The Seba library treats Cobra in 6 passages, across 5 authors (including Armstrong, Karen, Campbell, Joseph, Zimmer, Heinrich).
He tamed a highly dangerous cobra, a popular symbol of the divine, which the brahmins housed in their sacred fire chamber.
Armstrong presents the Buddha’s taming of the cobra as a paradigmatic miracle establishing spiritual dominion over a primordial symbol of the divine housed at the center of brahminic ritual.
, Buddha, 2000thesis
Their chief deity, the cobra-goddess Wadjet (after the manner of such local goddesses, who, after all, are but specifications of the general force of the cosmic Goddess-mother of ma’at), would now become the patroness and protectress of the victor.
Campbell identifies the cobra-goddess Wadjet as a localized manifestation of the universal Goddess-mother principle, elevated to royal protectress through the logic of political-mythological conquest.
, Oriental Mythology: The Masks of God, Volume II, 1962thesis
Some exhibit a snake queen of the mermaid type, with serpent tail and human body, and with a halo of expanded cobra hoods; she folds her arms across her breast supporting in them two serpent children.
Zimmer describes the nāgakal iconography in which expanded cobra hoods form the divine halo of a serpent queen, linking the cobra visually and symbolically to sovereign fertility and maternal power.
, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, 1946supporting
These personify under various aspects the life energy—beneficent but blind—which the message of the Buddha broke and dissolved.
Zimmer frames the serpent-cobra figures attending Buddhist monuments as personifications of an earth-bound life-energy that Buddhist teaching transcends, establishing the cobra as symbol of the pre-spiritual vital stratum.
, Myths and Symbols in Indian Art and Civilization, 1946supporting
The archetypal Self can be experienced as a symbol of wholeness. On rare occasions, another aspect of the Self may appear—the power and force of impersonal nature—an awe-some presence to be respected but not embraced.
Signell introduces a clinical dream of descent to encounter a snake, framing the encounter as an awe-inspiring manifestation of the impersonal, numinous face of the Self — a context in which cobra-like qualities of dangerous sacred power are implicitly operative.
, Wisdom of the Heart: Working with Womens Dreams, 1991aside
The flaying of the god, which we have already touched on in connection with the flaying-ceremonies of the Aztecs, is intimately bound up with the snake-like nature of the hero.
Jung’s discussion of the hero’s snake-like nature and the Agathodaimon serpent provides a broader mythological framework within which the cobra’s symbolism of transformation through shedding participates.
, Symbols of Transformation, 1952aside