In the wilderness, the people of Israel speak against God and Moses. God sends venomous serpents (nachashim seraphim — "burning serpents") among them. Many die. The people repent and cry to Moses. God instructs Moses:
"Make a fiery serpent and set it on a pole; anyone who is bitten can look at it and live."* (Numbers 21:4-9)
Moses makes a serpent of bronze (nechash nechoshet) and sets it on a pole. Whoever is bitten by a serpent looks at the bronze serpent and lives.
The serpent is the agent of death. And the cure is... a serpent. Not the destruction of the serpent but its elevation. The very image of the wound becomes the instrument of healing. The poison and the antidote are the same substance.
This is homeopathic magic at its most profound — similia similibus curantur ("like cures like"). It is the alchemical principle that the solution is found within the problem, that the philosopher's stone is hidden in the dung heap, that the very thing you flee contains the key to your liberation.
Christ's Own Interpretation
Jesus makes the connection explicit: "Just as Moses lifted up the snake in the wilderness, so the Son of Man must be lifted up, that everyone who believes may have eternal life in him." (John 3:14-15)
The bronze serpent on the pole prefigures Christ on the Cross. The serpent — symbol of the Fall, of death, of the curse — is lifted up, and in being lifted up, it becomes the means of salvation. The very instrument of death becomes the instrument of life.
Hermetic and Alchemical Connections
- The Caduceus and the Rod of Asclepius — The serpent on the pole resonates with the Hermetic caduceus (two serpents on a staff) and the rod of Asclepius (one serpent on a staff) — both symbols of healing, transformation, and the integration of opposites.
- Kundalini — The serpent raised on the pole maps onto the yogic image of the kundalini serpent rising up the spine (sushumna) — the primal energy elevated from the base to the crown.
- The Ouroboros — The serpent that devours its own tail. The poison that is its own cure. The eternal cycle of death and rebirth that is both the prison and the key.
The Destruction of Nehushtan (2 Kings 18:4)
Centuries later, King Hezekiah destroys the bronze serpent because the people have begun worshipping it as an idol — burning incense to it, calling it Nehushtan. The symbol that was meant to point through itself to God has become an end in itself. This is the perpetual danger of all sacred symbols: that they become idols, that the finger pointing at the moon is mistaken for the moon.