The misunderstanding of the Snake Character in the Abrahamic Origin Story is the very thing that keeps us afraid of our Shadow Self and chained to our toxic patterns. In the ancient Solomonic teachings, predating this dogma, the Snake was revered as a sacred symbol for the Holy Mother God, as She is in all other world cultures.
The meaning that Satan has today as the name of “the chief of evil spirits” comes from Christian traditions unknown at the time the Gospels were written. The Hebrew word ‘Satan’ was not a name, but a descriptive noun. It means “an adversary”, as in an inner voice or ‘mind based’ adversary.
The intelligent design of this realm is comprised of a binary energy (Proton – Masculine – Father God – Sky – Consciousness) and (Electron – Feminine – Mother God – Earth – Material) Yang and Yin. For over two millennia now, the Abrahamics have been operating with just the ‘Yang’ or ‘Masculine principle’, and we wonder why the Patriarchy has run rampant and we are so fractured in our own psyches.
The Holy Mother is Matter. So everything we experience, ‘good’ or ‘bad’, is Her. To be in this experience is to be ‘In Her’. When I look into the face of a horrible person, I am looking at Her. When I look into the face of an exquisite person, this too is Her. Everything on this plane is animated ‘by Her’.
We have Free Will, so, when I see evil, it is not Her, but rather a person in the depths of their own ego. In Vedic wisdom, this aspect of the Mother is called ‘Maya’, or illusion, but the Snake still remains Holy. Just because a person becomes lost in the fracturing of their own psyche, does not make the Snake (or creative playing field) evil.
The great irony, is when one engages with the Snake (or Shadow within), one begins to transmute ego patterns and evolve out of illusion. The path of the Snake is the path of our liberation from attachment. If we do not see Her as our loving Mother guiding us through this realm, but rather as a Devil ‘coming against us’, then we are truly lost. Forever fighting our shadows instead of transmuting them.