Snake Dance

It is no coincidence that America’s (and Rome’s) animal totem is the eagle.  It is also no mystery as to the disease of our leadership class today or in antiquity.  The “eagles” we elect look great and say all the right things, but they have received maybe half of their necessary training to be true leaders and are easily corrupted.  Their shadow and their dark side remains unexplored and therefore undefended from manipulation and eventual shadow rulership.

The last living remnants of the life on Earth from more than 65 million years ago, dinosaurs, lies in the reptiles and the birds.  Over their several hundred million year reign upon Earth and through the disaster, the eagle and the snake were diverging but they were from the same tap root.  Our obsession with the mythical dragon (a reconciliation of snake and bird) belies something to see about ourselves and the true nature of original reconciled power.

The founding human story for many humans is of a snake offering to Eve and Adam not just the “fall of man” but the revealing of what is hidden.  To master oneself and be a safe, worthy authority over men on Earth lies in this same journey few leaders still submit to.  First, to fly like the proud eagle, then to be brought low by initiation into the world of the snake and return with the reconciled power of both, a la the dragon.

In Native American culture, before it was destroyed by the European invasion, every tribal leader was initiated via the snake dance or some other method.  All young boys were trained as hunters and warriors and the best candidate of all the young eagles was selected by the elders for initiation to balance the spirit of the best eagle with its ancient partner, the snake.  The restoration of the original divisions between eagle and snake, man and woman, God and man, even life and death was the goal.  Only an undivided human was safe to make leader and given power over the people.

The snake dance involved the shiniest eagle dancing within a stone circle or pit also occupied by one or more poisonous snakes.  Eventually the eagle and snake meet, the man is bitten and the initiation begins.  The candidate of leadership, being the best representative of the tribe, carries all the memories, both victories and defeats, strengths and weaknesses of their tribe into the underworld.  Every sin and dis-ease of their people has its own demonic representation in the underworld and each demon picks a joint within the initiate to attack.  The once proud eagle lays poisoned and prostrate upon the ground and is dismembered so the demons can gnaw to the very end of each bone applying the maximum amount of pain.  There is no escape, only pain beyond any description.

What is the method in this spiritual madness? Every collection of humans has its own history, good and bad, that holds it together as one.  Like a solar system finds its balance between gravity and angular momentum, every collection of humans has its common stories, wounds and divisions binding it together and repelling the other.  But to choose a leader with only this thread of self service and the threat of “the other” makes for a very sick culture.  (See Trump, Biden and modern American politicians if there is any doubt as to our current state of health.)

A leader is only worthy of the name if they can become a greater expression of life than the wounds they naturally absorbed growing up in the tribe.  To die and to be reborn is to experience the process of reconciliation with the greater expressions of life in the process I call cosmonomics.  What was divided becomes whole.  What was disease becomes harmony.

Being “killed” by the snake and having every cosmic representative (demon) of your tribe’s sins (division of Oneness) teach you through pain the antidote to division and disease makes that the initiated human the perfect medicine for the tribe to evolve forward. The initiation, through no escape from the pain of division, opens the doorway to a higher realm where the disease and the cure are one thing.

Electing leaders who have no medicine of the knowledge of reconciliation within them ensures devolution backwards. There is no mystery here.  Even “primitive” tribes knew how to grow and test their leaders. Today, the poor application of traditional wisdom to leadership means humans must figure out by mass painful processes our mistakes over and over again.  Leaders ruled by their shadow, is a curse upon every man, woman and child…and all neighboring men, women and children.  Without the power of reconciliation, disease spreads to everything.

Or…we the people could wake up from the nightmare our own mind is visiting upon us to force ourselves back to the place we left long ago.  When the eagle and the snake were one.

We are a young people.  This land still has its living memory of reconciled power and harmony. There is an American dragon to be born again and again.