The Spinal Serpent

Author(s): Thomas McEvilley

Source: RES: Anthropology and Aesthetics , Autumn, 1993, No. 24 (Autumn, 1993), pp.
67-77
Published by: The University of Chicago Press on behalf of the Peabody Museum of
Archaeology and Ethnology

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 The spinal serpent

THOMAS McEVILLEY

In the Timaeus (69c ff.), Plato describes what he

calls lower soul, the appetitive part of a personality
obsessed with bodily pleasures, and higher soul, the
spiritual part whose reach transcends the bodily realm.
Somewhat surprisingly, he does not consider sexual
desire among the appetites of the lower soul, but as a
degenerate form of higher soul activity. The higher soul,
he says, desires only to be reunited with the World
Soul, or One; this, Plato says, is the true and pure form
of eros. When, however, the soul is embodied and
becomes subject to external influences through the
senses, a degenerate form of desire for the One, and for
immortality in the One, arises. This is exemplified in
the desire of the individual to merge with the species,
which the soul mistakenly sees as the One, and to
attain immortality through offspring. Other factors enter
also, such as seeing, in a sex object, the shadow of the
Idea of Beauty, and mistakenly seeking the Idea in the
shadow that stimulated memory of it. Thus, the true
eros, which is desire for supreme knowledge, freedom,
and eternality, is replaced temporarily by a false eros,
which is sexual desire.
Plato proceeds to describe the physiology of sex Figure 1. Kundalini yoga illustration. Illustrates stylized
intertwined serpent pair (caduceus) with seven points of
(Timaeus 73b ff., 91a ff.). Soul power, he says, resides
intersection or contact homologized to upper human body.
in a moist substance whose true home is in the brain,
From E. A. S. Butterworth, The Tree at the Navel of the Earth
the seat of the higher soul. The brain is connected, (Berlin: Walter de Gruyter, 1970), pi. XVI.
however, with the penis by a channel that passes
through the center of the spine and connects with the
urethra. Under the stimulus of false eros, the soul fluid this description of eros, in the Timaeus, obviously
in the brain is drawn down the spinal passage and applies just as well to the Hindu doctrine of the
ejaculated from the penis in the form of sperm, which kundalini. Similarly in the Hindu version, the natural or
is able to produce new living creatures precisely proper place of the kundalini, or soul-power, is at the
because it is soul-stuff. Although Plato does not speak top of the brain; when it is in this position, the yogin is
directly to this point, it may be inferred that the in a state of union with the divine (quite as Plato said of
practice of philosophy (which, for Plato, requires his philosopher). In an unpurified person, however, the
celibacy except for begetting children) involves keeping kundalini descends through the spinal channel and
the soul-stuff located in the brain, that is, preventing it expresses itself not as divine union but as the drive to
from flowing downward through the spinal channel. sexual union, and is expended through the penis in
This inference is implicit in the Platonic doctrine, ejaculation. The practice of yoga causes the descended
which holds that the philosopher must get beyond false kundalini power to be drawn back upward through a
er?s to attain the true celestial eros. Because the false
channel in the center of the spine. The kundalini may
eros draws the seminal fluid down the spinal channel, occupy seven seats, or chakras: that at the base of the
the avoidance of false eros must end this downward
spine, that at the top of the brain, and five in between
flowing. (Plato, however, mentions only two, the throat and the
Although it has never been mentioned in any text, heart). As in Plato's description, the kundalini power is
especially embodied in semen, and descends in the
This research is part of a larger project still in progress titled The form of semen from the brain to the penis through the
Shape of Ancient Thought: Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies. spinal channel. Various practices are recommended for

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68 RES 24 AUTUMN 1993

Figure 2. Greek votive relief. Attica, fourth century b.c. Depicts serpent
emerging from spine of patient at shrine of Amphiaraos. National
Archaeological Museum, Athens.

preventing the semen from descending through the
spinal channel or, if some has already descended, for
forcing it upward through that channel until it resides in
the brain again;1 there its life-giving force can express
itself in the form of spiritual rather than physical life.2
This correspondence is remarkable enough to invite
interpretation, but there is more. The Indian texts
distinguish many subtle channels in the body. The
foremost is the channel through which the kundalini
passes up and down the spine (sushumna-nadi); nearly
as important are two channels that pass along the spine
but outside it (ida and p?ngala). These two surrounding
channels resemble the ?con of the entwined serpents.
Between their origin in the upper brain and their
termination at the base of the spine, they cross one
another five times; their points of intersection are the
five intermediary chakras (fig. 1). Plato also knows of
these two veins unknown to anatomists (Timaeus 77c.
1. See Thomas McEvilley, "An Archaeology of Yoga," RES:
Anthropology and Aesthetics 1 (Spring 1981): 44-77, for discussion
of some of these practices.
2. Convenient modern descriptions of the system include Mircea
Eliade, Yoga: Immortality and Freedom, The Bollingen Series (New
York: Princeton Univ. Press, 1971), pp. 134, 236-249; and Swami
Sivananda, Kundalini Yoga (Sivanandnagar, India: The Divine Life
Society, 1971).
ff.); for him, they run along the sides of the spinal
column and cross one another an unknown number of
times (Plato mentions only the juncture at the throat). In
Plato, as in the Indian texts, these subsidiary veins are
secondary carriers of the soul-power.
Finally, the correspondence between Plato's Timaeus
and the kundalini extends to the imagery of the serpent.
Spinal marrow was associated with the serpent by
Aelian (De Natura Animalium 1.51) and by the
kundalini tradition. The kundalini power is described as
a serpent that, having been awakened, slithers up the
spine. According to Aelian, the spinal marrow of a man
leaves his body as a serpent when he dies. It is also
sometimes conceived as involved in the healing
process, as shown in a fourth-century relief (fig. 2).
That these remarkable similarities?which, it seems
obvious, could not derive from independent
theorizing?should occur in both Greece and India
demands special explanation. It is of course a
widespread belief, found among shamans as well as
yogins and philosophers, that the retention of semen
increases spiritual power; the Taoist alchemists of China
also taught techniques to force the semen up the spine
to the brain where it was expected to lead to the
alchemical transformation of the mind. The Chinese
belief probably came from India, and the Greek and

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Indian coincidence of the two subsidiary channels is
unique.
A rudimentary form of this occult physiology is
attested in India as early as the Chandogya Upanishad
(perhaps 700-600 b.c.),3 which says (VIII.6.6): "A
hundred and one are the arteries of the heart, one of
them leads up to the crown of the head. Going upward
through that, one becomes immortal."4 The somewhat
later Maitri Upanishad specifies (VI.21) that the name of
this channel is sushumna, and that the goal of yoga is
to cause the prana, or spirit-energy, to rise through that
channel to the crown of the head (compare also Prasna
Upanishad 111.6). The much later Brahma Upanishad
(perhaps circa A.D. 1000) asserts that there are four
seats of prana, and then appears to relate two different
traditions, first naming navel, heart, throat, and head;
then eye, throat, heart, and head.5 The Hansa
Upanishad (probably of about the same date) mentions
six: loins, belly, navel, heart, neck, and eyebrows
(ibid., 213). It is notable, though, that none of these
Upanishadic passages mentions the spine, and those
that refer to a channel or vein rising from the heart
seem to mean the heart itself, not the heart level of the
spine.
The Shandilya and Dhyanabindu Upanishads
(roughly medieval in date) describe the central channel
and the two subsidiary channels, and mention the anus
and navel chakras (ibid., 176-177, 205-206). The
Hatha Yoga Pradipika (also a late text) knows of the
arrangement of the three channels, and mentions the
throat and brain chakras (III.50; IV.75, 79).6 Another
late text, the Siva Samhita, spells out the entire system
of the three channels and seven chakras (V.56-103).7
The relative chronology of these texts is not certain, but
may be more or less in the order given here. If so, then
the pattern with which the system emerges into
articulation suggests, although it does not require, that
3. The dates when Indian texts reached their present state are
often problematic, and the value of such a date, even if it were
known, is complicated by the fact that many Indian texts contain
stratified materials from different eras. The dates given here are only
exempli gratia, but they do represent a loose and uncodified
consensus of many scholars who have written in the last two
generations.
4. S. Radhakrishnan, trans., The Principal Upanishads (London:
Allen and Unwin, 1953). Compare Brihadaranyaka Upanishad IV.2.3.
5. K. Narayanasvami Aiyar, Thirty Minor Upanishads (El Reno,
Okla.: Santarasa Publications, 1980), pp. 107-109.
6. Pancham Sinh, trans., The Hatha Yoga Pradipika (New Delhi:
Munshiram Manoharlal, 1980).
7. Rai Bahadur Srisa Chandra Vasu, trans., The Siva Samhita
(New Delhi: Munshiram Manoharlal, 1979).
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McEvilley: The spinal serpent 69
the doctrine either entered India in stages or that it
underwent indigenous development in a series of
stages. Of course, all of these texts contain materials
from different ages, so no conclusion on these matters
can be drawn at present. It is equally possible that there
were different versions of the system extant or that
different teachers purveyed it with different emphases.
The doctrine presented in the Timaeus can be traced
back before Plato?and the trail leads to the Sicilian
and South Italian schools of medicine, which were
connected with local Pythagorean and Orphic
traditions. These schools taught that semen comes from
the brain and is of one substance with the spinal
marrow, by way of which it travels to the genital organ
through the spinal channel, called "the holy tube."8
This was explicitly taught by Alcmaeon of Crot?n (DK
14A13).9 Crot?n, of course, was the center of the
Pythagorean brotherhood, and although Alcmaeon
seems not to have been a member, he shared many
views with the Pythagoreans.10 In fact, the doctrine of
the sperm descending through the spinal channel seems
to have a special connection with the Pythagorean
tradition; besides Alcmaeon and Plato's most
Pythagorean work, the Timaeus, it is found in Hippo of
Samos (DK 38A3 and 10) in the fifth century b.c., who
was probably also a Pythagorean.
The association of the spinal marrow with the word
aion, meaning "life" or "life span," in a fragment of the
Orphic or Orphic-influenced poet Pindar, affirms the
Orphic associations of the teaching. Aion, according to
later writers, was an Orphic name for Dionysus, the
divine element expressed as sexual power.11 Heraclitus,
himself very influenced by Orphism, seems also to have
taught the retention of semen and a qualified sexual
abstinence.12 Diogenes of Apollonia (DK 64B6), living
probably on the Black Sea in the fifth century b.c., also
8. See F. M. Cornford, Plato's Cosmology: The Timaeus of Plato
(New York: Bobbs-Merrill [The Library of Liberal Arts], n.d.), p. 295;
R. B. Onians, The Origins of European Thought about the Body, the
Mind, the Soul, the World, Time, and Fate (Cambridge: Cambridge
Univ. Press, 1989), p. 208.
9. Hermann Diels and Walther Kranz, Die Fragmente der
Vorsokratiker, 2 vols. (Dublin and Zurich: Wiedmann, 1972).
Hereafter referred to as DK.
10. See AI ister Cameron, The Pythagorean Background of the
Theory of Recollection (Menasha, Wise: George Banta Publishing
Company, 1938), pp. 37-42.
11. W. K. C. Guthrie, Orpheus and Greek Religion (New York:
Norton, 1966), p. 228.
12. These points are argued, for example, by M. L. West, Early
Greek Philosophy and the Orient (Oxford: The Clarendon Press,
1971), pp. 151-161.
 70 RES 24 AUTUMN 1993
held the doctrine of the spinal channel with the two
surrounding "veins" and of the connection between the
spinal channel and the testicles. Plato, as previously
noted, spoke not only of the three channels but also of
the heart and throat chakras, which he mentioned
earlier than any extant Indian text. Aristotle also wrote
of the connection between sperm and spinal fluid, and
regarded the testicles not as sources of semen but as
receptacles whose purpose is to retard and "steady" its
flow.13
There is likely to have been some connection
between the Indian and the Greek doctrines of the
identity of spinal fluid, brain fluid, and sperm; of the
spinal channel connecting the brain and the penis; of
the surrounding channels that cross one another; of the
chakras where they cross; of the hierarchy of those all
the way to the highest chakra, seen as the proper
location of the sperm-marrow-soul; and of the
association of the marrow with a serpent.
One hypothesis would focus on the diffusion of
elements of pre-Socratic lore from India into Greece
during the late sixth century b.c., specifically the period
540-510, when both northwest India and eastern
Greece were within the Persian Empire. It has been
established (although few classicists have yet taken note
of this) that Heraclitus's thought also reflected doctrines
learned, directly or indirectly, from Upanishadic
sources?and even doctrines related to those under
consideration here.14 If tantric physiology was a part of
this wave of Indian influence, it probably entered
Greece during that brief but crucial period 540-510
b.c., when many of the major events of pre-Socratic
thought occurred. The type of situation that would
provide a concrete means of transmission can be
exemplified by the story of the physician Democedes
of Crot?n. Democedes, according to tradition a
contemporary of Pythagoras, spent years at the Persian
court, where he met and exchanged opinions with
doctors from various parts of the empire, including
India, and then returned to Greece, no doubt full of
13. De partibus animalium 656a26; De generatione animalium A
7?7a20ff.; Problemata 879b and 897b23ff., and see Partibus
animalium. 651b20ff. and 652a25ff.
14. Heraclitus could have reflected an earlier source that also fed
into the Upanishads. See West, Early Greek Philosophy and the
Orient, p. 186 and elsewhere. West's argument about the sequence of
elemental transformations in Heraclitus amounts to what scholars
traditionally have called a proof?meaning the correct reading of the
evidence until the state of the evidence changes. I have argued
further such diffusion events in The Shape of Ancient Thought:
Studies in Greek and Indian Philosophies.
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new knowledge, including perhaps the metaphysiology
of the spinal channel. In fact, Democedes returned
home to Crot?n, where such ideas would have fed
directly into the Pythagorean tradition that ultimately
informed Plato.
The main problem with this reconstruction is that
Homer already had the idea that the cerebrospinal fluid
(which he called engkephalos) was the container of life
power. Whether he equated it directly with sperm is
unknown, but is implied by the fundamental idea that
the engkephalos was life-power. The connection of the
spinal fluid with sperm seems present in Hesiod too,
well before any known easy opportunity for Indian
influence on Greek thought. At least as early as
Democritus (perhaps born circa 460 b.c.), the
engkephalos was believed to issue forth in sexual
intercourse (DK 68B32), and the term may have been
partly interchangable with aion, which Homer describes
(Odyssey 5.160) as "the sweet aion flowing down." The
total novelty of this doctrine in the Greek tradition in
the sixth century b.c., then, is unlikely, although it may
have been refined and reinforced by elements imported
at that time. (The detail of the crossing secondary veins,
for example, may have been passed later than the
doctrine of the central channel.)
The presence of the doctrine of the engkephalos in
the Homeric texts seems well established, as it is taken
for granted, or treated as a given; therefore, its origin
may extend far back in the Homeric tradition, which is
known to contain elements that go back at least as far
as the fifteenth century b.c. In fact, there is some
evidence that the serpent-marrow-seed-soul identity was
already in place in the Minoan-Mycenaean period.15
One may want to look, then, for a source earlier than
Democedes's stay in Persia, a source that could have
influenced both Homer and the early Upanishads.
Because this doctrine is widespread among Indo
European traditions, a second hypothesis is that the
doctrine may have survived into the Greek and Indian
traditions from proto-lndo-European times. Similarities
to the doctrine appear in various European sources:
"The head," Onians says, "was believed by the early
Romans to contain, to be the source of, the seed"
(Onians, Origins, 124-125), and Pliny (Natural History
15. Nilsson opines that in Minoan-Mycenaean religion "the snake
represents the soul of the deceased" (Martin P. Nilsson, A History of
Greek Religion [New York: Norton, 1964], p. 13). See also Nilsson,
The Minoan-Mycenaean Religion and Its Survival in Greek Religion
(Lund, 1927), pp. 273ff.; and Jane Helen Harrison, Prolegomena to
the Study of Greek Religion (New York: Meridian Books, 1957),
pp. 235-237, 325-331.
 McEvilley: The spinal serpent 71

XI.37.178) describes the spinal marrow as "descending

from the brain." There are hints of the doctrine in
Germanic and Slavic lore (Onians, ibid., 154-155),
and remnants of it in Shakespeare's line "Spending his
manly marrow in her arms" (All's Well That Ends Well
II.3.298) and in Spenser's assertion that sexuality "rotts
the marrow and consumes the brain" (Fairy Queen
I.4.26).
But there are also similar traces in ancient Semitic
texts. In various passages of the Old Testament (Job
XX.11, XXI.24; Psalms XXII.14, CX.3; Ezekiel XXXVII;
and Isaiah XXVI.19), of Cabalistic tradition (for
example, Ha Idra Rabba Qadisha XXVI1.546; compare
Hippolytus, Refutation of Heresies V.17), and of
Rabbinic literature (see Onians, Origins 288), spirit is
equated with bone marrow, with brain liquid, and with
sperm, implying a system of conduits connecting the
corresponding areas in the body. Other suggestions of
this doctrine occur in the Near East. It has been
proposed, for example, that the priests of Attis and
Figure 3. Line drawing of a Sumerian stone vase ("Gudea
Cybele, who castrated themselves, may have been Vase"), ca. 2050 b.c. Shows intertwined serpent pair with
attempting to shut off the channel from the spine to the seven points of intersection or contact. From Heinrich
genitals, preventing the sperm from leaving the body Zimmer, The Art of Indian Asia, ed. Joseph Campbell, vol. 1
and thus the body from aging.16 Similarly, Epiphanius (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1955; 1960; renewed in
(Panarion 1, 2, 26, 9), writing of the Gnostic tradition, 1983), fig. 2, p. 50. Photo: Courtesy of Princeton University
says, "They believe the power in both the menstrual Press.
fluid and the semen to be the soul, which, gathering
up, they eat" (compare Onians, ibid., 110).
the ?mage of the entwined serpents, famously found on
There is an Egyptian antecedent for the idea of
the "Gudea Vase," circa 2300 B.c. (fig. 3), and the
attaining salvation or enlightenment through ascending
upright figure surrounded or flanked by intertwined
the spine. In the myth in which Osiris climbs to heaven
serpents, much as in the tantric iconography of the
on the spinal column of his mother, the goddess Nut,
"serpent power" (figs. 4, 5).18 There is also a strong
the vertebrae are used as the rungs of a ladder.17
argument for the likelihood of this doctrine occurring in
Onians proposes that the djed column, representing the
the early Indus Valley culture.19 Generally, then, the
spine of Osiris and worshiped "as an amulet of life,"
fundamental physiological model behind the kundalini
indicates the same idea (ibid., 208 n. 3). The fact that
doctrine?the spinal linkage between the brain and the
the spine and phallus of Osiris were found together at
urethra, and the identity of the brain fluid, the spinal
Mendes, in the myth of the dismemberment, again
marrow, and the semen?seems to have been extremely
implies the doctrine of the spinal channel and its
widespread in the ancient world, although only the
connection with the life and generative powers. "The
tantric and Platonic texts, as already mentioned, speak
vital fluid," Onians notes, "is repeatedly shown [in
of the two subsidiary channels surrounding the spine.
Egyptian iconography] as transmitted by laying the hand
This distribution does not seem to favor the proto
on the top of the spine or passing it down the spine"
Indo-European hypothesis; in fact, it becomes very
(ibid.). It also has been argued that there are hints of
problematic if the Egyptian and Indus Valley
the doctrine in Sumerian iconography, specifically in occurrences of the doctrine are allowed. It can be
accepted only if one adopts the hypothesis of early
16. This follows from the fact that the testicles were not regarded
as the sources of sperm but as carriers or way stations for it. Onians
Indo-European migrations proposed by Renfrew, with
argues the point in Origins, pp. 109-110, n. 4.
17. See Theodor Gaster, Thespis: Ritual, Myth and Drama in the 18. See Heinrich Zimmer, The Art of Indian Asia, The Bollingen
Ancient Near East (New York: Harper and Row [Harper Torchbooks], Series, (Princeton: Princeton Univ. Press, 1955), vol. 1, fig. 6, p. 66.
1966), p. 396. 19. See McEvilley, "An Archaeology of Yoga."

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72 RES 24 AUTUMN 1993

Figure 7. Indus Valley seal impression from Mohenjo-daro.

Illustrates in lower left motif of symmetrically flanking goats
with hooves up on central tree and mountain. The National
Museum, New Delhi.

Figure 4. Line drawing of a Babylonian cylinder seal,

ca. 2000 b.c. Shows upright male figure surrounded by
intertwined serpents. From William Hayes Ward, The Seal
Cylinders of Western Asia (Washington: Carnegie Institution,
1910), fig. 368b.

Figure 8. Achaemenian seal, sixth century b.c. Illustrates

Sumerian dompteur motif with central male figure grasping
symmetrically flanking lions or lion-related monsters. Other
examples, both Sumerian and Egyptian, are from ca. 3000
2600 B.c. Photo: Courtesy of The Pierpont Morgan Library,
New York, seal no. 820.

Figure 5. Akkadian cylinder seal impression from Tell Asmar,

ca. 2350 b.c. Illustrates enthroned male deity flanked by pairs
of intertwined serpents. Photo: Courtesy of The Oriental
Institute of the University of Chicago.

Figure 6. Cylinder seal impression, Uruk period. Illustrates

goats with hooves up on central tree and mountain in heraldic
flanking arrangement. After Henri Frankfort, Cylinder Seals Figure 9. Indus Valley fragmentary seal impression from
(London: Gregg Press, 1965), pi. IVj. Drawing: Maura Mohenjo-daro. Shows dompteur motif. The National
Sheehan. Museum, New Delhi.

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Figure 10. Sumerian cylinder seal impression, Uruk period
(ca. 3000 B.c.). Illustrates lion attacking bull from behind.
From Beatrice Laura Goff, Symbols of Prehistoric
Mesopotamia (New Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963).
Figure 11. Indus Valley painted potsherd from Mohenjo-daro.
Illustrates lion attacking bull from behind. The National
Museum, New Delhi.
the corollary of considering the Indus Valley civilization
as belonging to Indo-European culture and Egyptian
culture as having received Indo-European influence at
an earlier date than is presently conceded.20
A third possibility is to see the tantric and Platonic
versions not as survivors from a common Indo
European background but as inheritances from some
other ancient culture whose influence spread to both.
20. Colin Renfrew, Archeology and Language: The Puzzle of Indo
European Origins (New York: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1990). Renfrew
seems to lean toward an Indo-European Indus Valley (pp. 188-196);
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McEvilley: The spinal serpent 73
Zimmer argued one and one-half generations ago that
the iconography of the serpent power complex moved
from Mesopotamia into India.21 This diffusion, if it
happened, would have occurred in a number of waves,
beginning with the Indus Valley culture and ending
with the fall of Persepolis, when many Near Eastern
craftsmen carrying Mesopotamian traditions came into
India. Indeed, it cannot be denied that certain Sumerian
and Indus Valley icons appear to bear a resemblance
too close to be coincidental. A few examples will make
the point.
The heraldic flanking composition is perhaps the
most characteristic of all Sumerian visual trademarks.
Where it occurs in Old Kingdom Egypt, it is commonly
attributed to Sumerian influence. Several instances of
this imagery in the Indus Valley cannot be explained at
present except through the hypothesis of Sumer-lndus
influence, in whichever direction and however
mediated by other cultures. An Indus seal portraying a
ritual of a tree goddess, for example, shows clearly in
the lower left corner of the motif, common in Sumerian
cylinder seals, a mountain or hillock flanked by two
goats with their front feet on it and a tree or pole of
some kind rising from its top (figs. 6, 7).22 One face of
a triangular seal from Mohenjo-daro shows this motif
again, identical in form to many Sumerian icons.23
Numerous other Indus examples of this image have
survived.24 Several Indus seals show another of the
most characteristic of Sumerian ?conographs, often
called the dompteur or Gilgamesh: a male hero
standing between two lions who symmetrically flank
him and whom he is holding in a gesture of mastery
(figs. 8, 9).25 A burial urn from cemetery H at Harappa
shows two dompteurs, each mastering two bulls. They
others feel more certain, such as Subhash Kak, "A Frequency Analysis
of the Indus Script," Cryptologia 12.3 (July 1988): 129-143; "The
Indus M?ndala and the Indo-Aryans," Dr. S.R. Rao's Seventieth
Birthday Felicitation Volume, 1992. For a recent discussion of the
problems of the hypothesis of the Indus Valley as an Indo-European
culture, see J. P. Mallory, In Search of the Indo-Europeans: Language,
Archaeology and Myth (London: Thames and Hudson), 1989.
21. Zimmer, The Art of Indian Asia, vol. I, pp. 42-67.
22. For the Indus seal, see Ernest J. H. Mackay, Further
Excavations at Mohenjo Daro, 2 vols. (New Delhi: Indological Book
Corporation, 1938), pi. XC, p. 13. For a Sumerian example: Henri
Frankfort, Cylinder Seals (London: Gregg Press, 1965), pi. IVj, Xlg.
23. K. N. Sastri, New Light On the Indus Civilization, 2 vols.
(Delhi: Atma Ram and Sons, 1965), p. 118.
24. See, for example, Sastri, ibid., pi. III.8, pi. V, 4.c, 5.c, and so
forth.
25. For example, Mackay, Further Excavations at Mohenjo Daro,
pi. LXXXIV, pp. 75, 86.
74 RES 24 AUTUMN 1993

have long hair and seem to be naked, like their It must be granted, however, that the details of this
Sumerian counterparts.26 Other heraldic flanking motifs relationship?especially the direction in which
abound in Indian iconography.27 Additionally, the lion influence is presumed to have moved?are less agreed
bull combat, in which the lion attacks the bull from on today than a generation or so ago, when there was a
above and behind it, a commonplace of Sumerian widespread scholarly consensus about Sumerian
iconography, occurs in the Indus Valley (figs. 10, 11), influence on the Indus Valley culture. Henri Frankfort,
as does the goddess in the tree, a centrally important writing about fifty years ago, went so far as to suppose
icon in both Egypt and Sumer (figs. 12, 13).28 that "an important element in the population of the two
These icons?the eagle and serpents, the mountain
flanked by goats, the hero mastering lions, the lion-bull
combat, the goddess in the tree?are central to
Sumerian religion. Their presence in the Indus Valley
city of Mohenjo-daro (in the strata that indicate
Sumerian trade was active) suggests that significant
cultural exchanges took place during the Bronze Age
between Mesopotamia and the Indus Valley. According
to presently accepted chronologies, which tend to put
the flowering of Sumerian civilization somewhat earlier
than that in the Indus Valley, it would seem that both
iconographical and conceptual elements of Sumerian
religion were assimilated by Bronze Age India. That
Elamite or some other intermediaries might have been
involved does not alter the strength and significance of
Figure 12. Detail of a Sumerian cylinder seal impression, third
this hypothesis.
millennium b.c. Illustrates goddess in tree with horned god.
After Henri Frankfort, Cylinder Seals (London: Gregg Press,
26. Sastri, New Light On the Indus Civilization, p. 12, fig. 13. 1965), pi. Xlg. Drawing: Maura Sheehan.
(Some consider cemetery H to be post-Harappan, others the final
Harappan stratum.)
27. These include an Indus seal showing an eagle heraldically
flanked by serpents (Sastri, New Light On the Indus Civilization,
p. 122); both the eagle-and-serpent motif and the heraldic flanking
format encompassing them are distinctively Sumerian. The heraldic
flanking motif or structure was naturalized and assimilated in India
and became a basic iconographie structure. The Buddha meditating,
or almost any Indian deity, is shown on a central axis with
heraldically flanking figures. One example among many is the
Buddhist ?con sometimes called the "Bath of Lakshmi," in which the
goddess stands on a lotus, heraldically flanked by elephants with their
trunks raised, which appears in a well-known railing medallion of the
stupa at Bharut. This ?con may have passed into the Buddhist milieu
from the Jain. It occurs in the Kalpa Sutra's description of the dream
of the (second) mother of the Jain leader Mahavira on the night when
the embryo was placed in her womb; at that moment "she sat on the
top of Mt. Himavat, reposing on a lotus in the lotus lake, anointed
with water from the strong and large trunks of the guardian elephants"
{Kalpa Sutra, p. 36). The origins of Jain iconography, as one scholar
said, "reach back, like the origins of Jainism itself, to the remotest
depths of the unrecorded Indian past" (Zimmer, The Art of Indian
Asia, vol. I, p. 134). In fact, they may reach back past the Indus
Valley into Sumerian culture.
28. For a Sumerian ?mage of the lion-bull combat, see, for
example, B. M. Goff, The Symbols of Prehistoric Mesopotamia (New
Haven: Yale Univ. Press, 1963), fig. 260; for an Indus example, a
painted potsherd published by Sir John Marshall, Mohenjo-Daro, vol. Figure 13. Indus Valley seal impression from Mohenjo-daro.
3, pi. 92, p. 21. For the Indus goddess in tree, see Mackay, Further Illustrates goddess in tree with bull god and seven vegetation
Excavations, vol. II, pi. XCIX, 677A. spirits. The National Museum, New Delhi.

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regions belonged originally to a common stock."29 A
later scholar more moderately posited "idea diffusion"
from both Mesopotamia and Egypt as the proximate
causes of the Indus culture.30 Another spoke of
"stimulus diffusion."31 Yet another doubted that the
Indus culture sprang "from any separate ultimate
origin," and noted that at least in the technology of
writing it was "likely to be dependent, in the last resort,
on the inventions of late fourth-millennium date in
Mesopotamia."32 In the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s, then,
a formidable consensus of Western scholars generally
held that influences from Sumerian culture stimulated
the Indus Valley culture to arise out of the village state
of the Neolithic Age into the urban planning stage
uncovered at Mohenjo-daro and Harappa.33
More recently, this consensus has been broken up
into a series of new debates; the increasing influence of
scholars who are Indian nationals has contributed to a
tendency to minimize external influences into the
29. Frankfort, Cylinder Seals, p. 307.
30. Mortimer Wheeler, Civilizations of the Indus and Beyond
(London: Thames and Hudson, 1966), pp. 61-62.
31. Glyn Daniel, The First Civilizations (New York: Thomas Y.
Crowell, 1968), pp. 114-116.
32. Stuart Piggot, Prehistoric India (Baltimore: Penguin, 1950),
p. 141.
33. The excavations conducted at Mehrgarh by Jean-Fran?ois
Jarrige and Richard H. Meadow ("The Antecedents of Civilization in
the Indus Valley," Scientific American [August 1980]: 122-133) are
frequently mentioned as proof of the internal continuity of the Indus
Valley culture. But it seems to me that their findings show a major
discontinuity at the point when ancient Near Eastern influence might
have entered?that is, in the third millennium.
At Mehrgarh, Jarrige and Meadow found a continuous
stratigraphical sequence from the prepottery Neolithic to the phase
immediately preceding the appearance of the Indus Valley cities.
They feel that this evidence as they have presented it invalidates the
hypothesis of Sumerian diffusion; I feel that their own evidence,
properly interpreted, shows the need of such influence.
The authors divide their strata into seven levels, the sequence
being characterized by increasing complexity along with increasing
trade contacts with Central Asia. That a trade stimulus is in effect in
the steady complexification of the culture is granted?but there is
no sign of West Asian contacts, such as Sumerian, in these seven
levels. It is important to note that, despite the signs of gradual
complexification, this culture shows a remarkably static quality. Stone
sickles, for example, remained unchanged from level 2 to level 7, a
period measured not in decades or even centuries but millennia. The
appearance is of a stagnant provincial Neolithic culture lacking
pretensions to urbanism and cultural complexity. It is at the end of
this long period that evidence of West Asian trade appears?precisely
at the moment when the Indus cities materialized.
It seems to me that this new archaeological background renders
the hypothesis of West Asian diffusion not less but more useful. When
it was believed that the Indus cities arose with no antecedent
whatever, they seemed mysterious indeed. Now we have the picture
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McEvilley: The spinal serpent 75
Indian tradition.34 Can recalibrated carbon 14 dates, or
some other chronological technology, put the Indus
culture earlier than the Sumerian finds? What was the
role of Elam, and what was the connection between the
Elamite and Dravidian languages? Were the Indo
Europeans on the scene in India yet? This revisionist
impetus attacks the clich?d and long-held assumption
of the "nuclear" Near East, especially in its
Sumerocentric form, although little has actually
changed in the evidence. The revisionists have not yet
accounted for the iconographie parallels that Zimmer
noted in The Art of Indian Asia (or for the additional
ones mentioned above).
Perhaps the key icon involved is the entwined
serpents, which are central to the tantric iconography of
the spinal column with its subsidiary veins, and which
have something to do with the designation of the
kundalini as "serpent power." This is first encountered
in Sumerian iconography, for example in the famous
Gudea Vase, where it seems to be the symbol of
Gudea's personal deity, Ningizzida. It is not found in
the Indus Valley iconography as presently known and,
in fact, is not documented in India at all until after the
fall of Persepolis. In any case, whether this image was,
or was not, still associated with a certain specific
doctrinal content is not known.35
It is of course possible that a complex diffusion
situation occurred, where parts of the doctrine
descended into both Greece and India from some
earlier source, and other parts passed from one of these
of a sleepy (emic) culture gradually waking up to international (etic)
cultural currents through progressive foreign trade with Central Asia,
then suddenly catching fire when confronted with Mesopotamian
influence (mediated or unmediated). At the critical moment, a sudden
influx of Mesopotamian objects occurred along with significant
iconographie changes and the appearance of writing.
Mesopotamian influence occurs at the beginning of the urban
phase and continues throughout the phase. Archaeological evidence
shows that the Indus cities had prolonged trade contacts with
Mesopotamia, lasting for at least half a millennium in the Early
Dynastic and the Sargonid periods. These contacts were extensive
enough to imply the free movement of skilled artisans between these
cultures and the establishing of colonies of merchants in one
another's cities.
34. The extreme example of this type of argument is found in
Paramesh Choudhury, Indian Origin of the Chinese Nation (Calcutta:
Dasgupta and Co. Private Ltd., 1990). Choudhury argues that the
Bronze Age civilizations of the ancient Near East and North Africa, as
well as of China, all developed as colonies sent out from the Indus
Valley.
35. Onians notes, without mentioning the kundalini parallels,
"The union of the two serpents round the wand might for the Greeks
represent the life-power ... by the union of male psyche (soul;
cerebro-spinal fluid) and female psyche" {Origins, p. 122, n. 3).
76 RES 24 AUTUMN 1993

Figure 14. Indus Valley seal impression from Mohenjo-daro.

Illustrates seated figure with heels together. The National
Museum, New Delhi.

Figure 15. Australian aboriginal ritual view. Illustrates a
position similar to utkatasana. From Geza Roheim, Eternal
Ones of the Dream (New York: International Universities
Press, 1969), fig. 7. Photo: Courtesy of International
Universities Press.
Figure 16. Swami Dhirendra Brahmachari in mulabandhasana
(his facial expression reflects simhasana, his lower body
mulabandhasana). From Dhirendra Brahmachari, Yogasana
Vijnana: The Science of Yoga (Bombay: Asia Publishing
House, 1970), pi. 19.

cultures to another at a later time. What is clear, and
what should enter the general discussion of the topic, is
that the tantric physiology is not exclusively an Indian
element. A diffusion probably involving some of the
factors reviewed above was involved in India as well as
in Greece?and there may be a still more ancient world
involved.
In "An Archaeology of Yoga" the six mysterious
Indus Valley seal images, which are often rightly or
wrongly called "Sivas," were investigated. All the
figures on these seals, without exception, are in a
position known in hatha yoga as mulabandhasana, or
possibly the closely related utkatasana or bhadda
konasana, three variants of the same yogic function.36
The system of yogic ideas and methods with which
these asanas ave involved is consistently associated
throughout their long later history with the occult
physiology discussed above. Specifically, the function
of these asanas is, by pressing the heels against the
perineum, to drive the sperm-marrow-soul fluid up the
spinal channel. There is, then, some plausibility to the
view that where these asanas are found, that whole
system of physiology also may well have been present.
The posture in question does not, in fact, occur in any
of the places that from time to time have been
suggested as providing analogues of the asanas?in
Egyptian sculptures of scribes, for example, or the
Gundestrup cauldron,37 or pre-Columbian seated

36. McEvilley, "An Archaeology of Yoga." 37. However, in an article that makes use of my earlier research

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figures. Some Sumerian cylinder seal impressions of the
so-called Displayed Female are close, but the crucial
element of the joined heels is never precisely found in
them.38 This posture can, however, be observed in
ethnographic photographs of Australian aboriginal
rituals (figs. 14-16).39 Of course, there may be no
connection. But the Indian and the Australian seem to
be the only two known cases in all the world's record
of body postures, so perhaps it is permissible to evoke
the possibility of a remote connection and surmise that
this yogic position, possibly along with other protoyogic
elements, may have survived from the proto-Australoid
stratum of Indian prehistory.
The physiology of the spinal channel seems, in
Indian cultural history at least, syntactically related to
the heels-joined squatting posture. Of course, syntax
varies, and whether the connection would hold for
earlier cultures is a guess. Still, it is plausible that the
physiology of the spinal channel also may be extremely
ancient and may have been diffused widely at an early
stage of human culture?perhaps even by that
hypothetical wave of migration that brought the
ancestors of the proto-Australoid peoples out of Africa.
The ethnographer Lorna Marshall, in an article on
"!Kung Bushmen Religious Beliefs," writes of an occult
physiological power called ntum, which, aroused by
trance dancing, comes to a boil.40 "The men," Marshall
writes, "say it boils up their spinal columns into their
heads, and is so strong when it does this that it
overcomes them and they lose their senses."
in "An Archaeology of Yoga," Timothy Taylor notes that the relevant
Gundestrup figure does seem to show pressure on the perineum from
one heel, without the heels-joined posture (Timothy Taylor, "The
Gundestrup Cauldron," Scientific American [March 1992]: 84-89).
38. The Indus Valley seal-amulets portraying figures seated in
mulabandhasana have other Mesopotamian connections, however,
which have not been discussed. The motif of three-facedness, for
example?or four-facedness, if the figures are intended to have
another face to the rear?is echoed in Sumer, where various three
and four-faced figures are known. At Ischali in central Mesopotamia,
for example, a four-faced god was worshiped. The closest antecedent
to the posture of mulabandhasana is the so-called Displayed Female
motif, in which sometimes the heels are very close together. (See,
e.g., Goff, Symbols of Prehistoric Mesopotamia, fig. 440.) Further,
Sumerian figures are found seated on slightly raised platforms much
like those on the Indus seals (ibid., fig. 352). Figures seated cross
legged and assuming ritual hand positions also occur (Parrot, Sumer,
fig. 252), although not precisely in the heels-joined position. The
animals surrounding the figure on one of the Indus seals answer to
the animals floating around the scene in many Sumerian cylinder
seals (e.g., Frankfort, Cylinder Seals, pi. IV).
39. See, for example, Geza Roheim, The Eternal Ones of the
Dream (New York: International Univ. Press, 1969), pi. 7.
40. Africa, vol. 32, no. 3 (1962).
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McEvilley: The spinal serpent 11
Indeed, brain and marrow cults are of enormous
antiquity. At Choukoutien in China, the principal site
for Pithecanthropus pekinensis (circa 400,000 b.c.), the
long bones of both animals and humans have been split
for extracting the marrow, and human skulls have been
opened to drink the brain.41 Of course, it may simply
be, as Clark and Piggott observe, that "brain is good to
eat."42 But similar practices among modern tribal
peoples have had ritual purposes based on the idea that
the brain fluid and the bone marrow contain life force.
Indeed, the method with which Peking Man opened the
skull implies a special ritual focus on its connection
with the spine: "the enlargement of the foramen
magnum, the hole at the base of the skull through
which the spinal column connects with the brain . . .
for extracting this delicacy without splitting open the
cranium."43 The special care of this method has implied
to another commentator that "this grim cult might
reasonably be proposed as the earliest religious rite of
the human species."44 Similar brain and marrow cults
are recorded by the remains of Neanderthal societies,
and indeed were observed in this century among the
indigenous peoples of Borneo.45 The sensibility, or
spirituality, with which such rites were performed may
not be far removed from the kundalini practitioner's
desire to convert "the reproductive fluid into a radiant
vital essence of high potency which, racing along the
nerve fibres as well as the spinal canal, nourished the
brain and the organs with a rejuvenating substance."46
Nor may it be so alien to Plato's conviction (Timaeus
73b) that "the marrow is the starting-point, for the
bonds of life, so long as the soul is bound up with the
body, were made fast in it as the roots of the mortal
creature." Finally, this Greek-Indian parallel seems to
direct our gaze into the farthest depths of human
prehistory.
41. See, for example, Grahame Clark, World Prehistory in New
Perspective, 3d ed. (Cambridge: Cambridge Univ. Press, 1977),
p. 29; and Grahame Clark and Stuart Piggott, Prehistoric Societies
(New York: Knopf, 1965), pp. 47-48.
42. Ibid., p. 48.
43. Ibid., p. 47.
44. Joseph Campbell, The Masks of God: Primitive Mythology
(New York: Viking Press, 1959), p. 394.
45. Ibid., and see G. H. R. von Koenigswald, "A Review of the
Stratigraphy of Java and Its Relations to Early Man," in George Grant
MacCurdy, ed., Early Man (Philadelphia: F. B. Lippincott Company,
1937), p. 31.
46. Gopi Krishna, Kundalini, the Evolutionary Energy in Man
(Boulder: Shambala, 1971), p. 163.