1023. The symbolism of And I — yes, I — am setting up my pact as the presence of the Lord in charity can be seen from the symbolism of a pact, given in §§ [665,] 666. That section showed that a pact symbolizes rebirth, and more especially the Lord's close connection with a regenerate person through love. It also showed that the heavenly marriage is the most genuine compact, and in consequence that the heavenly marriage inside everyone who has regenerated is such a covenant too.

The nature of this marriage — this covenant — has also been shown before [§§155, 162, 252].

[2] For the people of the earliest church, the heavenly marriage existed within the sensation that they had their own power of will. For the people of the ancient church, however, the heavenly marriage developed within the sensation that their power of understanding was their own. When the human race's willpower had become thoroughly corrupt, you see, the Lord split our intellectual sense of self off from that corrupted voluntary sense of self in a miraculous way. Within our intellectual selfhood he formed a new will, which is conscience, and into conscience he injected charity, and into charity innocence. In this way he joined himself to us or, to put it another way, entered into a compact with us.

[3] To the extent that our self-will can be detached from this sense of intellectual autonomy, the Lord can be present with us, or bind himself to us, or enter into a pact with us.

Times of trial and other similar means of regeneration suppress our self-will to the point where it seems to disappear and almost die out. To the extent that this happens, the Lord can work through the conscience implanted in charity within our intellectual selfhood. This, then, is what is being called a pact in the present verse.

251. The meaning of the snake as all evil in general and self-love in particular is due to evil's point of origin. All evil rises out of a fixation on the senses and on facts, which is what the snake first symbolizes. As a consequence, the snake now symbolizes evil itself in any form, and specifically self-love, or hatred directed at others and at the Lord, which is the same as self-love.

Because the evil of hatred is multifaceted, and divides into many general categories and an even larger number of specific forms, the Word distinguishes its forms by speaking of different kinds of snakes. There are generic snakes, cockatrices, asps, bloodletting snakes, and "presters," or fire snakes; there are flying snakes and creeping ones; and there are vipers. ¹ The determining factor is differences in their venom, and the venom is hatred.

[2] In Isaiah, for instance:

Do not rejoice through and through, Philistia, that the rod striking you has been broken, because from the root of a snake a cockatrice will come out, and its fruit will be a flying fire snake. (Isaiah 14:29)

The root of a snake is a reliance on the senses and on factual knowledge. A cockatrice is evil from the resulting falsity. A flying fire snake is the kind of desire felt by self-love. The same prophet deals with the same animals in another way using these words:

They will hatch the eggs of a cockatrice and weave the webs of a spider. Whoever eats of their eggs dies, and when one is crushed, a viper is hatched. (Isaiah 59:5)

In Revelation 12:3, 9 and 20:2, this snake is called a big red dragon and the ancient snake; it is also called a devil and satan and the one who leads the whole inhabited world astray. (In this place and others, "devil" never means an individual devil who is the ruler of the others but the total horde of evil spirits — and evil itself.)

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