Bishop Vladimir Sokolovsky with his bishop’s staff.

One of the most surprising images one is faced with considering Orthodox liturgical symbolism is the bishop’s staff sporting two snakes flanking a small cross atop it.  Especially in a Protestant North American context, this image seems to hark back to ancient chthonian cults, more a wizard’s magic staff than anything Christian.  As I have been doing for other subjects, I would like to take a trip through iconography, through the Bible and other traditions to show how this symbol is all at once thoughtful, powerful and perfectly orthodox in the broadest sense.  It also happens to fit nicely with all I have been writing for the OAJ up till now.

The first hurdle we must overcome is the perception that the Western bishop’s staff, the crosier, is really a shepherd’s staff, whereas the Orthodox have this strange snake bearing object.  In fact, for a millennia at least, the western crosier was also identified with a serpent as medieval crosiers attest.  We could say that there are two basic shapes, the crosier and the “tau” shaped staff which were present in the Church before the Schism, both of these shapes have been interpreted with serpents.  The current Orthodox version of the staff with serpents (as seen above with Bishop Vladimir Sokolovsky) is a variation of these models.

Western Crozier from Limoges, France

Tau shaped serpent crozier from Koeln, Germany, circa 1000.

We wonder though, how can such an image of serpents, both in the East and West be appropriate for the very symbol of a Bishop’s authority?  Many will point to the Biblical story of the bronze serpent, somehow prefiguring Christ,  as the basis for this use of serpents on the bishop’s staff.  This is a perfectly sound explanation, though it is insufficient to create a complete picture.  If we are to look a Moses as the origin of this image, we should look earlier.  The very first time we encounter a staff in the Bible, at least a staff that is related to divine authority, is at the burning bush.  When Moses doubts the Pharaoh will listen to him, God tells him:

“What is that in your hand?” He said, “A rod.”  And He said, “Cast it on the ground.” So he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from it. 4 Then the Lord said to Moses, “Reach out your hand and take it by the tail” (and he reached out his hand and caught it, and it became a rod in his hand), Exodus 4: 1-3

The very first time we encounter a staff of divine authority, it is immediately linked to a serpent.    Here we find a first example of the “shiftiness” of the snake symbol, of its dual nature.  In the story of Moses and pharaoh there are two origins of the serpents.  We know that Pharaoh’s magicians could produce the same miracle, and so both sides make serpents from staffs, a “good” serpent and a “bad” serpent. The good one eats the bad one.

The shiftiness, the double sided aspect of the serpent symbol appears also in the story of the bronze serpent on several levels.  The Israelites had been plagued by serpents, and to save them from the poisonous bites, God told Moses to make a bronze serpent and to put it on a staff.  Whoever would look to the bronze serpent would be healed, yet those refusing to do so would die of their snake bite.  In terms of duality, we can see clearly here how the serpent is both the disease and cure. Looking to the serpent that was “raised up” will cure one from those serpents that bite “down below”, just as an antidote is made from the poison or a vaccine is made from the disease.  Another way to see the duality in the story is how this serpent that was raised up as a healing device, will later be “cast down” by the virtous king Hezekiah for having become an idol (2 Kings 18:4).

Christ points to the brazen serpent.

With the bronze serpent we understand the serpent is not only related to a staff, but also more generally to the “vertical”, the pole, the ladder, the axis.  The staff is only one facet of this vertical symbol.  The first and primal version of this symbol is of course the tree.  So we must reach further back than Moses in the Biblical text, looking to one of the very first mentions of a specific tree:  the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil in the middle of the garden.  With this tree we find the serpent, and in Christian iconography, it has been represented unanimously as coiled around the Tree of knowledge as it entices Adam and Eve to eat from its fruit.

Icon of Adam and Eve. This is taken from the wonderful blog on icons: A Reader’s Guide to Orthodox Icons

We have spoken elsewhere of Death and the garments of skins (here and here), of death as the movement to the periphery, and with the snake wrapped around the tree, it is precisely what we get:  death, animalism, skin, basically a series of wheels wrapped around a central axis.  The serpent is the image of death, not a kind of extinction, but rather the living death of the Fall, the waxing and waning cycles of birth and death, of pleasure and pain, the life in duality.  St-Gregory of Nyssa, the master of symbolism ties some of these images together speaking of men becoming « animals turning the mill. »  « With our eyes blindfolded we walk round the mill of life, always treading the same circular path and returning to the same things …we never cease to go round in a circle. »[1].

Just as in the references from the book of Exodus, this primordial image of the serpent in Genesis also shows the general duality of the serpent symbol, for although it is right to say the serpent brought about a great evil, it is better to acknowledge the serpent brought about both good and evil, causing us to experience God as mercy and rigor and all the other manifestations of what we have called right and left hand symbolism in earlier posts (here, here and here).

Having gone from the staff back to the tree, it is difficult not to make the great leap forward which brings us to the foot of Cross.  The relationship between the Tree, the staff of Moses or Aaron and the Cross is one I am not inventing.  In apocryphal sources, the story of this relationship can be found everywhere from the Golden Legend in the West to the Eastern edge of traditional Christianity, in the Book of the Bee of Syriac Christians.  These traditions take different forms, but their essential core is the same, that is how the staff of Moses is made from the tree of Knowledge[2], and the wood from this staff was somehow used to make the cross.  The fantastical details in these stories need not keep us, for these traditions should be taken as “pointers” more than anything else, that is as ways to experience more clearly in Biblical tradition what is already there.

When considering these traditions, especially knowing they already participate in the iconography of the crucifixion[3], it cannot but shed a different light on the image.  It becomes difficult not to notice the “S” shape of Christ’s body and how it invokes serpent symbolism.  Christ compares himself to the bronze serpent saying, “And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of Man be lifted up,” (John 3:13-15) and in medieval images it was not rare to see crucifixion images with the snake on the lower tier and Christ on the top tier, both hanging on the same cross/tree of knowledge.

The serpent is at the center of the resurrecting dead on the axis of the cross. Crucifixion from the V&A Museum. Rheims, France (probably, made)
Date:ca. 860-870

This might come as a shock to some, but hopefully a few remarks will calm any controversy.  We are used to see the snake as an image of the Evil One, and this is not a false attribution, but symbols are always multiple in depth of meaning.  Considering the fullness of the symbol, that is when we look at Moses changing his staff to a serpent or the bronze serpent, limiting the image of a serpent to the Evil One creates some serious problems.  Rather, we must look at the serpent more closely within the biblical stories themselves, and see there the power of death, death in the sense we have been expounding:  as the periphery, the duality, the cycle, the garments of skin[4].  And this makes more sense within Orthodox teaching of Christ trampling down death by death, of the God-Man uniting himself to death in order to conquer death.  In that light it is not surprising to see Christ taking a shape suggesting the serpent on the cross.

The body of Christ sways to the left and the right on the Cross. 13th century Macedonian icon.

For those who still doubt this attribution of the snake to death, we need only consider the other great use of the serpent in iconography, that is the Serpent of Tribulation.  In latter images of the Last Judgement, there appears a great serpent which slithers from the upper part of the icon, under Christ, sometimes starting at the foot of Adam, and swerving down to Hell.  The human person on his or her  death is meant to move along this serpent, and like nodes or knots in the serpent’s body appear the controversial tollhouses.  I do not want to engage a discussion on tollhouses here. I only want to show how this use of the serpent is in line with our other interpretations.  The movement on the serpent is not just one of moving down to Hell as some have said, but the soul of the deceased is shown both ascending and/or descending.  Each station appears, like the bars in Jacob’s ladder, simultaneously as a step going up or coming down.  Each sin is balanced by a virtue, each tollhouse contains both possibilities.  A powerful quote relating to this from the Ladder of Divine Ascent is when St-John explains that in our spiritual journey “« …the original fervor can only enter by the door it had taken to exit. [5]”

Serpent of Tribulation, Detail from a Stroganov School Last Judgement. 16th-17th century.

Detail of the Serpent of Tribulation. A soul attempting to ascend along the tollhouses is pulled down by a demon.

Having grounded the serpent in the Bible, iconography and other Orthodox traditions, we should not be afraid to look at and discuss analogous pagan images, for in this case we have much to ponder.  The serpent on a pole is of course one of the oldest symbols we know of, it appears in its single and double versions everywhere from Sumer to Babylon, from the Greeks to the Aztecs.  Much of the specific meanings of these lost cultures have disappeared with them, but at least from the Greeks we can gather a few interesting tidbits that will feed into the general meaning.  In Greek myth, the serpent on a pole is associated with Asclepius (and to Hermes in its double aspect[6]).

Asclepius hold his rod/staff with a serpent coiled around it.

The symbolism of the rod of Asclepius is so close to the bronze serpent that I remember as a child growing up in a Christian home thinking the symbol used by various medical groups was in fact the bronze serpent.  Asclepius made his “medicine” from the blood of the Gorgon, one of the snake-related monsters of Antiquity.  He would use blood from the right side of the beast to make his cures, suggesting that the left side of the beast was poisonous.  Here again we have the dual nature of the snake, of the snake as both the cause and the cure for illness.  Continuing along asclepian line in Greek thinking, we should ponder of course the word “pharmakon”, a word extensively used in this context.  It is the greek word for “cure” in the medical sense while simultaneously being the word for  “poison” or even a “drug” in the sense of “illegal drug” as it is used today.   In English, the word “drug” does still contain all these meanings simultaneously. How can a word mean two opposing things at once? In a broader sense, the “pharmakon” is what is added to a nature, a supplement in order to enhance it, but which is also the very cause of its lacking.  This addresses once again the nature of the supplement, of the garments of skin as both death and a protection from death.   One of the most important words related to “pharmakon” is “pharmakos”, that is the “sacrificial victim”.  It was the word used to describe the animal killedin the public sacrifices.  In Greek thinking the pharmakos acts as pharmakon, that is, through sacrifice the cycle begins anew.  We can see how this relationship finds its ultimate accomplishment in the cross, for if the incarnation of Christ seen at its extreme in the crucifixion is the finality of the garment of skins, if it contains in its unity the duality of the pharmakon,  of the left and the right hand, it is because these are brought together in the final pharmakos, the pharmakos that is both God and sacrifice, the perfect and total sacrificial victim.  I know the Orthodox approach avoids going too far in this theological direction, yet we should not completely discard it.  Christ on the Cross unites heaven and earth by the vertical and gathers all horizontal opposites, heals the duality born in the fruit of the tree of knowledge by uniting the duality of the pharmakon in the God-pharmakos.  All is made One in Christ.  And in making all things one, duality and multiplicity are not abolished, rather they are seen as finding their root in him, as flowing from his person.

This last statement is a fitting point to return to our main subject.  Duality, multiplicity, periphery do not need be an image of death.  They only become an image of death when they “forget” their anchor, when the tree of Knowledge is viewed as being separate from the Tree of Life.  And this is really the meaning of the bishop’s staff, of his crosier.  It is the power of heaven on earth, the power of the keys, the power to bind and unbind, to bring in the sheep and push away the wolves, to bless and to curse.  It is duality as expression of unity, periphery as expression of center. And so whether there are two serpents or one, whether a “Tau” or a crosier, the meaning is the same.

[1] Gregory of Nyssa quoted by Nellas in Deification in Christ, 87