Serpent (symbolism)

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For other uses, see Serpent (disambiguation)

Serpent is a word of Latin origin (serpens, serpentis) that is normally substituted for "snake" in a specifically mythic or religious context, in order to distinguish such creatures from the field of biology.

1 Mythology
- 1.1 Hebrew Bible, originally the Aramaic Bible and story from Mesopotamia
- 1.2 New Testament
2 Other symbolic uses
3 References
4 See also
5 External links

[edit] Mythology

There was a serpent that was an Ancient Near Eastern and Aegean god of wisdom, who was always, quite naturally, an earth symbol.

In Egypt, Ra and Atum ("he who completes or perfects") were the same god, Atum, the "counter-Ra," was associated with earth animals, including the serpent: Nehebkau ("he who harnesses the souls") was the serpent god who guarded the entrance to the underworld. As far away as Fiji, Ratumaibulu was a serpent god who ruled the underworld (and made fruit trees bloom).

In the Louvre, there is a famous green steatite vase carved for king Gudea of Lagash (dated variously 2200–2025 BCE), dedicated by its inscription to Ningizzida, "Lord of the Tree of Truth" which bears a relief of serpents twined round a staff, exactly like the caduceus of Hermes.

At the far western end of the world of Antiquity, in the Garden of the Hesperides, another serpent tree-guardian, Ladon, protected the golden fruit.

Under yet another Tree of Enlightenment, the Buddha sat in ecstatic meditation. When a storm arose, the mighty serpent king rose up from his place beneath the earth and enveloped the Buddha in seven coils for seven days, not to break his ecstatic state.

The Minoan Great Goddess brandished a serpent in either hand, perhaps evoking her role as source of wisdom, rather than her role as Mistress of the Animals (Potnia theron), with a leopard under each arm. It is not by accident that later the infant Heracles, a liminal hero on the threshold between the old ways and the new Olympian world, also brandished the two serpents that "threatened" him in his cradle. Classical Greeks did not perceive that the threat was merely the threat of wisdom. But the gesture is the same as that of the Cretan goddess. The rod that Moses held turned into a serpent. When he threw it to the ground, at God's command, it took its serpent form. If the identity was not clear enough, when Moses picked up the serpent, it was transformed to a rod once more.

Serpents figured prominently in archaic Greek myths too: the myth-element of Laocoon, the ancient Hydra that was battled by Heracles, the serpent of the oldest Delphic oracle. Olympias, the mother of Alexander the Great and a princess of the primitive land of Epirus, had the reputation of a snake-handler, and it was in serpent form that Zeus was said to have fathered Alexander upon her; tame snakes were still to be found at Macedonian Pella in the 2nd century AD (Lucian, Alexander the false prophet) and at Ostia a bas-relief shows paired coiled serpents flanking a dressed altar, symbols or embodiments of the Lares of the household, worthy of veneration (Veyne 1987 illus p 211)

The image of the serpent as the embodiment of the wisdom transmitted by Sophia was an emblem used by gnosticism, especially those sects that the more orthodox characterized as "Ophites", ("Serpent People"). The chthonic serpent was one of the earth-animals associated with the cult of Mithras. The Basilisk, the venomous "king of serpents" with the glance that kills, was hatched by a serpent, Pliny the Elder and others thought, from the egg of a cock. Such fantasies filled the medieval bestiary.

In Germanic mythology, serpent (OE: wyrm, OHG: wurm, ON: ormr) is used interchangeable with the Greek borrowing dragon (OE: draca, OHG: trahho, ON: dreki). In Norse mythology specifically, Jörmungandr, the Midgard serpent, encircled the world in the ocean's abyss.

Vishnu is said to sleep in Yoga Nidra, floating on the cosmic waters on the serpent Shesha. In Dahomey mythology of West Africa, the serpent that supports everything on its many coils was named Dan.

Because a snake sheds its skin and comes forth from the lifeless husk glistening and fresh, it is a universal symbol of "renewal", and the regeneration that may lead to immortality. In the Epic of Gilgamesh (of Sumerian origin), Gilgamesh dived to the bottom of the waters to retrieve the plant of life. But while he rested from his labor, the Serpent came and ate the plant. The snake became immortal, and Gilgamesh was destined to die. Outside Europe, in Yoruba mythology, Oshunmare was such a mythic regenerating serpent. The Vision Serpent was also a symbol of rebirth in Mayan mythology, fuelling some cross-Atlantic cultural contexts favored in pseudoarchaeology. Mayan Gukumatz, the Feathered Serpent was most familiar under his Aztec name, Quetzalcoatl.

The Rainbow Serpent (also known as the Rainbow Snake) is a major mythological being for Aboriginal people across Australia, although the creation stories associated with it are best known from northern Australia.

Sea serpents were giant cryptozoology creatures once believed to live in water, whether sea monsters such as the Leviathan or lake monsters such as the Loch Ness Monster. If they were referred to as "sea snakes", they were understood to be the actual snakes that live in Indo-Pacific waters (Family Hydrophiidae).

[edit] Hebrew Bible, originally the Aramaic Bible and story from Mesopotamia

In the Hebrew Bible (the Tanakh) of Judaism, the speaking Serpent (nachash) in the Garden of Eden brought forbidden knowledge, but was not identified with Satan in the Book of Genesis. "Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field which the Lord God has made," Genesis 3:1 reminded its readers. Nor is there any indication in Genesis that the Serpent was a deity in his own right, aside from the fact that the Pentateuch is not otherwise rife with talking animals. Every word the Serpent spoke was in fact true, and its words were later confirmed by Yahweh in Gen. 3:22 as he conferred with his fellows.

Image:MosesandSnake.JPGThough he was cursed for his role in the Garden, this was not the end of the Serpent, who continued to be venerated in the folk religion of Judah and was tolerated by official religion until the in time of king Hezekiah. The Book of Numbers provides an origin for an archaic bronze serpent associated with Moses, with the following narrative:

"21.6. And the Lord sent fiery serpents among the people, and they bit the people; and much people of Israel died. 7. Therefore the people came to Moses, and said, We have sinned, for we have spoken against the Lord, and against thee; pray unto the Lord, that he take away the serpents from us. And Moses prayed for the people. 8. And the Lord said unto Moses, Make thee a fiery serpent, and set it upon a pole: and it shall come to pass, that every one that is bitten, when he looketh upon it, shall live. 9. And Moses made a serpent of brass, and put it upon a pole, and it came to pass, that if a serpent had bitten any man, when he beheld the serpent of brass, he lived."

When the young reforming king Hezekiah came to the throne of Judah in the late 8th century:

"He removed the high places, and brake the images, and cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the brasen serpent that Moses had made: for unto those days the children of Israel did burn incense to it: and he called it Nehushtan." 2 Kings 18:4.

The dual -an ending specifies that the idol was of two snakes upon the pole, the familiar entwined snakes on the staff that survived in Hermes' caduceus and the single snake on the staff of Aesclepias."

[edit] New Testament

In the New Testament of Christianity, a connection between the Serpent with Satan is strongly made. The first mention is made in Genesis 3:14 where God curses the serpent with attributes that are consistent with a snake, "And the LORD God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life". This indicates that the serpent had legs prior to this punishment.

In Matthew 23:33, Jesus observes, "Ye serpents, ye generation of vipers, how can ye escape the damnation of Gehenna?" ("Hell" is the usual translation of Jesus' word Gehenna.)

Although in the minority, there are at least a couple of passages in the New Testament that do not present the snake with negative connotation.

When sending out the twelve apostles, Jesus exhorted them "Behold, I send you forth as sheep in the midst of wolves: be ye therefore wise as serpents, and harmless as doves" (Matthew 10:16).

In the verses just before the possibly most well known verse of the Bible, John 3:16, Jesus made a comparison between himself and the setting up of the snake on the hill in the desert by Moses:

And as Moses lifted up the serpent in the wilderness, even so must the Son of man be lifted up: That whosoever believeth in him should not perish, but have eternal life (John 3:14-15).

Veyne, Paul, 1987. A History of Private Life : 1. From Pagan Rome to Byzantium

[edit] Other symbolic uses

Aside from its universal use as a symbol of regeneration and immortality, the serpent, when forming a ring with its tail in its mouth, is also a clear and widespread symbol of the "All-in-All", the totality of existence. See Amphisbaena, Ouroboros.

Snakes entwined the staffs both of Hermes (the caduceus, illustration, left) and of Asclepius, where a single snake entwined the rough staff. On Hermes' caduceus, the snakes were not merely duplicated for symmetry, they were paired opposites. The wings at the head of the staff identified it as belonging to the winged messenger, Hermes, the Roman Mercury, who was the master of diplomacy and rhetoric, of inventions and discoveries, the protector both of merchants and that allied occupation, to the mythographers' view, of thieves. In Late Antiquity, as the arcane study of alchemy developed, Mercury was understood to be the protector of those arts too and of arcane or occult "Hermetic' information in general. Chemistry and medicines thus linked the rod of Hermes with the staff of the healer Asclepius, which was wound with a serpent; it was conflated with Mercury's rod, and the modern medical symbol— which should simply be the rod of Asclepius— often became Mercury's wand of commerce. Art historian Walter J. Friedlander, in The Golden Wand of Medicine: A History of the Caduceus Symbol in Medicine (1992) collected hundreds of examples of the caduceus and the rod of Asclepius and found that professional associations were just somewhat more likely to use the staff of Asclepius, while commercial organizations in the medical field were more likely to use the caduceus.

A similar conversion of a rod to a snake and back was believed to have been experienced by Moses and later by his brother Aaron according to Islamic, Christian, and Jewish hagiography [an excerpt from Christian lore below]:

And the Lord said unto him, What is that in thine hand? And he said, A rod. And he said, Cast it on the ground. And he cast it on the ground, and it became a serpent; and Moses fled from before it. And the Lord said unto Moses, Put forth thine hand, and take it by the tail. And he put forth his hand and caught it and it became a rod in his hand. (Exodus 4:2-4)

Moses Another bible reference to the serpent and healing would be, "And the Lord said to Moses, ‘Make a poisonous serpent, and set it on a pole; and everyone who is bitten shall look at it and live.’ So Moses made a serpent of bronze, and put it upon a pole; and whenever a serpent bit someone, that person would look at the serpent of bronze and live." (Numbers 21:8-9)

[edit] References

Joseph Campbell, Occidental Mythology: the Masks of God, 1964: Ch. 1, "The Serpent's Bride"
John Bathurst Deane, The Worship of the Serpent, 1833. [1]
Lewis Richard Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States, 1896.
Joseph Eddy Fontenrose, Python; a study of Delphic myth and its origins, 1959.
Jane Ellen Harrison, Themis: A Study of the Social Origins of Greek Religion, 1912. cf. Chapter IX, p.329 especially, on the slaying of the Python. [2] [3]
Joseph Lewis Henderson and Maud Oakes, The Wisdom of the Serpent. The tribal initiation of the shaman, the archetype of the serpent, exemplifies the death of the self and a transcendent rebirth. Analytical psychology offers insights on the meaning of death symbolism and the serpent symbol.