Ophidian Glossary

The Ierà is the main and foundational liturgy of Ophidism. Through its structure and composition it is the perfect representation of the so called “Mysteries of Creations”. The liturgical semantic of the Ierà allows the Ophidians to represent what they cannot rationally comprehend, to perceive what goes behind every human understanding, to transmit what hasn’t been conceived. To do so, the Ierà does not only adopt a proper semantic, but also some elements that are worthy to be quoted. The adoption of Latin, above all, allows the Ophidian to enter a psychological and spiritual condition totally different from the one they live in their profane lives. The use of this ancient language, allows the attendants to perceive without understanding, to receive without knowing just as a child understand the teachings of their parents before learning how to speak.

The Dies Serpentis is one of the main sacred days of Ophidism, celebrated for about 12H between the Friday evening and the Saturday morning. The celebration is aimed to represent the self-givenness of God as the main creative acr acknowledged by the Ophidian doctrine. The celebration si held individually or collectively. The full text of the celebration is available for the public.

Through the term self-givenness, Ophidism names one of the three main creative acts identified and acknowledged by the Ophidian doctrine. Specifically, the Self-givenness is the process through which God acquired a self-consciousness starting from the Farmacon. Naming this process Self-Consciousness means to acknowledge that the Deity has not been created, nor generated, but simply gave Itself to its Creation through an act of self-consciousness. Multiple are the anthropological implications of such an acknowledgement: in Ophidism, consciousness becomes the element that makes the humans similar to God, that creates a connection, therefore, between two different state of the existence, that allows the finite to look into the infinite. Just as God we, humans, are Farmacon thinking about itself.

With the Greek word Farmacon (Pharmakon) Ophidism has named an infinite, eternal and omnipotent primordial substance implied as an ontological condition of existence. The Farmacon is often referred to as Nothingness, because in it the categories of potency and act are inverted. If in our reality the act is manifested and the potency is not, in the Farmacon the act is unaccomplished while everything is just in potency. This overthrowing of the existence categories, allows the definition of the Farmacon as “omnipotent” not in a scholastic sense, rather in an etymological sense. By saying that the Farmacon is omnipotent we are precisely saying that it contains all the potencies of existence, all the possibilities of the Being.

In the Ophidian tradition the Imago Dei (image of God) is the Serpent. Representing God as a Serpent in the sacred icons means on one side to acknowledge the original meaning of the Serpent in the religious traditions of the past, while on the other to create a new Ophidian semantics aimed to represent all the divine features studied by Ophidism.

Festivities are, in Ophidism, the liturgical celebrations that falls within a peculiar moment of the solar year. Ophidism divides the year in quarters, falling under the influence of the previous solstice or equinox. The main festivities are the Ofisie (20-21-22 December), the Disoterie (20-21-22 March), the Faidrerie (20-21-22 June) and the Tanasimee (20-21-22 September) each recalling the importance of a specific element of Ophidian doctrine. To these main festivals, Ophidism adds some minor celebrations to create a liturgical balanced aimed to represent the cyclical shedding of skin of the Serpent. A full list of the festivals is available here.