“Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves.” (Matthew 10:16)
A regular menagerie of a sentence! Sheep, wolves, serpents and doves. If inanimate things like stones can testify to divinity (see previous post) and proclaim truth in the face of human delusion, then certainly birds and beasts can do the job, too.
Here Jesus is admonishing his followers, as he commissions them to spread his teaching, that the world is full of wolves. His disciples won’t appear on the scene with an army at their beck and call. They don’t carry letters of introduction, or a case of free product samples to tempt the potential client. No email blast or flurry of tweets precedes their arrival. No, if they’re to succeed, they’ll need specific attributes which he characterizes as the wisdom of serpents and the harmlessness of doves. And note that you can’t transpose those qualities; who would welcome a person “wise as a dove” or “harmless as a serpent”?! Bad advertizing. It’s a recipe for disaster. But more importantly, would serpent-wisdom and dove-harmlessness actually work? Hold that thought.
A persistent tradition in the UK at least eight centuries old has Jesus spending some of the “lost” years — between his appearance in the temple at 12 and the start of his public ministry around age 30 — in Britain, studying with Druids. William Blake, associated with revival Druidry during his lifetime in the 19th century, penned the famous hymn “Jerusalem” (this version hails from the last night of the ’09 Proms, a popular annual summer music series in the U.K.). The lyrics were put to music about a century later, and the piece has become a perennial favorite, a kind of unofficial British national anthem:
And did those feet in ancient times
walk upon England’s mountains green?
and was the holy lamb of God
on England’s pleasant pastures seen?
These lines of the opening stanza seem innocuous enough, if fanciful. A Middle-Easterner would surely have it rough during a British winter — it isn’t always “green.” The tradition continues from there, claiming that after Christ’s death, Joseph of Arimathea (who provided a tomb for the body) either sent part of the Grail to England, or made the journey himself and founded a church in Glastonbury, or planted there a thorn tree long venerated as holy.* Whatever the truth of these events, it makes for a striking symbol and image.
But Blake continues, and this is when his poem turns odd:
And did the Countenance Divine,
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here,
Among these dark Satanic Mills?Bring me my Bow of burning gold;
Bring me my Arrows of desire:
Bring me my Spear: O clouds unfold!
Bring me my Chariot of fire!I will not cease from Mental Fight,
Nor shall my Sword sleep in my hand:
Till we have built Jerusalem,
In England’s green & pleasant Land.
As a proto-Druid, Blake gets his ecological digs in here: the “dark Satanic mills” of the early industrial revolution are already at work spewing smoke and ash over London. While most Druids today have no intention of attempting to “build Jerusalem in England’s green & pleasant land,” the song brings divinity one step closer. Who complains if some versions of our ancient history bring with them a delicious shiver of magic or imaginative religious reconstruction? But is the way to achieve divinity on our shores through “mental fight” and metaphorical battle? The sudden shift to the quadruple imperative of “Bring … bring … bring … bring” summons up images of a bronze-age charioteer. But what of the “arrows of desire”? Here the image is of Eros, Cupid, the piercing quality of sudden strong feeling. Is it the poet speaking as “I” in the last stanzas? Or as someone else? Is it Blake’s idea of Jesus?
You may not remember, but I asked you a few paragraphs back to hold the thought of serpent-wisdom and dove-harmlessness. Some of the “wisdom” accrues from the belief that serpents are uncanny beasts, for they are able to shed their skin and achieve a kind of rebirth or immortality. And the serpent in the Garden that haunts the Western pysche tempted Eve not to the Tree of Life (Eve! EVE!! The other tree! Eat from the OTHER tree!!) but the Tree of Knowledge. As I tease my students, “Major mistake. Become immortal first, and then get the knowledge of good and evil.” The harmlessness of doves is less problematic. Though city dwellers may have their foremost associations with pigeons as flocking beggars in parks, or as producers of statue-staining and public-building-defacing birdshit.
But consider again. If you know something — I mean really know something of life-changing power — you need to come across as seriously harmless. Otherwise people have this nasty tendency to string you up, burn you at the stake, remove the supreme discomfort of your ideas and presence at all costs. Your wisdom puts you in mortal danger. So reassure people first, and work your changes quietly, harmlessly. A major piece of strategy! Some devious or disgusting trick you’d expect to discover about that other political party — the one you don‘t belong to and affect to despise as the epitome of all things vile and loathsome. Is that why this year’s political reality-show contestants (I mean presidential candidates) come across as less than competent? (Repeat after me: “All candidates vile and and loathsome, all con-men big or small, all morons foul and putrid, Democrats/Republicans have them all!”**)
So animals embody a divinely-commissioned strategy for survival. The wisdom of the serpent, long despised, is not dead, but sleeps in each of us, waiting the touch of the divine longing to rouse and waken it in the service of life. The son of God (we are all children of the divine) summons it forth from us. It lives, tree of knowledge and tree of life united, identical, twining its way around our hearts, which know — when our heads deny it — which way to go, what we need, where to find answers others say are “forbidden” or “not for mortals to know.” On the contrary — they’re specifically intended for mortals to realize.
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*The Glastonbury thorn has lately made headlines. It (there are actually several in the area, believed to spring from a single parent) was hacked down two years ago this month (with some historical precedent, if you read the article) and then recovered enough by March of 2011 to put forth a new shoot. Another demonstration, as if we needed it, that old things do not just disappear because we hack at them or find them out of place or inconvenient. They have a habit of return, of springing back to life. Another habit from the natural world for us to imitate …
**This uncharacteristically acerbic side-note is not part of the actual blog.
A Druid Way 
