Python meaning

Meaning

Decay, He Who Rots

Deepling, Arcane One

Etymology

From the verb πυθω (putho), to rot or decay.

From a widely attested PIE root "dewb-", deep or unclear.

The name Python occurs once in the Bible, namely in Acts 16:16, where Paul and company — which appears to have included Timothy, Silas, Luke the narrator, and perhaps also Lydia and members of her house — happen upon a slave-girl endowed with the spirit Python, who made her masters much business by acting like a maniac, and Paul and Silas much annoyance by repeating that they were "servants of the Most High God, who are proclaiming to you the way of salvation." Although this was entirely correct, it still irritated Paul and after a few days of this he commanded the spirit Python to exit and leave her. That happened, to the commercial detriment of her owners, who dragged Paul and Silas in front of the judges for ruining their trade.

The name Python belonged to the spirit behind the oracle of Delphi (from δελφυς, delphus, womb), which by the first century had been reduced to a rubble. Our story implies that although the buildings had collapsed, the spirit was alive and well.

Some ancient manuscript read the genitive Πυθωνος (Puthonos), meaning [a spirit] of Python, but the more reliable ones have an accusative: Πυθωα (Puthona), meaning [the spirit] Python, which means that Paul directly addressed Python himself and told him to leave. Nobody in the original audience of Luke's account would have missed the pun, as Python was the original name of the Chaos monster or earth-serpent that was defeated by Apollo at Delphi, which is the Greek version of what the Hebrew Scriptures ascribe to YHWH: "Was it not You who cut Rahab in pieces, who pierced the dragon?" (Isaiah 51:9, also see Psalm 89:10, Job 26:12-13) or otherwise: "You divided the sea by Your strength; You broke the heads of the sea monsters in the waters. You crushed the heads of Leviathan; You gave him as food for the creatures of the wilderness" (Psalm 74:13-14, also see Isaiah 27:1).

It goes without saying that this does not equate Paul with YHWH, but rather that the former acts in the latter's Name, or that the Name YHWH is in him. Likewise the Angel who went ahead of Israel out of Egypt derived his authority and power from the Name that was in him (Exodus 23:21), and later traditions identified this angel with Michael, who indeed famously slayed the dragon. This dragon-slaying imagery has to do with whatever cultural, legendary or legal system keeps a society together: the spirit of the nation, if you will (Daniel 10:20), which keeps all its members united and hovers over them like a spirit over waters: the prophet Jeremiah describes Nebuchadnezzar as such (Jeremiah 51:34) and Ezekiel describes the Pharaoh as such (Ezekiel 29:3, 32:2), both these deified men embody whatever it is that keeps an otherwise entirely disconnected myriad of humans from being nothing but a cloud of dust or sand driven by whatever wind, and makes these many humans rather alike a single living being whose body comprises all people, and whose spirit is whatever legislation emanates from its godly king. The way the same DNA sits in every cell of an organism, so the same legislation sits in every man's mind of a kingdom. In very early societies, that legislation isn't formal but rather instinctive and quite beastly: draconic, so to speak. And if the society wants to grow out of its beastly nature and into a sophisticated human nature, the dragon must be slayed.

This dragon-slaying imagery was very familiar to the Greeks, who told the story of Bellerophon of Corinth on Pegasus the winged horse who slayed the monstrous Chimera. Later, this image would morph into the familiar picture of saint George (geo, from γη, ge, earth), who likewise pierced the dragon. And of course Longinus (λογχη, logche, spearman) was ascribed the piercing of Jesus' side, or κοιλια (koilia), the seat of one's emotions, where is seated that familiar god of those familiar people whose god is their belly (Philippians 3:19), i.e. those people whose reality is governed by their own feelings rather than reason, law or even the consideration of other people's feelings.

Nobody in the original audience of Luke would have forgotten that Apollo was Greece's national deity, and that his defeat of Python hadn't been much of a defeat since Python was obviously alive and well and seated in the damsel whose manic antics did nothing but make her masters money. The girl, in turn, was not merely a girl but embodied a societal class, namely the class of the lesser informed who get bedazzled and enthused (and infected) by peddlers of the supernatural. People like Paul know that only the Creator supersedes creation but absolutely everything else certainly does not, so that absolutely everything else must be part of creation and obey the laws of nature, that can be studied and mastered.

Paul came not with lofty erudition to sway the gullible but rather in a cool demonstration of power (1 Corinthians 2:4). We don't exactly know what he demonstrated, but if he did something, he demonstrated that it could be done, and if it could be done, it was regular and natural because it depended on the laws on nature, which don't change and which can be learned and mastered (Matthew 5:18, John 14:12, 2 Peter 1:4). At the heart of Israel sat the Ark of the Covenant, which not only contained one particular covenant but also the idea of it: the concept of the covenant. A covenant is literally a piece of mind, and has no mass or volume or velocity or smell or anything that can be measured or by any means observed. That means that a covenant is supernatural, which makes it godly, and one's choice to uphold a covenant is precisely that: a choice.

When a people collectively chooses to uphold a covenant, or rather when a people collectively decides to derive their collective identity from their collective upholding of any and all covenant (and so attain an identity that is supernatural and hence godly), then any individual can predict any other one in ways that animals will never be able to begin to comprehend. But such a people will be able to regulate the traffic in their cities, to untangle complex property disputes, and even develop a language far beyond the reach of any natural language that deals merely with things that can be seen. Such a language can have words for abstract things and complex ideas and even approach the greatest abstraction of them all, namely God, whose unity cannot be comprehended but which causes the unity of nature by which everything works (Romans 8:28, Colossians 1:16-17).

Particularly the Book of Genesis tells of mankind's troubling transition from the natural obeying of one's feelings and personal intuitions, to the super-natural obeying of pre-agreed law. When people follow their feelings, they simply are animals (Psalm 73:22, Ecclesiastes 3:18, 2 Peter 2:12, Jude 1:10), and every man is on his own and only the strongest one gets his way. When rulers began to rule over groups of people that were greater than their own families, and even began to include people they had never met, they began to realize that their realm could only be stable and continue when absolutely everybody followed the same agreements, so that absolutely everybody could be predicted. And that included the king. Great empires from Egypt up could exist by the sole merit of a law that even the Pharaoh respected. This is the reason why Pharaoh gave Abram back Sarai: he had thought she was his sister (a natural relationship) but the outbreak of societal turmoil (Genesis 12:17) demonstrated that she was Abram's wife (a legal covenant). The second iteration of this same story happens when Sarah gets taken by Abimelech king of Gerar. Abimelech's understanding of law is already much more mature than that of Pharaoh, and he does not need to observe his society collapse but instead tunes into the truth of things via his subconsciousness (Genesis 20:3), and gives Sarah back to Abraham. Later still, Isaac and Rebekah venture into Abimelech's realm, but Abimelech now knows how to consciously tell a man's legal wife apart from his natural sister (Genesis 26:9).

The exact same issue was contemplated in the Iliad, which tells of eight weeks of a ten year war that broke out because the wife of the king of Sparta, namely Helen, had allowed her feelings to supersede her covenant, and eloped with Paris of Troy. The war that ensued — and from which Greece derived its earliest national identity: its Homeric spirit, if you will — was not triggered by the physical beauty of some woman (because in those days, the beauty of a woman had little to do with what she looked like; see Proverbs 31) but by the life-and-death importance of honoring the collective law over anybody's private feelings. Had Greece allowed a king's wife to follow the impulses of her heart, then the entirety of Greece's society would have done the same and would have reverted to beings beasts. Greece fought Troy over its humanity, not Helen's pretty face (as Christopher Marlowe romantically proposed).

The exact same concern carries the story of the conception of Ishmael. In those days, a woman's honor was proportional to the amount of children (sons) she birthed. But when Hagar discovered she was pregnant and used that to belittle barren Sarai, she discovered that despite her pregnancy, a servant (someone bound by an economic or military relationship) remained of a lower rank than a wife (bound by a covenantal relationship, freely entered: Genesis 24:8).

All this shows that feelings are serpentine and live in the dark dungeons of one's private belly, whereas law is a unified bundle of spears (κυριος, kurios) with which the fiery serpent is either subdued or killed, but which at any rate form the bars of the cage in which it is captured (hence also the burning bush). This also explains why "what comes out of a man" is what makes a man unclean (Mark 7:15) and why the underworld is so frequently associated with sulfur (brimstone), which is precisely what gives farts their signature smell — also see our article on the verb βδεω (bdeo), to fart in the negative sense of producing an offensive smell.

It's quite clear that the design of the tabernacle derives from a woman's body, but in concentric gradations of holiness — with the inner most ark representing her fertilized ovum (the two tablets the zygote's DNA), the frankincense altar her respiratory system, the table with two sets of showbread her breasts, the regular altar her digestion and the bronze laver her bladder; the words משכן (mishkan), tabernacle, and שכינה (shekina), the feminine presence of God on earth, both stem from the verb שכן (shakan), which means to dwell but emphasizes the social identity that emerges from many people sharing a language, a culture and a body of science and technology.

The Greeks saw the same things as the Hebrews did, but while the Hebrews saw with the eyes of shepherds (ποιμην, poimen), the Greeks saw with the eyes of dogs (κυων, kuon), and that resulted in two quite different pictures of essentially the same world. What to the Hebrews looked like the Exodus out of Egypt looked to the Greeks like the battle over Troy (and to us moderns the Bronze Age Collapse), and what to the Hebrews looked like twelve human tribes looked to the Greeks as twelve Olympic gods. Likewise, the image that became the elaborate tabernacle to the Hebrews (Exodus 25:40, Hebrews 8:5, Acts 7:44), became to the Greeks the duo Python and Delphi, representing anus and vagina.

The story that tells of Apollo defeating Python, like similar stories, tells of the rise of civilization. This rise never happens gradually but always in stages: some new technique is invented and developed and taught globally (anything from metallurgy, agriculture, language and script to electricity, computers, the Internet), until the world is saturated with it and a subsequent new thing is invented and takes the world by storm. God is One, so godliness is unity, which means that the ultimate purpose of anything at all is to unite. Sometimes a new thing causes more division than unity, and the first wave of followers peter out when evidence of any advantage remains absent or elusive. Many cults, cures and magic methods die that way and their survivors sober up and go their way. Sometimes, however, the lure is so addictive that it takes a great many deaths for it to be abandoned. Alchemy, for instance, promised mountains of gold for only a little bit of effort, which not only violated nature's cardinal rule, but also side-tracked and wasted generations of scholars into the pursuit of vanity. Nazism, to name another familiar example, seemed like a great idea at first but was ultimately largely abandoned when it appeared that society cannot be purged from evil by killing folks. And the latest greatest, namely Artificial Intelligence, likewise seems perfectly safe to release on the general public, but it causes the collapse of mental health and will go down in history as the mental version of the Black Death. Survivors will use AI wisely, but they will be few.

The original Python appears to have been a so-called deep-earth creature, which relates to humanity's beastly core as much as humanity's rationality relates to the high heavenly realms (Isaiah 1:18). Both Hades and Tartarus are places of "death" (and see Ephesians 2:1 and Colossians 2:13) and deep underground, where anything "living" is far removed from the ordered and covenanted human κοσμος (kosmos), and even farther from the ever more orderly heavenly realms of angels and stars (αστηρ, aster, star). This has nothing to do with an actual descent into the physical earth, or an ascent into outer space, but merely tells of concentric orders of unity. That means that the lonely dead of the underworld are all around us (anything speechless, from cows to flies to amoeba), which in turn implies that heavenly angels are around us as well (Hebrews 13:2). And so, Jules Verne's Journey to the Center of the Earth, Dante's Divine Comedy and some versions of Hollow Earth theory tell of descents into primitivity, lawlessness and ultimately speechlessness and thus beastliness, whereas any sort of Star Trek seeks out new life and new civilizations, a much more efficient language and a much more unified community (Zephaniah 3:9).

The Hebrews of antiquity emphasized the blessings of the Republic, in which every man is free and every voice is heard, nobody dominates anybody else (1 Corinthians 15:24), and society is governed by nothing but the open dialogue of all involved. This Hebrew Republic is stellar (Genesis 15:5, Daniel 12:3, Philippians 2:5, and relate Matthew 2:2 to John 17:21-23). Contrary to the stellar Republic, there is the solar Tyranny, which depends on some great hero or leader for everybody to huddle around (see our article on Tyrannus). It's pretty much impossible to have a society evolve from a rule by Python directly into a stellar Republic, so an intermediate period of Solar government marks the inevitable period of societal adolescence. Superheroes exists only as long as everybody else thinks little of themselves, and stop to exist when they are discovered to be just another point of light in a vast galaxy. The necessary Sun is far from invincible because it is forced to set every evening. And when it refuses to set, and somehow it always does, then the stars can only govern through invisible gravity from behind the sun's blinding light. And as long as the sun can keep itself from setting, its relentless propaganda turns the whole world into a withering desert, whose environment is agreeable only to that ancient serpent that the whole idea of government (Genesis 1:16) was designed to do away with.

The Greek story goes that Apollo (himself a solar deity) killed Python and left its corps to rot in the blazing heat of Helios, the actual solar deity. And this is a fancy way of explaining why the priestesses of Delphi (called Pythia) could breathe in violently poisonous methane, ethane and ethylene, and produce clairvoyant insights. There was probably indeed some skill involved, which means that people had to train for it. And the validity of the outcome was likely on a par with oneirocriticism, which in our modern world is still widely abused but which to properly gifted interpreters opens a window upon the dreamer's own mind (Daniel 2:30). Like Daniel, the patriarch Joseph was celebrated for his ability to interpret dreams (Genesis 41:39), and his namesake, the legal father of Jesus, evidently was too (Matthew 1:20, 2:13, 2:19, 2:22). Jesus entered Jerusalem riding an οναριον (onarion). The Greek word for dream is οναρ (onar).

The sin of the Pythia was therefore not that they tried to gauge the inner structures of man's mind, but rather that they let themselves be guided by greed and lust for money, even to the extent that the success of their performance was measured by their income rather than by the similarities between their predictions and the actual unfolding future. The decline of Delphi's reputation was set in motion when in the sixth century BCE the fabulously rich king Croesus of Lydia inquired of it whether he should go to war with Persia. The oracle answered that if he would, a great kingdom would fall. Emboldened, Croesus went and the Persians destroyed his kingdom. In the third century BCE, a local tribe plundered and sacked the complex at Delphi, which the Pythia hadn't seen coming. And they quenched the unquenchable fire, so that was that.

The name Πυθων, (Puthon), Python, derives from Πυθω (Putho), Pytho, the name of the region where the oracle of Delphi evolved from a chance encounter of a shepherd boy and a crack in the rock from which magic vapors arose (or so the legends tell). Those vapors probably didn't smell very good, because the verb πυθω (putho) means to rot or decay. This verb stems from the same Proto-Indo-European root "puH-", meaning to rot or decay, from which English gets words like putrid, pus and foul. The name Monty Python, though explained in all sorts of ways, was concocted by classically trained gentlemen and, as they surely knew, essentially means "Pile of Sh-t".

Another Greek word for to rot or be putrid is σηπω (sepo), which appears to have been mostly associated with blue necrotic flesh (specifically after a snake bite), which in turn may have helped the formation of the noun σαπφειρος (sappheiros), sapphire, the glassy blue stone — the story of Sapphira and Ananias clearly shares its themes with our story of the Python-girl and her masters. In Acts 8:5-25, we read about a magician named Simon who offered Peter and John "silver" for the power of the Holy Spirit, upon which Peter says: "May your silver perish with you!" Everybody in Luke's original audience would have known Apollo's most important epithet, namely αργυροτοξος (argurotoxos), "with the silver bow" (from αργυρος, arguros, silver or money, and τοξον, toxon, bow), which also referred to the Milky Way (or "galaxy", from γαλα, gala, milk, and κυκλος, kuklos, circle) and declared that the open commercial market is as stellar as humanity is ever going to get. But Jesus spoke of salt that had lost its saltiness, whose only use would be to pave streets with (Luke 14:34). John the Revelator saw streets of gold (Revelation 21:21). This implies that the economy of scarcity will one day be superseded by an economy of abundance, which is a whole different game all together. The common word for snake is δρακων (drakon), which stems from the verb δερκομαι (derkomai), to see, and which is rather more often associated with the reddish color πυρρος (purros), or fire-color.

However, despite the name Πυθω (Putho) being identical to the verb πυθω (putho), to rot, it's more likely that these two words accidentally converged, and that instead our hugely old name Πυθω (Putho) stemmed from the widely attested PIE root "dewb-", meaning deep, unclear or too far away to be clear — hence English words like deep, dip, dumb, and bottom, and Greek words like τυφος (tuphos), smoke or fever, and βυθος (buthos), depth or the deep. This not only explains the name of the region of the oracle — the cracks from which the vapors emerged clearly gave access to the very depths of the earth — but also the names of such venerable characters as Pythagoras (i.e. the Depth Speaks; from αγορα, agora, market place or place of gathering; see Psalm 42:7) and Pytheas (i.e. Of Depth: see for more on this gentleman our article on Phoenicia).

Then, Paul's letter to Philemon is really rather obviously not simply about a runaway slave (who would have been crucified upon discovery and would certainly not have tried to smuggle a self-incriminating letter by various Roman inspection points). Anybody familiar with Livy's History of Rome, would have known the name Onesimus from an official at the court in republican Rome, whom Livy described as "a son of Pytho(n), a Macedonian of distinction".

The ultimate bottom line to all this appears to be a polemic against needing special talents or esoteric access to the divine. As the Torah explains:

"For this commandment which I command you today is not too difficult for you, nor is it out of reach. It is not in heaven, that you should say, 'Who will go up to heaven for us to get it for us and make us hear it, that we may observe it?' Nor is it beyond the sea, that you should say, 'Who will cross the sea for us to get it for us and make us hear it, that we may observe it?' But the word is very near you, in your mouth and in your heart, that you may observe it" (Deuteronomy 30:11-14).

In our modern age, the masters of the girl who had the spirit Python are as alive and kicking as the spirit they make money off. Many of them will teach their audience about religions and creeds that require lots of books to be bought and buildings to be funded and salaries to be forked over. But, the Word of God came to humanity free of charge, and engaging this same Word can only be done when one begins to partake in the Eternal Republican Dialogue that has existed upon planet earth since the Word introduced himself to Abram (Genesis 15:1).

The "masters" will proclaim that Abram was an old-school hero, whose personal virtues merited the Word coming to him. But others point out that there had been many virtuous people before Abram, but that Abram was the first to be called Hebrew (Genesis 14:13), which implies that Abram was the first to have embraced the language of nature — the language in which God created the world, by first making the words and then pronouncing them — and that God, who was speaking the whole time, was only received when the first human god-radio, namely Abram, switched on and tuned in.

This means that partaking in the Eternal Republican Dialogue requires learning Hebrew. It does not mean that speaking Hebrew automatically gives access to the divine, but it does mean that without Hebrew, there isn't (John 14:6). Without Hebrew there are only the masters.