The event
Time: During the day
Date: Late 1982 or early 1983
Place: My flat at Praterstraße 47/3/3/12, Vienna
I was 26 years old. I suddenly saw a spiritual image: A white scene, a line of white water reeds. They were simple, broad-bladed reeds without any top bit. My eyes travelled along the line of reeds, from right to left. Midway along, I came to a white snake. I was taken aback! I was only expecting more water reeds! What was a snake doing there? And a white one, too! It looked just like the white water reeds, like its “fellow reeds”. It stood upright amongst them, as tall as they were. It was a living entity. It had a golden crown on its head.
The image lasted a few seconds.
Thoughts and theories
I didn’t know what the snake signified, so I had to figure out a theory. It took me a while, but eventually I hit upon “knowledge and wisdom”— a bit like the biblical apple. Many years later, in 2018 when I was visiting Armenia, our guide took us to a church that had a carving of a snake in the churchyard. I asked what the snake signified, and our guide said something along the lines of “knowledge, wisdom”.
I’ve wondered a lot about that snake. It was like the white reeds. Its proper place was amongst them, yet it wasn’t one of them. Does this refer to people who have their place amongst us but who are unlike us, being spiritual guides, or gurus? Perhaps the white snake was once upon a time a water reed, but he graduated and came back changed, solely to help his fellow reeds. Here I could drop some names: Buddha, for instance, and Mohammed, and Rudolf Steiner. And I know of a living person, a guru, a very progressed soul whom I won’t name.
The golden crown must be significant. The snake is a spiritual entity, so the crown has nothing to do with the acquisition of worldly power.
Afterword
The white snake with the golden crown is a known entity in German and Austrian folklore. You can find it if you google weiße Schlange mit goldener Krone or Glücksbringer Schlange, that kind of thing. But I don’t find any reference to the white water reeds, which I think were sweet flag. (Sweet flag is green, not white, but every living thing in this image was white.)
Googling further, I’ve even found the crowned snake in Baltic and Pakistani folklore, but it’s not white and it’s not standing in water reeds.
A snake is also a totem animal, but that entity doesn’t have a crown and is probably not white.
I’m not the only one to have seen the white snake. How did people in earlier centuries capture its image, so that it would remain known? They wove it into their stories, and it became part of their folklore.
And finally, today, 13 June 2024, I asked Google’s Gemini if it could tell me anything about the snake and the crown. An excerpt from Gemini’s answer is, “The crown could suggest the snake possesses knowledge beyond the human realm, perhaps wisdom from a higher source.” Good answer. That’s probably what it means.
━━━━━ ▲━━━━━
13 August 2024: Another theory, short and simple, is that the snake represents us, the human animal, and the golden crown is our higher state of knowledge, higher than all other animals.
