The Abyss, in Egypt is a name of the North, and the original mother of this Abyss, which was Space, was called Typhon, the Mother of Beginnings, the Mother of the Fields of Heaven, the Mother of Revolutions (time cycles),1 as well as the Mother of Gods and Men. She was later made goddess of the constellation of the Great Bear, Mother-Goddess, and her first son was called Sut, the Dog-Star in the south. (1)

The seven devils or seven heads of the old Dragon… are born in the mountains of sunset, which shows the same natural genesis in physical phenomena. They had their birth-place where the sun went down. … in the West, the Egyptians stationed the Great Crocodile that swallowed down the lights, sun, moon, and stars, as they set each night, in its wide-open jaws of darkness. …the crocodile was an ideograph of the swallowing darkness--and of earth, or the waters below, called the Abyss (2)

The Dragon, or Serpent, is amongst the oldest and most primal mythological symbols known to man. Kenneth Grant explain in Nightside of Eden
The earliest Mystery tradition (i.e. the African) was dominated by three key symbols: the Tree, the Water and the Serpent … (and are found) in the metaphysics of the qabbalah as the Tree of Life, the Water of the Abyss and the Serpent which achieved it apotheosis or Height in the Depth to which the Gateway is Daath. (op cit.)
The symbolism is explained in more detail by showing the numerical (and thus the Kabbalistic) formulae upon which they are constructed and by which we can interpret them:
(the Hebrew letter zain is) attributed to the Twins, Set-Horus,. Zain is the number seven, the number of Sevekh, the earlier form of Set as the son of the Mother, Typhon, one of whose symbols was the crocodile, the water-snake or the Dragon of the Deep. Like the progeny of Tiamat [note: the Dragon-goddess of the ancient Babylonian myth-cycle of creation] Sevekh [Set] assumed his mothers totem, the crocodile. (my emphasis)
This Mythology was astronomical or symbolized in the Stars In this vein, Gerald Massey writes:
We call them the Two Bears. But the seven stars of the Lesser Bear were once considered to be the seven heads of the Polar Dragon, which we meet with—as the beast with seven heads--in the Akkadian(3) Hymns and in the Book of Revelation. The mythical dragon originated in the crocodile, which is the Dragon of Egypt. … one particular cult, the Sut-Typhonian, the first god was Sevekh, who wears the crocodile’s head, as well as the serpent, and who is the Dragon, or whose constellation was the Dragon .(4)
Grant describes the son, Set, as the Eighth of seven, the numerical symbolism which is the perfection of the number 7, as in the seven stars of the constellation Ursae Major which was earlier considered the sign of the Dragon, in 8.(5) This is also important to our next point. This god, Sevekh or Set, according to Grant was
the fulfillment of his mother. In this role, the Mother and the male child (set) … occupy the central position at the summit or the pole.
The background related above now has prepared the ground, so to speak, for the explication of the central Mystery of the Dragon:
The Mother and Child constitute the Dragon with eight heads … seven of the heads are identified with the seven planets, and the seven inferior Sephiriot of the Tree of Life, the seven that have their summit or height in Daath.

As we shall see, this has its reflection in several esoteric streams and is a truth that can be “re-discovered” by the applications of certain magical Arcanum. In a book that I am in possession of, which will be discussed at length later in the study, there is a reflection (or reflex )of this myth:

159. Barbelo sang the Leviathan into sleep, weaving her spells around him and binding him in threads of Silence. Then she sang the Great Spell of Life, the Charm of Creation calling to the Logos as he lay wrapped in the Shroud of Darkness. Within the Darkness, the Son of the Dawn awoke from the Dream of death, hearing the call of the Daughter of Eternity. And the Logos spoke and the WORD came like a sword from his mouth and the Leviathans' heads were cleaved from His body and the blood flowed through the abyss and into the void and gathered there. And the Logos rose up over the Dragon and spoke the WORD of binding and the corpse fell through the abyss and came to rest amidst the ocean that was created out of the blood of the Leviathan. And the body of the Dragon became the firmament and the Blood of the Dragon became the great salt sea.
160. And behold, from the Leviathans' corpse rose a mountain, reaching the Limit of the Abyss and toward the Pleroma from which he was born.
161. And this is the Fifth Mystery.
162. And the Son and the Daughter went together and stood upon the mountain of the Universe which is the Mountain of Heaven. The Abyss above became the Limit and the sea below and Hades were formed, and the mountain of Heaven separated the Earth and the Sky. Thus the Universe was born. And the Logos placed the seven heads of the Leviathan, the heads of the Dragon, in seven spheres, each according to its form and the Planets were created. The heart of the Leviathan he took and cast it into the Abyss, that it might remain hidden in the cycles of time, but when the heart fell into the Abyss (which was formed from the birth waters of the Dragon) the Demon Choronzon was born and he awakened saying,
163. I AM I
164. But he was hid in the darkness of the Abyss and the Logos heard him not, being upon the Mountain.
165. And Choronzon is the Sixth Mystery
-The Coiled Dragon VI

The above quote is not really so interesting, in that it merely recapitulates the mythic stream we are here following through Grant’s work, except that it was received prior to any knowledge of Grant’s thesis and also of the sources which Grant refers to, such as Gerald Massey’s work Therefore, it as a true exposition of what Grant would call the primordial Gnosis, which is to say, the Draconian, or Typhonian mythos . That this ‘gnosis’ can be discovered, in some sense, spontaneously seems to lend weight to the argument that it indeed represents forces or processes that independent of the individual.

Returning to Grant, we find that:
The seven heads of the dragon were identified with the seven planets and the seven inferior Sephiroth on the Tree of Life. …[In Egypt] the primal power zones were concentrated in the 8 gods that ruled the Amen-Sen, the Place of Chaos. These eight power zones wer later demoted and identified with the lesser cosmic power zones: the Sun, Jupiter, Earth, Moon, Mercury, Mars, Venus. These powers were identified with basal pyramid of the Tree of Life, which culminated in the eighth power-zone typified by Daath, the place of Choronzon, or Chaos, in the Abyss.
…in the Sumerian phase of the Mythology, the seven heads of the devouring dragon are represented as follows:
1. The first by a scorpion
2. The second by a whirling cross or Thunderbolt
3. The third by a leopard or hyena
4. the fourth by as serpent
5. The fifth by a raging Lion
6. The sixth by a rebellious Giant
7. The seventh by Typhon, the angel of the fatal wind.
Here we see that the Dragon has been part of the Mythic imagination of mankind since, at least, the beginning of recorded history in Sumeria and Egypt. The Dragon or Sea Serpent, and specifically the Dragon of Seven heads, therefore, is an ancient mythic type which, though of a much earlier date than the oldest books of the Bible , appears named as the Leviathan , nonetheless
Thou brakest the heads of leviathan in pieces; Thou gavest him to be food to the people inhabiting the wilderness. --Psalms: 74 : 14
Note the reference to the [plural] heads of the beast. The Coiled Serpen is also mentioned in Isaiah:
In that day the LORD with his sore and great and strong sword shall punish leviathan the piercing serpent, even leviathan that crooked serpent; and he shall slay the dragon that is in the sea.
--Isaiah: 27 : 1 (KJV)
This is a version of the Caanaite Myth:
As you (Baal) smote Lothan the twisting serpent, you desroyed the crooked serpent, the seven-headed tyrant
--Ugaritic Baal and `Anat Cycle
The “type” of course survived into the Christian era down to today in the Book of Revelation. Finally, a quote from Massey in which he pulls many of the threads in this section together:
In Egypt the Great Bear was the constellation of Typhon, or Kepha, the old genetrix, called the Mother of the Revolutions; and the Dragon with seven heads was assigned to her son Sevekh- Kronus, or Saturn, called the Dragon of Life. That is, the typical dragon or serpent with seven heads was female at first, and then the type was continued as male in her son Sevekh, the Sevenfold Serpent, in Ea the Sevenfold, in Num-Ra, in the Seven-headed Serpent, Iao-Chnubis, and others. We find these two in the book of Revelation. One is the Scarlet Lady, the mother of mystery, the great harlot, who sat on a scarlet-coloured beast with seven heads, which is the Red Dragon of the Pole. She held in her hand the unclean things of her fornication. (Massey, ibid)

The mythography of the Dragon (or serpent) is vast; we shall explore this subject in more detail later. For now, suffice it to say that we have uncovered an Arcanum that has been known, and hidden, for the better part of the last 2000 years, which is to say, the bulk of the Aeon or Age of Pisces. The universe is, in this myth, formed from the body of the Dragon, and the lights of Heaven are likewise created from his heads. The body of man, is therefore, made of the Dragon’s body.

Finally, as has been pointed out and is worth restating, this means that, while the Gnostic myth has the soul-spark or “Star” as Crowley would call it, coming from the eternal realm, which is the Plenum or Fullness, the body, that is the material Vehicle of the soul is thus of one substance with the Dragon. This is a major theme in many Creation Myths, from the Sumerian to the Norse and of course the heterodox streams of Christianity and the Kabbalah also contain hints of theis doctrine. This is of course part of the concept of the Chakras and the Kundalini “serpent” that ascends in the Awakened person. Thus it is said that the body recapitulates the universe or the Microcosm is in the image of the Macrocosm. And so it is. This, then, is one of the prime “Mysteries” of magic for as the concept is easily described, it reveals depths unimagined as we attempt to map the courses of the Dragon.

1. The Celestial Ship of the North E. Valentia Straiton
2. Gerald Massey’s Lectures
3. the forerunners of the Assyrians and later Babylonians
4. Gerald Massey’s Lectures – “The Hebrew and other creations fundamentally explained”
5. Interestingly, this bit of the Gnosis is preserved in the Revelation of John ,as Massey says; “The name of Sevekh signifies the sevenfold; hence the seven heads of the Dragon, the Dragon who is of the seven and `is himself also an eighth,` as we are told in Revelation.” (op cit.)
6. See this volume Part II for an examination of the cosmology implied by the Book of the Coiled Dragon
7. A great deal more detail concerning the specifically Typhonian concept of the serpent or Dragon can be found in the introductory material to Part II.