The Ophite School — The Serpent's Wisdom
The Ophites (serpent-worshippers) honored the Genesis serpent as the bringer of Gnosis — taking the Gnostic Genesis reversal to its most explicit and provocative conclusion.
The Ophites (Greek: ophis — serpent) were a Gnostic group (reported by Irenaeus, Origen, and Celsus) who honored the Genesis serpent as the vehicle of divine wisdom — the being who brought Gnosis to humanity against the Demiurge's prohibition. Their most striking ritual practice: the use of a live serpent in their eucharistic celebration, which the snake would coil around the bread before the community partook. This use of the serpent — the very symbol that mainstream religion condemned — is the Ophite tradition's most extreme version of the Gnostic reversal: what orthodoxy condemns (the serpent, the transgressor) is revealed as the bearer of divine wisdom. Philosophically, the serpent represents the Gnostic insight that genuine liberation often comes from transgressing conventional boundaries of knowledge and experience. The Ophite tradition also developed an elaborate seven-headed serpent cosmology (the Leviathan/Ouroboros) as a map of the Archonic powers that bind the soul.
The serpent is wiser than all the beasts. He who taught the first humans was the bearer of the most ancient wisdom — honor him.
Scholar Birger Pearson (Gnosticism, Judaism, and Egyptian Christianity) traces the Ophite tradition's connections to Jewish traditions about the divine Wisdom (serpent as Sophia) and to Hellenistic traditions about the serpent as a symbol of healing (Asclepius) and cosmic wisdom (Ouroboros).
Against Heresies