The Snake and the Ancestors

Connecting with our stories of origin

<< previous

In the tradition of the Ivrim, the snake carries the medicine of knowledge. (Book of Genesis 3:1) Although the snake is not the carrier of knowledge itself, snake is the Spirit or Ancestor that guides and directs the feminine to the place where wisdom can be found. In the language of the Ivrim Ancestors, the word for snake, Nachash, is also the Ivrim word for trickster. The medicine of the snake, then, is to challenge our very understanding of what we think we know and comprehend. In the Biblical Creation story when Earth Being (Adam) and Fire Being (Woman) are in the Garden, the snake directs Fire Being to partake of the fruit from the tree of knowledge, leading her to the place where the wisdom of balance and extreme could be acquired.

Christian colonial thinking and reason have maintained that this was the original sin of humanity and the fault of woman. This act, the colonial mind teaches, caused the expulsion of Adam and Eve from the Garden of Eden; and since that time man has been trying to regain entrance to that Garden through control, arrogance, intolerance, oppression, will, dominion, and power over all of Creation. This one story has been distorted for centuries, concealing the teaching and power of snake as well as the ancestral Spirits that live within this story in the guise of the letters, words, and sounds of the traditional language. The snake, the feminine, and nature all have been demonized by a colonial interpretation of this holy text.

Without noticing, this understanding is the sense Jewish men and women have been given by the dominant society about themselves, their world, and their culture. The demonizing of the feminine has been accomplished by using the patriarchal and colonial values and practices in which we have been steeped and educated, and by which we have been seduced.

The de-valuing of the feminine is reflective of a mind‑set and mode of being in which blame and scapegoating flourish; this is detrimental to achieving healing, self-realization, enlightenment, and community. As a result, the dominant culture has been able to keep wholeness and healing at bay, ensuring that its dominion is safe from the strength of a healthy, illuminated community.

The destiny that is each of our lives, given the opportunity to reveal itself, will move our lives, our loves, and our work. This movement is directed by our Ancestors, all of them. The Ancestors will stir our lives whether we ask or not. However, if one does consciously ask for ancestral assistance, the motion can be formidable. When we have asked the Ancestors to assist, when we have done the ritual activity of re-connection and reexamined who They are and what They chose during their lives, and we have done this with compassion and intention, then we have begun what is called The Ceremony of the Dead. In the Ceremony of the Dead we redeem our Ancestors and their history. We ask them and we ask ourselves: What would it have been like to have spent a day connected, whole, and in the good mind?

From an indigenous perspective, we can assume that within the practice of our spirituality and in the traditional languages of our cultures live tiny fragments of an earlier time and a different world view. For the most part we are oblivious to these pieces of this ancient and timeless puzzle. So much time and so much hardship have elapsed following the genocide and assimilation of our people into the cultures that have surrounded, or engulfed, or become us. In addition to the extensive suppression of our traditional ways, our memories have been discounted, invalidated, and nullified, so the conjuring of the cellular memory held in the body knowing of those of us who lived, who survived, and who endured, is more difficult.

Immersion into the dominant culture assists in the dulling, numbing, and deadening of our awareness of the fragments that still exist of our original ways, our original instructions, our duty to Creation. As we continue to melt into the universal cauldron that is American or European or Western, we not only lose our distinction, but we lose access to those fragments that do remain and that can guide us home to that place of being/knowing that is specific to us as a people. With this loss of memory is also the loss of hope for healing and sustainability, for not only ourselves as whole and healed people, but for each of the diverse peoples that make up the consciousness of this magnificent planet, cosmos, and universe. >>more