Snake biting its tail
Symbol of spirit present in matter
July 28th 2013
Being born means receiving a body, and the work of disciples of a spiritual teaching is to make their body the material they work on. So, they spend years striving and disciplining themselves, and they gradually purify and fill every particle of their being with light, succeeding in bringing it alive with new vibrations.
The soul and spirit are of divine essence; they know themselves to be so, and they appear as such above, in their world. But they have to know themselves and make themselves known below as well, through the medium of the physical body. This is life’s greatest mystery. Initiates have represented it using the symbol of the snake biting its tail: the head, the higher self, spirit, must manifest through the tail, the lower self, matter. The spirit, which is above and all-knowing and all-powerful, must be able to see itself in matter as in a mirror. That is the goal of initiation: to succeed in transforming matter so that it can reflect back spirit’s image.