The Myths of Death, Rebirth, and Resurrection : The Wisdom of the Serpent

The tribal initiation by the shaman, the archetype of the serpent, exemplifies the death of the self and rebirth into transcendent, " unknowable" life. Henderson and Oakes trace the images and patterns of spiritual initiation in the religious rituals and myths of resurrection, poems and epics, the cycles of nature, and universal human responses in art dreaming. The authors dramatize the metamorphosis from a common experience of death’s inevitability into a transcendent freedom beyond the individual’s limitations.