posted on Sep, 1 2007 @ 07:55 PM
As far as I can tell, the first modern references to "The Brotherhood of the Snake" to be taken very seriously were made by the great William
Cooper. He thought of the Brotherhood of the Snake as the source of all ancient mystery societies and the secret source of, above all, the Eleusinian
rites. The cults of Ra, Osiris, Orpheus, Isis, Dionysus, etc were, in Cooper's view, partially corrupted emanations of this great Original
Mystery.
Cooper also felt that the original Bavarian Illuminati as conceived and founded by Weishaupt was little more than a front for The Brotherhood of the
Snake. By extending this line of reasoning, we could say that all relevent Secret Societies even in the 21st century are emanations of, and perhaps
even fronts for, this original secret society.
It's worth noting that although both Fraser in The Golden Bough and Hall in The Secret Teachings of all Ages do stress the importance of serpent and
dragon worship in cults and mystery cults, neither explicitly mentions The Brotherhood of the Serpent. Since Cooper explicitly defers to Hall's work
as the magnum opus and standard reference for ancient mystery cults, this poses a serious problem for any claims that The Brotherhood of the Snake
ever really existed.
It is possible that it did, but it seems more likely that Cooper was simply positing the existence of something he felt logically had to have existed,
that is a single original cult from which all other cults spread. In my view this is elegantly wrong reasoning.
In the 20th and 21st centuries ther have been numerous cults calling themselves The Brotherhood of the Snake or Dragon or Serpent and all claiming an
unbroken lineage from this original (pre-historic) cult down to the present day. Most of these cults are, to use a scholarly and technical term,
"full of it".