Happy Nāga Panchami
Nāga Panchami is a Hindu festival that honors the serpent as divine, offering prayers for protection, fertility, and harmony with Nature.
Honoring snakes might seem strange if you come from a Christian background, since the serpent is cursed in the Bible as the one who tempts Eve into her original sin:
“And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life:
And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel."
Personally, not only did I grow up in an Irish Catholic context in the USA, I was also born on St. Patrick’s Day, the feast day of the Christian saint who, legend says, banished all the snakes from Ireland. As a child, I pictured him chasing actual snakes into the sea. But these “snakes,” I later learned, were metaphors for Ireland’s pre-Christian, Earth-honoring traditions, driven underground when Christianity forcefully silenced pagan ways of relating with the natural world.
So, if you’re in some way like me, there may be some deep healing and integration needed to repair our relationship with snakes and the serpentine!
India, in particular, has many beautiful stories that can help us to heal our relationship with snakes (and thereby all of Nature) by celebrating the more dynamic and benevolent role that serpents play in our lives and in the nature of the cosmos.
In fact, many of the world’s more ancient faith traditions, from the Americas to Africa to Asia, honor serpents as sacred to our spiritual and earthly ecosystems, and as embodiments of great healing power.
In Ancient Greece, the serpent can be seen winding around the Rod of Asclepius, an emblem of medicine that is still widely used today, including by the World Health Organization.
In India, both ancient and contemporary, divine serpents are known as Nāgas who are seen as guardians of the Earth and its treasures. For example, Ananta Śeṣa is the infinite Nāga who supports the divine sustainers of the universe, Lord Vishnu and Goddess Lakshmi, on his coils. Mucalinda is the compassionate Nāga who holds and shelters the Shākyamuni Buddha from the storms of distraction during meditation under the Bodhi Tree. Vāsuki is the great Nāga king coiled around the neck of Lord Shiva who offers his body to the gods and the demons for churning the cosmic ocean to attain the nectar of immortality in the Samudra Manthana. And Kundalinī is the great Nāga goddess of enlightenment, lying dormant and ready to awaken at the base of every spine.
Nāgas dwell in watery realms, holding wisdom, offering fertility, revealing treasures, illuminating teachings, protecting health and harmony, and even inflicting diseases depending on how they’re treated.
So today, on Nāga Panchami, may we reconsider the role of snakes in our lives as we contemplate the serpents in our cosmos, not as spiritual enemies to be banished but as ecological allies to revere.
May the Nāgas remind us how to shed what we’ve outgrown, move intimately with the ground, and come more fully into Grace.
Happy Nāga Panchami!
Xo Sandi
This post was written in dialogue with ChatGPT (AI)
