Dove and serpent

Shortly after I posted "Look who's still showing up in syncs," William Wildblood posted "The Serpent and the Dove."

My post connects Jonah, whose name means "dove" in Hebrew, with the "sign of the dove" given at the baptism of Christ. I also quote Joseph Smith on the sign of the dove and discuss the gourd that is eaten by a worm at the end of the Book of Jonah.

William, discussing Christ's injunction to be "as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves," also refers to the baptismal dove.

And what is the dove? For information on that we can go to John the Baptist who was the first to recognise the adult Jesus as the Messiah and who proclaimed when he baptised him that he saw the Holy Spirit descend on him in the form of a dove. The dove is the Holy Spirit, and the innocence of the dove is true spiritual wisdom compared to the earthly, even if it is occult or esoteric, wisdom of the serpent.

My own post makes no direct reference to the serpent, but it was certainly present in the context. I discuss perusing the Wikipedia article on Jonah. One of the things I read there, but did not mention in my post, was this:

Joseph Campbell suggests that the story of Jonah parallels a scene from the Epic of Gilgamesh, in which Gilgamesh obtains a plant from the bottom of the sea. In the Book of Jonah, a worm (in Hebrew tola'ath, "maggot") bites the shade-giving plant's root causing it to wither; whereas in the Epic of Gilgamesh, Gilgamesh ties stones to his feet and plucks his plant from the floor of the sea. Once he returns to the shore, the rejuvenating plant is eaten by a serpent.

Jonah's worm is equated with Gilgamesh's serpent.

Another thing that I didn't mention is that, when I was searching for the Joseph Smith quote about the sign of the dove, I misremembered the specific phrase "sign of the dove" as coming from the notes on the Second Facsimile from the Book of Abraham. Actually, all the Facsimile notes say is that one of the pictures "Represents God sitting upon his throne, revealing through the heavens the grand Key-words of the Priesthood; as also, the sign of the Holy Ghost unto Abraham, in the form of a dove."

I remembered, though, from my anti-Mormon reading back in the day, that the Facsimile was Smith's restoration of an incomplete Egyptian hypocephalus, and that he had restored it "incorrectly" by Egyptological standards. Specifically, the sign of the dove was based on a fragmentary figure that was probably originally an ithyphallic serpent.

It is probably indicative of my spiritual state at the time that when I discovered this serpent/dove connection I thought not of Christ but of Aleister Crowley: "Nor let the fools mistake love; for there are love and love. There is the dove, and there is the serpent. Choose ye well!" However, Joseph Smith's (unintentional) dove-serpent hybrid is more suggestive of Christ's doctrine than Crowley's -- not "choose ye well" but "be as wise as serpents and as innocent as doves."

Although it was posted back in July and linked to by the Junior Ganymede on October 18, I didn't see it until after writing my own post and reading William's: "On pills, blue and red" from Calculated Bravery. In this very interesting and perceptive post, the writer compares the red pill to the forbidden fruit and discusses the complementary roles of knowledge (the serpent) and innocence (the dove).