Seraphim (Winged Heart & Flaming Snakes) 13" Laptop Decal

How many different animals can you see in this painting? I obviously meant to put snakes in there, but was surprised to find forms that remind me of an owl, an octopus, and a tiger (or crocodile)...and someone surprised me with "elephant," as well. Painting is a process of discovery for me, a kind of intuitive listening, and this painting connected more dots for me than most – namely, the relationship between angels and dragons. The Old Testament word for the highest angels, "seraphim," literally means "the burning ones," and is used throughout the Bible as a synonym for "snakes." Flaming snakes with wings? Gosh, that sounds familiar... I don't know why it hadn't occurred to me – even after years of savoring the connection between "Archangel Michael & The Serpent" and "St. George & The Dragon" (and "Lord Garuda & The Naga," further East...birds versus snakes, world round). The snake – which as many of you know shows up in the yogic traditions as a symbol for the wriggling, electric life force called "kundalini," sprouts wings when our animal nature reaches its crescendo and sprouts from the crown of the head, fully integrated with subtler, perceptibly "feathery" celestial energies. Following that rabbit down (or up?) its hole, I remembered that to the Chinese, the dragon is an occulted natural force, a terrible mystery that reveals itself through what insurance companies call "Acts of God" – lightning, wildfires, and floods. In other words, the dragon appears worldwide as a kind of mythological shorthand for the terribly transcendent, especially in what author Erik Davis calls "the electromagnetic imaginary" – our collective mystical experience of electricity and magnetism, whose awesome power has captured social imagination for thousands of years. In a blog post describing his vision of the coming alchemical, musical paradigm he believes will replace materialism, cultural historian and former MIT professor William Irwin Thompson draws a straight line through angels, aliens, and electromagnetism: "Since [our experience of] space would no longer be empty and separating, space itself would be a plenum of vibrating streams of energy that in the medieval lore of the Jewish Zohar in Spain and of the Muslim Sufis in Andalusia were known as angels. At the end of industrial civilization, through the popularity of science fiction, these beings were often re-presented as high-tech extra-terrestrials." In other words, aliens = electricity = dragons = angels. Chew on that for a minute.