Nāgas and Sarpas

It may be that the Nāgas and the Sarpas are one and the same animal, the Serpent. Not a snake as we know it today, the Serpent. A higher being, more noble, more intelligent, more learned, more pedagogical: in a word, closer to the human — She is called Lilith in the Bible. The Snakes created her to help… and to distract them.

Reptilians and Snakes

Nāgas and Sarpas both mean snakes in Hinduism. They have been worshipped by Hindus since ancient times. Today, nagas and sarpas are often used as synonyms. But there is a difference between them. According to Harivamsa, Vasuki is the king of the Nagas. Takshaka is the king of sarpas.

The Nagas are semi-divine and have powers. The Sarpas are not divine and have no power. The Nagas can take any form at will. The Sarpas do not have this power. The Nagas have their own underworld. The Sarpas have no world of their own, so they live on earth.

Nagas are generally associated with the gods Shiva, Vishnu and the Devas. Sarpas are most often associated with demons. They seem to have some negative qualities.

For more information on the subject, consult this site.

The book of Dzyan

Héléna Blavatsky mentions the ancient book of Dzyan as being from a Sanskrit source, but she is the only one to talk about it… This unknown book evokes and describes a race of snake that descended from the heavens and instructed the human species.

“The Book of Dzyan is supposed to be an ancient text, of Tibetan origin, and possibly related to an esoteric branch of Tibetan Buddhism. It formed the basis of Theosophy, the esoteric spiritualist movement founded by Helena Blavatsky in 1875 and distributed by the Theosophical Society,” says Wikipedia which does not seem to believe in its authenticity.

Indeed, H.P. Blavatsky has often indulged in baptizing his own texts with Tibetan names. She naturally defended herself from it, hiding behind gifts of clairvoyance that made her read a disappeared book as if it had been before her own eyes.

Possessing this gift myself, I will not make a mockery of it. But I prefer less evanescent qualities, like those developed by his adoptive son Krishnamurti.

Sarpas or Seraphs?

Contrary to Wikipedia, R.A. Boulay seems to take her word for it: “Madame H.P. Blavatsky spent three years in Tibet, Bhutan and Sikkim, accumulating thousands of Sanskrit sources that were compiled in the book by Dzyan.

These sources concern an ancient people called the Nagas or Sarpas, semi-divine beings with a human face and endowed with a dragon’s tail. Blavatsky thought that these Sarpas were undoubtedly the Seraphim of the Old Testament, who would therefore have the same etymological roots as the Sarpas of ancient India.” (source)R.A. Boulay – Le passé reptilien de l’humainté, p.97

An Indian ethnic group still bears the name of Nāga, which means snake. “The Nāgas form an ethnic group of about two and a half million people in north-eastern India. They are distributed among the states of Nagaland (where they are the majority), Manipur, Assam, Arunachal Pradesh and near the border with Burma (Union of Myanmar).

Originating from Yunnan and Burma, their dialects are part of the Tibeto-Burmese language family.” (source)

Eve et the Snake, from William Blake

The Biblical Nakash

In Hebrew, the same root Na-aa is found in the term נ ח ש (nāḥāš or nākāš). Nakash refers to the Serpent in the Bible. It notably designates the snake of Genesis, which brings about the fall of Adam and Eve. It is also the term used when the staff of Moses turns into a serpent in the Book of Exodus and in the episode of the brass serpent from the Book of Numbers.

Nakash is found 31 times in the Bible. Here are some instances:

Genesis 3.1 Nakash was the most cunning of all the animals of the field.
Genesis 49:17 Dan will be nakash on the road, viper on the path.
Exodus 4:3 And the LORD said, “Cast it on the ground.” He threw it on the ground, and it became nakash.
Numbers 21:6 The LORD sent burning nakash upon the people, and many died in Israel.
Psalms 58.4 They have a venom similar to the venom of the nakash.
Ecclesiastes 10:8 He who digs a pit shall fall into it; and he who breaks down a wall shall be bitten with the nakash.
Isaiah 27:1 The Lord will strike the leviathan, nakash fleeing, nakash tortuous and he will kill the monster of the sea.
Amos 9.3 I will order the nakash to bite them.

The Nāgas and Buddha

One and the same animal, Nāga and Sarpa? Yes and no. The Sanskrit texts give them two different names, it seems that the Nāgas and the Sarpas are not the same beings. Whether they belonged to one or the other species, or whether these two species were but one, all ancient Serpents were capable of emotions, reflection, writing and speaking.

Maybe they taught articulated language like writing to our ancestors Adam?

In Buddhism, the Nāgas stand at the service of the gods. Let’s quote the indianist Heinrich Zimmer:

“According to Buddhist ideas, all the geniuses of nature rejoice with the highest gods at the appearance of an incarnate redeemer, the Buddha. And the Serpents are no exception, being the main personification of the waters of earthly life.

Anxious to serve the universal master, the Nāgas monitor with solicitude his progress towards final enlightenment, for he has come to similarly redeem all beings, creatures of the earth, of the heavens, and of the underworld.” (source)

<< Born on December 6, 1890, in Greifswald, Pomerania, and died on March 20, 1943, in New York, the German Heinrich Robert Zimmer is an Indian and South Asian art historian.

Nagarjuna, Prince of Snakes

Some texts say that the Buddha, when he began to preach his doctrine, quickly understood that men were not ready to accept it entirely. Then he entrusted the profound interpretation of reality to an audience of Nāgas, who agreed to take responsibility until humanity was ready to understand it.

The Nāgas waited seven centuries for a great sage to be able to penetrate Buddha’s first secret. Nāgārjuna, Nāga Arjuna, the Prince of Serpents, was initiated by the Snake Kings in the certainty that everything is empty (śūnya). It is he who transmitted to humans the completed Buddhist teachings, those of the Mahāyāna. (source)

A virtuoso dialectician, he indeed relies on the Buddhist corpus, made up of religious texts and a myriad of erudite commentaries, but he prefers logical rigor to the argument of glosses, which he deconstructs.

It is in the Stances du milieu par excellence, his flagship book also known as Traité du Milieu, that he defends the idea of a void with a certain consistency, always in motion, «impermanent», which he makes the spring of reality.

Nāgārjuna is the promoter of another conception of reality, based on ’emptiness’. The life of this Buddhist monk, born between the second and third centuries in the south-east of India, remains little known and widely mythical.

Nāgārjuna is however reputed to have founded the Middle School, in homage to the Middle Way advocated by the teaching of Buddha.

King-snake Mucalinda protecting Buddha

Buddha and Mucalinda

The motif of the snake-king Mucalinda sheltering under his hood the Buddha from bad weather is a favorite theme in Buddhist art, including outside of India. In Nepal, the Nāgas are linked to Amoghasiddhi whose canopy they adorn and to Dīpamemberkara of which they are the ‘vehicle’. They are also attached to the cult of Rāto Matsyendranāth, which is also called Avalokiteśvara.

Snake-spirits, their heads extended by a tongue darted outward, decorate the canopy of this god. They provided, it is said, the ritual lustrations of Matsyendranāth when the priests in charge of the divinity had fled at the time of the attack on king Mukunda Sena of Palpa. Vāsuki, moreover, helped King Narendradeva to introduce Matsyendranāth in Nepal (ch. VI) and many details of the feast of this god evoke snake-spirits. (source)

Nāgas in Hinduism

Stories involving the Nāgas are still part of contemporary cultural traditions in the predominantly Hindu regions of Asia, notably India, Nepal and the island of Bali. In the Hindu fold, the Nāgas are considered nature spirits, protecting bodies of water such as rivers, lakes, seas, springs and wells. If they are rightly worshipped, they bring rain, and with it wealth and fertility. However, they are also believed to cause disasters such as floods, famine and drought if they are despised by humanity’s disrespectful actions on the environment because such actions encroach upon their natural habitats.

Shesha with one hundred heads

Nāga Shesha

The most famous Nāga in the Hindu tradition is undoubtedly Shesha, the most recognizable with its one hundred heads. He is often depicted with Vishnu, who sometimes shelters under him, sometimes lies down on him. In any case, Shesha stubbornly persists in reproducing. Overlapped or riding, it constantly mates and gives abundant offspring.

Balarama, brother of the incarnation of Vishnu Krishna, was sometimes identified as an incarnation of Shesha. The snake is not exclusively related to Vishnu: it is also very present in the iconography of Ganesh and Shiva.

In the case of Ganesh, the snake is often draped around his neck or belly, or wrapped around his stomach like a belt, around a hand or ankles, or wrapped in the shape of a throne. For Shiva, the snake is most often in a garland around its neck. Shiva’s lingas often show him sheltered by many heads of nagas. (source)

The lingam or linga (plural lingas) is an object in which Shiva is present; when invoked, it is conceived as a pratika, a symbol of devotion. This Sanskrit word is found with us in religious practices.

Ganesha and his Serpent

The Dravidians

Hindu mythology and literature are filled with sexual liaisons between the gods and the human species, thus procreating many strange beings called Dravidians and Dasyus.

The Dravidians are those populations of India who speak neither Aryan nor Himalayan languages, but their own languages, coming from the Serpents: the Dravidian languages. Twenty-six Dravidian languages are listed, spoken by more than 250 million people.

This race lived in large walled cities. They were coarse, cannibals, dark-skinned and camus. The Aryans who came later, met the descendants of this snake race; they are described in the Ramayana:

“Near Bhogavata, there is a place where the hosts of the snake race live, a city of boulevards, fortified and forbidden, guarded and defended by vigilant legions. Made awful by their venom tooth, young snakes are terribly violent. On his throne in the imperial corridor, Vasuki, the most violent, governs them all.”

Mohenjo-Daro, reconstruction of one of the cities of the Empire of Rama

The Indus Valley

The antediluvian Dravians were eliminated by the Flood. When the Earth was repopulated, Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro became the center of Dravidian culture.

The civilization of the Indus Valley traces its roots 8000 years ago to Mehrgarh. At that distant time, the culture of the Indus had largely exceeded the borders of present-day Pakistan, it was centered in Sind and Punjab. The two largest cities, Mohenjo-Daro and Harappa, emerged much later it seems, around -2600 along the valley of the Indus, on the Indian bank and on the Pakistani bank.

This civilization knew the writing, had urban centers, a social and economic structure, and enjoyed comfort and a quality of life undoubtedly superior to ours.

It was rediscovered in the 1920s during excavations conducted at Mohenjo Daro in Sindh near Sukkur and Harappa, west of Punjab and south of Lahore.

Numerous sites, stretching from the foot of the Himalayas to Indian Punjab, and from Gujarat to Baluchistan have also been discovered and partly studied.

The archaeological site of Harappa was damaged, in 1857, by the engineers who built the railway Lahore-Multan.

To make the ballast, they had many bricks removed from the site of ruins. It wasn’t the first time, except maybe on such a large scale. Despite this heavy loss, we found an abundance of art objects. (source)Wikipedia

Finely crafted precious metal jewelry, pottery, sculptures, all these objects testify to a great craftsmanship and refined taste. Well-designed tools and utensils confirm this sense of common development between Harappa and Mohenjo-Daro.

Mohenjo Daro : ruins of the Dravidian city in Pakistan

Mahabharata and Ramayana

Much of the evidence that Dravidian, Dasyus and Nagas were all different names for these people can be found in the great Epics of India, the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

“The two Epics concern the contacts of the Aryans with this snake race, some, friendly and others, hostile. Due to the intermarriage of the Aryans with these people, a kind of atmosphere, a love-hate relationship emerges from these two great Epics.

In the Epic of the Mahabharata, a group of ‘celestial’ beings arrive by air car to attend the wedding feast of the Aryan kings: “The gods arrived in bored wagons to see the beautiful scene. Winged Suparnas, Scaly Naga, Bright Celestial Wagons, all together navigating the cloudless sky.” (source)R.A. Boulay – Le passé reptilien de l’humanité

Human Crosses

These Nagas united with Aryans, producing kings and heroes. For example, in the Rig Veda, names like Divodasa indicate that there was a cross between the Dasyus and the Aryans shortly after 1500 BCEBefore Common Era

Several ancient Hindu gods united with humans and, as at Sumer, produced a reptile mammal hybrid, the semi-divine kings who haunt the literature of Sumer and India.

Hindu literature claims that divine people descended and conducted biological experiments with apes. In fact, Hanuman, the monkey god who, with Rama, the hero of the Epic Ramayana, was conceived when the god Shiva gave a sacred cake to Anjan, the monkey. This obvious reference to a genetic experiment produced Hanuman, the super-monkey, evocative of the Enkidou from the Epic of Gilgamesh.

The Stellar System of Mahātala

The Nagas and Sarpas came from another stellar system, all Asia believes in this thesis. It is time for the Westerners to admit such evidence …

Sarpas
The planetary system below Talātala is known as Mahātala. It is the abode of many-hooded snakes, descendants of Kadrū, who are always very angry. The great snakes who are prominent are Kuhaka, Takṣaka, Kāliya and Suṣeṇa. The snakes in Mahātala are always disturbed by fear of Garuḍa, the carrier of Lord Viṣṇu, but although they are full of anxiety, some of them nevertheless sport with their wives, children, friends and relatives.

Nāgas

Beneath Rasātala is another planetary system, known as Pātāla or Nāgaloka, where there are many demoniac serpents, the masters of Nāgaloka, such as Śaṅkha, Kulika, Mahāśaṅkha, Śveta, Dhanañjaya, Dhṛtarāṣṭra, Śaṅkhacūḍa, Kambala, Aśvatara and Devadatta. The chief among them is Vāsuki. They are all extremely angry, and they have many, many hoods — some snakes five hoods, some seven, some ten, others a hundred and others a thousand. These hoods are bedecked with valuable gems, and the light emanating from the gems illuminates the entire planetary system of bila-svarga. (source)

Sarpas, Snakes

Snakes occupy an important place in Sanskrit texts due to their unique characteristics and association with poison.

Snakes are reptiles with a history of 240 million years, with about 2,000 species worldwide, including 216 in India. In India, 52 snake species can cause toxic symptoms in humans.

Snakes are often associated with ancient rituals and practices of propitiation.

The Science of Snakes (Sarpavidyā)

The term ‘vidyā’ means knowledge, and Sarpavidyā is mentioned in the Śatapatha Brāhmana. Sarpavidyā is the knowledge of snakes, encompassing toxicology and remedies against poison.

Sarpavidyā is synonymous with Gārudavidyā, which concerns the control of snakes and the management of their poison. Toxicology is considered a branch derived from Sarpavidyā.

Snakes are mentioned in the Vedic literature, which emphasizes their ritual and symbolic importance. Three seers snakes are mentioned in the Rigveda. The Yajurveda and the Atharvaveda refer to snake worship and include mantras to soothe snakes.

Garuda and the Snakes

Garuda’s legends illustrate the antagonism between Garuda and snakes, symbolizing control over poison. Garuda, born from Vinatā, is in conflict with the snakes, son of Kadru. The legend of Garuda shows its role in the fight against snakes and their poison. The Mahābhārata and the Rāmāyana contain accounts of this rivalry.

The Sarpasattra is an important ritual in the Mahābhārata, aimed at destroying snakes. This sacrifice was made for the first public narration of the Mahābhārata. The priests specialized in the Sarpasattra played a key role in this ritual. Many snakes were destroyed during this sacrifice.

The Purānas contain myths and knowledge about snakes and their poison. The Garuda Purāna provides methods for diagnosing and treating poisons.

True Myths, Unveiled Secrets

From all these facts, it appears that reptiles and Reptilians are two occurrences of the Prime Snake. Why first? because this animal was on earth long before our humanity, the fifth of the name.

The Gigantomachy tells the fight of Zeus and the Olympian gods helped by the giants against the Prime Snakes. I want to see a real episode, which has nothing mythical. For traditional Hindus, this episode takes part in the impressive corpus of vedas, puranas, and other sacred texts of this religion, such as the Mahabharata and the Ramayana.

For me, myths are sacred. Thus I join the Hindus. It is clear that the first snakes were dinosaurs and other saurians. The crocodile we know is its distant descendant.

The myths of the Nāgas and the Sarpas teach us a part of the history of the origins of the world. It is very likely that an evolved species dominated the long reign of reptiles on Earth.