daughter I really am. Am I the daughter of Cain, the farmer’s daughter, or the daughter of Abel, the shepherd’s daughter. Another question I ask myself is, “Does it really matter? They are both domesticators.” My biological father would outright disagree and say, “You are the daughter of an old, ex-hippie, former rock star” (my father was the drummer for the band Chicago).

I would have to disagree with my father as well because it is insulting to think that I am wholly defined by my patrilineal heritage. In spite of my internal reservations, nonetheless, my mind automatically curves in the direction of my father whenever I think, “Who am I?”

The exploration of my own self-attitudes through the materials presented in class has proved to be disquieting and at the same time grounding. As Socrates states in Plato’s Phaedo, the path to the underworld, to the deep roots, truly is curvy. “It seems clear to me that it is neither straightforward or single [...] In fact, it seems likely that it contains many forks and crossroads [...]” (Plato Last, 175). Like the mythologies I study, the ever-changing landscape of my life, my personality and even my surname are serpentine. My last name, Seraphine, is related to the word Seraphim, which is the name for the highest order of angels in Hebrew mythology.

The name Seraphim is a combination of the Hebrew word rapha, which means "healer," and ser, which means "higher being." They
are represented by the serpent, which is a symbol of healing.
(Briggs 246)

The root of the word Seraphim may also come from the Hebrew verb saraph, “to burn,” or from the noun with the same spelling which means “a fiery, flying serpent” (Lindemans 2004).
Seraphim are brilliant and human eyes must not gaze upon them, lest they be instantly incinerated. “It is said that they are so radiant that not even the Cherubim and the Ophanim can look upon them” (Briggs 246). The essence of the Seraphim is love and they continuously sing the Trisagion around the throne of God– “Kadosh, Kadosh, Kadosh” or in English, “Holy, holy, holy” (Godwin 25). Maybe I am the daughter of a hippie after all! Hippies are all about love, peace and in general love singing about both topics.

Strangely enough, for such an exalted, loving group, the Seraphim comprise the angelic order most closely related to the serpent and the dragon: they are known in the Old Testament as the “fiery, flying serpents of lightning,” who “roar like lions” when aroused” (Godwin 25). Isaiah has a vision of the angelic Seraphim surrounding God’s throne:

In the year that king Uzziah died I saw the Lord sitting upon a throne high and lifted up, and His train filled the temple.

Above Him stood the seraphim; each one had six wings: with twain he covered his face and with twain he covered his feet, and with twain he did fly.

And one called unto another, and said: Holy, holy, holy, is the Lord of hosts; the whole earth is full of His glory.

And the posts of the door were moved at the voice of them that called, and the house was filled with smoke.

Then said I: Woe is me! for I am undone; because I am a man of unclean lips, and I dwell in the midst of a people of unclean lips; for mine eyes have seen the King, the Lord of hosts.

Then flew unto me one of the seraphim, with a glowing stone in his hand, which he had taken with the tongs from off the altar;
and he touched my mouth with it, and said: Lo, this hath touched thy lips; and thine iniquity is taken away, and thy sin expiated. (Isa. 6:1-6:7)

Yet in the Book of Numbers, chapter 21:5, the Seraphs are fiery serpents sent to punish the Israelites:

And the people spoke against God, and against Moses: 'Wherefore have ye brought us up out of Egypt to die in the wilderness? for there is no bread, and there is no water; and our soul loatheth this light bread.'

And the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died.

And the people came to Moses, and said: 'We have sinned, because we have spoken against the Lord, and against thee; pray unto the Lord, that He take away the serpents from us.' And Moses prayed for the people.

And the Lord said unto Moses: 'Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole; and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he seeth it, shall live.'

And Moses made a serpent of brass, and set it upon the pole; and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he looked unto the serpent of brass, he lived. (Num. 21:5-21:9)

Even more strange, are the names of the angels reputed to be Seraphs or related to serpents: Raphael, Metatron, Satan and Michael. The angel Raphael, because of his relationship to the healing arts, is often depicted with the caduceus, a staff entwined by two serpents facing each other–a motif that is echoed in many paintings of the fall of Adam and Eve. Metatron is one of the most powerful of all the angels and is said to be in charge of the welfare of mankind–and in some circles, “Metatron is known as Satan” (Godwin 26). How can Satan, whose name ha-satan actually means “adversary,” and Michael, the great Archangel who defeated him, belong to the same order of angels? Isn’t one the epitome of hubris and evil, and the other the exemplary of postulate, God-loving and good? A great example of both/and yet this situation is not registered as such. Instead, Satan is repressed and begins to snake his way into the back of humanity’s consciousness waiting to venomously project out onto the world.

Perhaps the most pivotal story in the Hebrew Bible is the fall and the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the garden of Eden. My namesake, the serpent, makes a grand appearance in the guise of Satan. The serpent in the story has a unique relationship to Eve that has been explored extensively in both art and literature.

Many paintings depict the snake directly facing Eve; the snake will often have the visage of a woman, perhaps even the face of Eve (see Appendix). “The cunning that the snake represents is really within Eve herself. This is vividly depicted in Christian art; the serpent is often portrayed with a female head” (Phillips 61). Often, Eve is shown looking at Adam, but in more than one painting she is looking directly at the serpent. The two mirror each other and form a gestalt or, with the tree in between, the caduceus. Eve has an affinity with the snake and both share an intimate relationship, held together by invisible threads; woman and serpent are forever forged into association with one another.

From a gender roles perspective, since Eve can directly face the serpent, she doesn’t need to go through the man, Adam, to receive the healing and wisdom of the snaky divine emissary. In fact, Adam must go through Eve to relate to the serpent. So, who is the one really “wearing the pants” in this scenario? In Eden, the masculine is submissive and the feminine is active. The dynamism needed for the great transformation of consciousness is acted through Eve, the feminine principle. Yin and Yang do not exist yet because there is no need for it; the feminine/masculine split doesn’t occur until Yahweh (the word) declares it to be so. The snake is both a feminine and masculine symbol. It is affiliated with the physical curviness of a woman but can also be a straight and penetrating phallus.

Yahweh psychologically represents the Hebrew projection of the fear of gender chaos during a time when order was not only desired, but necessary for survival. The fear of the devouring, dark mother that is a feminine snake or dragon, known as Leviathan or Tiamat, may also be more directly related to the revulsion of the serpent and the denigration of the feminine.
The patriarchal world strives to deny its dark and “lowly” lineage, its origin in this primordial world, it does everything in its power to conceal its own descent from the Dark Mother and–both rightly and wrongly at once–considers it necessary to forge a “higher genealogy,” tracing its descent from heaven, the god of heaven, and the luminous aspects. (Neumann 213)

Yahweh was as deviant and crafty as his servant Satan when he staged the fall; his creation of Eve, the snake and the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil was a setup to bring his creations closer to him. Conventional wisdom imparts that if the Israelites can’t stay in line, if they deviate or curve, they can’t survive as a community. History and myth have both shown that in the example of the Hebrew people, the more they deviated from the straight path, the closer they became to their god Yahweh.

It seems that the idyllic garden of Eden is an undifferentiated space, where contradiction and paradox live undetected by human consciousness. This undifferentiated state starts with the first chapter of Genesis and continues all the way until the fall. Each subsequent chapter of the Old Testament becomes increasingly historical and less eternal in sensibility. In the Old Testament, Genesis, chapter 1, God creates the world from chaos, a uroboric, non-temporal state. In Hebrew, chaos is characterized as tehom, which means “deep”, and derives from the name of the Babylonian female dragon, Tiamat.

Tiamat, the saltwater mother of chaos, and Apsu, the freshwater father, were the primeval Babylonian creator gods who birthed the lesser gods by “calling them into being” (King 3). As in Genesis, “the word” or logos, creates the gods out of the formlessness:

When in the height heaven was not named,
And the earth beneath did not yet bear a name [...]
When of the gods none had been called into being;
And none bore a name, and no destinies [were ordained]
(King 3)

In the beginning of this creation myth, both feminine and masculine deities have equal rank and responsibility. After ages pass, Apsu is murdered by their children and Tiamat goes on a bloody rampage to avenge the death of her consort. A woman’s rage is now considered unacceptable in modern society–the repressed rage lurks in the unconscious, as the terrible, murderous mother. She thirsts for blood and sends in legions of poisonous serpents to wage war against her offspring:

Hath made in addition weapons invincible, she hath spawned monster-serpents,
Sharp of tooth, and merciless of fang.
With poison instead of blood she hath filled their bodies
Fierce monster-vipers she hath clothed with terror
(King 41)

The enormous vipers are reminiscent of Yahweh’s fiery serpents sent to terrorize the Israelites in Numbers 21:5. Serpents are the bringers of death and at the same time have the power to restore life, reanimating the dead.

The end of the story is no big surprise–the hero god Marduk, whose name translates as “bull calf of the sun,” takes down the mother goddess leader, cuts her into twelve pieces and creates the rest of the earth with her body. He is a fertility god as well as the god that creates humans. Tiamat is gorged and dismembered, her heart pierced, her “foul” body becoming fertilizer for eternity. Her salty tears become the rivers Tigris and Euphrates. Tiamat’s voice, the divine feminine voice, is cut from the ability to call creation into being as Marduk crushes her skull. The hissing call of the serpent is the only audible sound issuing from the thick grass. However, her presence is not extinguished, or obviously Yahweh, and other sky gods, wouldn’t be in eternal battle with her. Marduk made Tiamat into a voiceless image of powerful multiplicity.

My first line of questioning was, “whose daughter am I?” Gilles Deleuze and Felix Guattari were opposed to trees, even the family tree, and favored the rhizome; trees have roots and are stratified, rhizomes do not. Rhizomes are analogous to grass and vines; their random, meandering patterns allow for individuality, deviancy, polyvalency. In Deleuze and Guattari’s eyes, I am the daughter of a father but also a completely separate individual creating my destiny as I move through life. My individuation is not defined by my biological ties, and perhaps is even encumbered by them. Genealogies are like trees; they have stratified branches and immovable roots. A hierarchy ordered around a center, such as in the hierarchy of the angelic hosts, is also not present in the rhizomatic model:

Multiplicities are rhizomatic, and expose arborescent pseudomultiplicities for what they are. There is no unity to serve as a pivot in the object, or to divide in the subject. There is not even the unity to abort in the object or "return" in the subject. A multiplicity has neither subject nor object, only determinations, magnitudes, and dimensions that cannot increase in number without the multiplicity changing in nature (the laws of combination therefore increase in number as the multiplicity grows). (Deleuze 8)

A rhizome, according to Deleuze and Guattari, is a grouping of “heterogeneous elements”–the woman, the snake and the tree form a rhizome–in which one element somehow reproduces itself within the other element’s image, and vice versa. “Wasp and orchid, as heterogeneous elements, form a rhizome. It could be said that the orchid imitates the wasp, reproducing the image in a signifying fashion (mimesis, mimicry, lure, etc.)” (Deleuze 10). However, the rhizome is really a map of the elements, similar to Jung’s concept of archetype, not a true photographic reproduction. A rhizome depicts analogous structure within elements that somehow connects them.

On the surface, a concept of unity seems to be disregarded in the rhizome theory, however, unity can exist without being “centralized,” as it is in a power structure. St. Bonaventure’s quote about god being “a circle whose centre is everywhere and whose circumference is nowhere” (Hartman 1995) echoes the rhizome principle of multiplicity in unity.
Likewise, when Jung writes about the nature of the psyche in Symbols of Transformation, he describes it as an ancient, underground entity. “The psyche is not of today; its ancestry goes back millions of years. Individual consciousness is only the flower and the fruit of the season, sprung from the perennial rhizome beneath the earth; and it would find itself in better accord with the truth if it took the existence of the rhizome into its calculations. For the root matter is the mother of all things” (Jung 1912/52: xxiv). The great mother’s broken and scattered body parts forever spring forth new networks of connecting rhizomes.

Modern culture in the United States reflects an ages old “program in the background” that raises its head in advertising, pop culture, television and film. I was paging through a women’s fashion magazine and found an ad for Seiko watches that captured my interest (see Appendix):

It’s not your handbag.
It’s not your neighborhood.
It’s not your boyfriend.
It’s your watch that tells most about who you are.

A watch is a functional and ornamental device that is associated with linear time, and mythologically associated with the collective father, Father Time. The message is clear: “you, woman, are defined by the father; and you, woman, are not to be defined by your other relationships.” The woman in the ad is also more Athene than Aphrodite, more business than pleasure. Taking pleasure in the body and in nature is the “juice” of life and this ad seems to completely deny this reality. The handbag is often associated with female genitalia, and the ad is expressly saying that a woman’s power doesn’t lie in her feminine nature, but in her direct relation to the father figure. “Father” could be Zeus, Saturn, Cronos or Yahweh, but the personal, or integrated father figure is not part of the equation; the advertisement is attempting to tap into a powerful archetype.

The Sky-Father archetype may be the major “program running in the background.” Can we kill him like Saturn killed Cronos? Killing the father will undoubtedly allow for new growth. However, the mythological pattern teaches that whomever slays the father eventually becomes the father, and once again the cycle of death and rebirth dramatizes on a masculine playing field. Yahweh will not risk being dethroned and will rule through intimidation in order to keep His position intact. It is interesting to ponder why the masculine powers, both in myth and in history, are so threatened by the feminine. Part of the repression is based on the fear of death; the fear of going back into the ground of the dark mother’s womb. Her womb is both life and death.

From the genital of Woman all men have come forth, and to the genital of Woman most men return. Psychologically, then, women must be regarded as perpetually confronting men with the threat of nonexistence, and men avoid this terror by reversing the natural course (women are really born from men) or by denying their sexual yearning for the comfort of oblivion (women are seducers). (Phillips 44)

I found a fashion layout in a magazine, showing a woman reclining with a beautiful yellow-striped serpent wrapped around her body (see Appendix). Eve is a powerful, undying image in American culture. Unlike her superficial biblical image, Eve as archetype, is now portrayed as provocative, strong and undomesticated. The image in the magazine shows her completely at ease in her wild, beautiful garden.

This fall, the fashion company Diesel launched a campaign called “Diesel Society of Nature Lovers.” On their website, a panoramic photograph of men and women “loving” trees, flowers, grass, rocks and water (see Appendix) resembled a modern rendering of Hieronymous Bosch’s “The Garden of Earthly Delights.” On the left side of the photograph there is a beautiful woman laying in the grass, who appears to be having an orgasmic experience with a long, curvy vine (see Appendix). Feminine sexuality and the enjoyment of nature is celebrated in this photo, not derided.
Erecting mother goddess supreme over the masculine god is a course of action, but not the only one. The feminist movement helps to keep the gender balance on a slightly more even footing, but it still exacerbates a similar situation in which definition and order overcome flexibility and spontaneity. In other words, even if I say, “I’m not going to define myself. I absolutely refuse,” I’ve repeated the very same scenario I’m trying to release myself from. Perhaps, killing off the “program running in the background” is as violent and pointless as slaying Leviathan.

Both the repressed feminine and masculine project images onto the world. Like the caduceus, they are two snakes facing each other, coiling and copulating in a dance that never ceases. Surrendering to what is seems like impotent resignation, but it engenders an openness that paradoxically resists being snared into repressed ideologies that have lived way past their expiration dates. The importance of studying mythology lies at the heart of this notion: observing how the psyche represses uncomfortable material, such as those old dragons lurking around in the dark, and all the while keeping off of the hero’s straight, incisive path. The reflective part of the psyche assists in connecting the deeper, metaphoric function to the revisioning, imaginative function. Self-definition, as much as it may be psychologically necessary for survival, is not a black or white path.

I am a farmer’s daughter as well as a daughter of Eve, and on a grander scale, of Tiamat. Even so, there is no need for me to define who I am, even though I’m told that whatever I am, I have inherited from my ancestors. The serpent has wisely whispered this message to me, offering a piece of the forbidden fruit, and I listen, taste and ingest gratefully.

Works Cited

Briggs, Constance Victoria. The Encyclopedia of Angels. New York: Penguin,
1997.

Deleuze, Gilles and Felix Guattari. A Thousand Plateaus: Capitalism and
Schizophrenia. Minneapolis: U of Minnesota P, 1987.

Godwin, Malcolm. Angels: an Endangered Species. New York: Simon & Schuster,
1990.

Hartman, Gary V. “History and Development of Jung's Psychology: The Early
Years, 1900 to 1935.” CGJungpage.org. 1995. 23 Sep. 2004.


Jewish Publication Society Bible. Sacred-Texts.com. 22 Sep. 2004.


Jung, C. G. (1912/52). Symbols of Transformation: An Analysis of the Prelude to a
Case of Schizophrenia. Collected Works, Vol. 5. 2nd Ed. Trans. R. F. C. Hull.
Princeton: Princeton U P, 1967.

King, Leonard William. The Seven Tablets of Creation. Vol. xii-xiii. London:
Luzac and Co., 1902. Sacred-Texts.com. 22 Sep. 2004.


Lindemans, Micha F. "Seraphim." Encyclopedia Mythica. 2004. Encyclopedia
Mythica Online. 04 Sep. 2004.
.

- - -. "Tiamat." Encyclopedia Mythica. 2004. Encyclopedia Mythica Online.
23 Sep. 2004.


Neumann, Erich. The Great Mother. Trans. Ralph Manheim. Princeton, N.J.:
Princeton UP, 1991 (seventh printing).

Phillips, John A. Eve: The History of an Idea. San Francisco: Harper & Row
Publishers, 1984.

Plato. The Last Days of Socrates. Trans. Hugh Tredennick and Harold Tarrant.
London: Penguin Books, 1993.





Appendix

(Pictures appear in this order)
I. Adam, Eve and the Serpent in the Garden of Eden.
15th c. Manuscript Illumination.
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~humm/Topics/AdamNeve/a_n_e05.html

II. Adam, Eve and the Serpent in the Garden of Eden.
Miniature, Florence
http://ccat.sas.upenn.edu/~humm/Topics/AdamNeve/a_n_e01.html

III. Magazine Ad: Seiko Watches, In Style Magazine, September 2004.

IV. Photo Layout: House & Garden Magazine, October 2004.

V. Fashion Campaign: Diesel Fall 2004, “Diesel Society of Nature Lovers”
http://www.diesel.com/naturelovers/

VI. Fashion Campaign: Diesel Fall 2004, “Diesel Society of Nature Lovers”
http://www.diesel.com/naturelovers/