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“Be shrewd as serpents but innocent as doves” has always been a favorite verse of mine.
So, my devil horns poked up when I heard last year was the Year of the Snake: I hoped it might be a year that I could be more serpent-like. It was the opposite. It was a gauntlet of layer shredding and excuse confronting while trudging through circumstances of my own creation. A snake, even after being beheaded, writhes for a bit.
My character began undergoing significant needed changes last year. And more with this year. Getting back more into AA with a new sponsor helped tremendously. The privilege of being invited to a Native American sweat lodge community, especially during a rough month, was profoundly needed.
After the second sweat, I had learned plenty of lessons. 91% were personal, healthy, and humbling. And there was another 9% that I’m still chewing on.
It made me think of a story about Caesar Augustus and an Eastern monk who went through the Eleusinian Mysteries together. Hopefully, it’ll make sense by the end.
The East Meets Augustus
After Caesar Augustus had consolidated power as the first Roman emperor, an envoy was dispatched from the Eastern Pandyan Kingdom in modern-day India. It traveled roughly 6,000 miles, a trek that took nearly four years. In it was a host of characters, some of whom didn’t make the journey:
- a tiger
- a man born without arms who could use his feet like hands (“Hermes”)
- large venomous snakes
- And a monk named Zarmanochegas, who was an adviser to the Indian king
Greeks called these monks Gymnosophists (literally, naked philosophers), and they already had a reputation with the Greco-Roman world. There’s an account of a Hindu monk meeting Socrates in Athens; when Socrates said he studied “human life,” the monk laughed and said one cannot understand humanity without first understanding the divine1. Alexander the Great frequently interacted with groups of gymnosophists, including executing a group of them who caused a revolt2.
These monks were normally Hindu or Buddhist ascetics. Buddhism was not only present in the Greco-Roman world before Augustus, but the entire province of Bactria had been a major Buddhist province. Modern manuscript and archaeological evidence are revealing just how much ideas flowed through these areas.
When the envoy finally caught up with him, Augustus was at Samos, an island in the Aegean. They stayed for two winters because Augustus was busy reorganizing the Eastern provinces and settling diplomatic ties with Parthia, but also because the monk’s presence was a massive curiosity. He was a walking “exhibit” of Eastern wisdom.
They then traveled with Augustus to visit Eleusis in 19 BC, and both Caesar and the monk were initiated into the Eleusinian Mysteries at the Telesterion. It was unusual for a foreigner or Roman to be admitted, especially since it was not the right season, but, for Caesar Augustus, they made an exception3.
Two Pivotal Outcomes
The Mysteries were mysterious by design. But we know the experience was transformative. The whole thing would have involved a reenactment of Demeter’s abduction by and return from Hades. For people being initiated to the mysteries of Demeter, it was an ordeal (khatabasis) lasting hours through the night, involving fasting, rituals, and the Kykeon; a sacred, possibly (probably?4) psychedelic cocktail.
The priests had been operating a 1,000-year tradition, so who knows what kind of “technologies” and theatrics they may have come up with. We believe there was music, plays, and more. Participants saw visions and gained understanding, but were sworn to guard the secrets and their visions upon pain of death5. Plato seems to have honored this while also trying to talk around it.
“For ‘many,’ as they say in the mysteries, ‘are the thyrsus-bearers, but few are the mystics,’ meaning, as I interpret the words, the true philosophers.”
— Plato, Phaedo 69c
And this is what the unlikely duo went through together. When they came out, the two different responses were staggering.
For Augustus, the Mysteries were a tool for Order and Continuity; he emerged not humbled, but emboldened as Divi Filius (a son of god). He used the “mystic” to stabilize the “material” world of the Pax Romana, as later Caesars would. Carl Jung warned that there’s a grave danger when the ego confuses itself with a Divine, or any, Archetype during such pivotal experiences, leading to an “inflation” where a human thinks he or she is the myth.
“The ego-personality is swallowed up by the individual’s identification with the archetype… This is what I call inflation.”
(Collected Works, Vol. 7)
In fact, when Alexander the Great arrived in India, the locals saw the potential for a “Chakravartin,” a universal spiritual king archetype in their mythology. They also were not surprised that someone could “swing that way” and become such an empirical tyrant. When the “matrix” is nothing but a machine at your disposal, it makes sense that someone has to run the world.
Meanwhile, Zarmanochegas already had years of philosophy, fasting, meditation, and monk training. He also went in as someone from the outside. Who knows what he brought into that experience? But when he came out, Augustus’s world was still a husk, and his life’s work was complete.
Instead of going back to India or becoming an ambassador, he traveled to Athens, had a pyre constructed, anointed himself, and, with a literal smile, leaped into the flames. The Romans had a tomb inscribed for him: “Zarmanochegas, an Indian from Barygaza, according to the custom of his country, immortalized himself.” Zarmanochegas probably would have rolled his eyes at the Romans’ idea of “immortalizing.”
The first century East and West, with their Caesars and Shahanshahs (“king of kings”), were dueling it out amongst themselves, while the real battle happening was within the minds and hearts of humanity, trying to learn to govern themselves.
Two Kingdoms: East & West
In today’s time, there are two kingdoms at play: a Western and an Eastern, but not with geographic lines, party divides, or ideologies… well, sort of.
In Scripture, they saw the “end of the Gentiles,” or the “others,” as being inevitable (Luke 21:24; Romans 11:25; Revelation 11:15; Daniel 2:44). Jesus was obviously studied in Jewish teachings, and He would have been familiar with the Gymnosophist’s ideas, as well as with the Greco-Roman mythology and philosophy that was currently ruling over the Ancient Near East.
Jesus knew His Kingdom wouldn’t end until every knee bent, from Caesar to Buddha. In part because Jesus had already been kneeling, washing their feet. It’s easy to kneel when the King is already down there.
In the Book of Revelation, all crowns are cast down. And there’s this one little subtle detail about the “Kings of the East” coming (Revelation 16:12). This was actually a common Roman fear, regarding the Parthians or others. Rome feared a persistent superstition of Nero coming back from the dead with an army from the East.
Revelation already toyed with that superstition by using 666 (a gematria for “Nero“), so when Scripture mentions the “Kings of the East,” it’s suggesting that eventually empires, tribes, and divisions of an egoic world would be dissolved by a wisdom from the outside, and not the actual myth the mob of Rome often fell for.
The Year of Chariots of Fire
Out of Eluesis came two different humans and ideas of the world, and it feels like the globe is just now feeling that same schism shaking beneath our feet. The West has gone so far that it has run back into the East. Two kingdoms have been proliferating in the world: one that inflates the ego to stabilize empires, and one that dissolves it to reach a state of harmony and health.
With “how the world is,” I’m going with Zarmanochegas, and not with self-emulation, but with throwing things on the altar and leave in the dirt. With the good fight that was never “out there.” With the Kingdom of God inside. It is not us vs. them, or this vs. that. It is just us. For a bit, I used to say we’re all in the same boat, but I’ve realized we need to become oceans to outlast storms.
Personally, the year of the snake saw more of my snakey layers and excuses being stripped away. This year is the Chinese Year of the Fire Horse. At first, I had no thoughts about whether it meant anything. But then a long writing project through Elijah and Elisha, and some chariots of fire, crushed me.
So, maybe it means that humanity is ready to burn with Spirit again.
*Footnotes (& Leftover)
- Strabo, writing during Augustus, mentions the Hylobioi as an honored sect of the “Sarmanes” (Sramanas). Apparently, Sarmanes lived in forests, subsisted on leaves and wild fruits, and wore clothing made of tree bark. Strabo states some members of this group viewed death by fire as a “customary” exit when their life’s work was finished or when facing physical decline. Although he also noted that some Brahmins looked down on the practice as being too impulsive.
↩︎ - There is a long history that trails back and forth east and west, predating Christ. About 250 years before Augustus, the Mauryan Emperor, Ashoka the Great, sent diplomatic and religious envoys specifically to spread “Dharma” to the Hellenistic world, which included Macedonia and the Seleucid Empire. Megasthenes served as an ambassador to the court of Chandragupta Maurya. His writing, Indica (not the “herb“), first explained the categories of eastern philosophers: Brahmins and Samanas. Later, Deimachus and Dionysius were also ambassadors from the Seleucid and Ptolemaic empires (respectively) to the Mauryan court. They maintained the missionary link of Ashoka, bringing back details of Indian asceticism to the libraries of Alexandria and Antioch. It was through this connection that a later envoy would come to greet Augustus as the first emperor of Rome.
↩︎ - Generally, at this time, only Greeks were allowed through the Mysteries. The first major exception was made for Hercules and the Dioscuri (the twin brothers Castor and Pollux), who had to be “adopted” by Athenian citizens to qualify. By the time of Augustus, the Greeks were under Roman rule, but the religious authorities at Eleusis still maintained the fiction of Greek exclusivity. Augustus was initiated not just as a person, but as a symbolic bridge between Greek culture and Roman power. Stay tuned for a possible future Patreon-post looking at the history of the Mysteries.
↩︎ - Another source: Antonopoulos, Romanos K et al. “Investigating the psychedelic hypothesis of kykeon, the sacred elixir of the Eleusinian Mysteries.” Scientific reports vol. 16,1 8757. 13 Feb. 2026, doi:10.1038/s41598-026-39568-3
↩︎ - The arrhetos (the unspoken) was protected by law. Aeschylus, an ancient Greek playwright, was nearly lynched for allegedly revealing secrets in a play (c. 525–456 BC), and Alcibiades, an Athenian statesman and general, was prosecuted for profaning the mysteries in a private home. ↩︎
