The Good and Evil Serpent (46 page)

Human Commonality

I am persuaded that the shared thread observable in so many different cultures is the result of the commonality of human experiences and reflections on serpents.
²²
Culture may be ten thousand years old, but the human has been on this earth for over three million years. Much of our art and symbolism are shaped, in various ways, by these “earlier years.”

In impressive prose, D. Newton explains how the human was once the insignificant one in creation. Indeed, there was a long period of time when “the puny population of the human race could have been trampled out of existence under the advance of a single great herd of bison or reindeer.” The first humans, and most succeeding generations, knew “that the animals were stronger, fiercer, cleverer than themselves, and certainly more beautiful.” We can recapture some of this perspective by studying ancient art. The human desired to acquire what the animals possessed. Depictions of animals sometimes represent them, but more often represent their at tributes, qualities, or characteristics that were so lacking and desirable to humans.
²³

All peoples who have myths or theologies that feature the snake, serpent, or dragon live where venomous snakes are present (or imagined present), are prevalent, and mysteriously appear and disappear. Snakes bring fear and the threat of death. The snake is odd because of its habit of scurrying away from humans, while many animals are eventually drawn to humans.

For millennia, humans have observed that the snake has an odd means of moving and eating. It burrows into the earth, which was revered by the ancients not only as
magna mater
(the Great Mother who nourishes all life) but also as the realm of life, water, wisdom, and mystery.

The serpent is widely seen as representing a resurgence of life because it sheds its old skin. The shed skin may be all we see of the elusive creature that we know keeps on living, leaving the old skin behind and moving ahead with a younger and larger body. This feature of the snake evoked thoughts about immortality, a “fountain of youth,” rejuvenation, and eventually resurrection.

This common element in human culture explains the prevalence and similarity of serpent symbolism in the earth’s diverse cultures. We need no theories of some distant place of origin. J. Fergusson was misinformed when he claimed that the serpent cult originated in the lower Euphrates.
²⁴

G. E. Smith claimed that the serpent cult originated in Egypt around 800
BCE
.
²⁵
We know this is impossible for numerous reasons; only four now suffice.
²⁶
First, the Minoan serpent goddesses (or priestesses)
²⁷
date to about 1600
BCE
, and the serpent cults at Beth Shan and Hazor,
²⁸
and elsewhere, are also from the second millennium
BCE
.
²⁹
Second, in his
Histoires de serpents dans l’Égypte ancienne et moderne
, L. Keimer wisely drew attention to a prehistoric pictograph from Aswan. On the left is a woman in adoration with her two hands raised; before her rises a cobra.
³⁰
This may be the earliest depiction of the
Naja haje
as the divine uraeus. Third, serpent symbolism was highly developed in Assyrian thought and iconography. Fourth, the serpent is a symbol in many cultures, including among Aborigines in Australia and the prehistoric cave dwellers who experienced snakes, beginning after the Ice Age in which no reptile could exist.

The Language of Art and Symbolism

If under the influence of Aristotle we can speak about the essence of the serpent, then the symbol of the serpent does not reside in its physicality
(natura sua).
Serpent symbolism derives from what the human imaginatively adds to the concept of the animal: the form. The symbol of the serpent thus represents what cannot be reduced to the formal essence of a snake. The symbol and symbology are what the human perspective adds to nature, creating a meaningful world out of chaotic phenomenology.
³¹

The Greeks did not pour time, thought, money, and effort into a sculpture of a god for merely aesthetic purposes (see
Appendix II
). Their artwork is a language that results from careful symbolic reflections. A moving work of art is full of symbolism. Without such symbolism, life is artless—it remains hollow or devoid of meaning. According to Eusebius’
Preparation for the Gospel
, Porphyry pointed out that the nature of Zeus cannot be represented because he is the whole world, “god of gods,” and mind. What has the Greek thus represented in an image of Zeus? Note Eusebius’ report:

[The Greek] made the representation of Zeus in human form, because mind was that according to which he wrought, and by generative laws brought all things to completion; and he is seated, as indicating the steadfastness of his power: and his upper parts are bare, because he is manifested in the intellectual and the heavenly parts of the world; but his feet are clothed, because he is invisible in the things that lie hidden below. And he holds his sceptre in his left hand, because most close to that side of the body dwells the heart.
³²

Porphyry’s insight into the symbology of Zeus is helpful when we see a sculpture of him seated in majesty, as in the monumental Zeus on public display in the Hermitage (see
Fig. 57
).

Hercules’ labors defined superhuman efforts for all time: such actions were and are “Herculean.” They were well known in antiquity, featured almost everywhere in song as well as bronze and marble statues. They were on public display. For example, in the Augustan-age Palaestra’s large (35 meter) cross-shaped swimming pool at Herculaneum, there was a bronze image of a snake with five heads. It served as a fountain from which water gushed into the pool. The serpent is coiled around a tree. What is the meaning of this prominent symbol? It depicts the many-headed Hydra slain by Hercules.
³³
Nearby frescoes of Hercules and a miniature altar that is dedicated to him provide further evidence of the legends from which the citizens of this city chose the name, Herculaneum.
³⁴

What is meant by the appearance of the serpent in so many tales of Hercules and his twelve labors? What could these symbolize? According to Eusebius, Porphyry explains that each of the twelve labors is “the symbol of the division of the signs of the zodiac in heaven.” What then are the symbolic meanings of his club and lion’s skin? Porphyry, through Eusebius, explains that Hercules is arrayed “with a club and a lion’s skin” because the club is “an indication of his uneven motion,” and the lion’s skin is a “representation of his strength in ‘Leo’ the sign of the zodiac.”
³⁵

What about Asclepius (or Aesculapius [the Latin] or Asklepios [the Greek]) and ophidian symbolism? According to Eusebius, Porphyry offered the following explanation of Asclepian symbolism:

Of the sun’s healing power Asclepius is the symbol, and to him they have given the staff as a sign of the support and rest of the sick, and the serpent is wound round it, as significant of his preservation of body and soul: for the animal is most full of spirit, and shuffles off the weakness of the body. It seems also to have a great faculty for healing: for it found the remedy for giving clear sight, and is said in a legend to know a certain plant which restores life.
³⁶

Porphyry’s comments surely represent more than his view of serpent iconography and symbology.
³⁷
The image of the serpent is a language unto itself. It is now beyond doubt that the art of the Greeks—and the later Romans—is evocative and the artists’ details often represent a world of symbolic thought.

Ophiology and Mythic Lore

Greek and Roman thinkers mixed keen observations with mythic lore, and they often showed ignorance of ophiology. In his study of animals
(De natura animalium)
, Claudius Aelianus (or Aelian, 165/70–230/35
CE)
makes numerous rather absurd comments about snakes.
³⁸
He gives some credence to the lore that the snake is born from “the putrefying marrow” in the spine of an evil person’s corpse (I.51).

In his polemic against Celsus, Origen, citing a letter from Pliny the Elder, reported: “[A]t the present time a snake might be formed out of a dead man, growing, as the multitude affirm, out of the marrow of the back.”
³⁹
Such reports are invaluable insights into the folklore of the average person in the first century.

Aelian baldly states that snakes, when coupling, produce “a most offensive odor” (9.44). The keen sight of the snake is due to molting (9.16). Along with others who exaggerate the size and characteristics of snakes in India, Aelian, under the influence of Megasthenes, thinks that in India snakes (
)
have wings (
16.41; cf. 2.38). Aelian announces that the snake emits urine (
)
that produces “a festering wound on any body on which it may happen to drop” (16.41). This comment is significant, since, as pointed out previously, snakes do not urinate. Aelian can be surprisingly misinformed, as when he claims that Egypt is “the moistest of all countries” (2.38).

Snakes are exceedingly fast. In fact, according to Aelian, one snake called Acontias (
,
acontiae;
the Javelin-snake) can shoot forth as fast as a javelin (6.18).
⁴⁰
The ability of snakes to rise up is exaggerated: they can “rise upright and stand upon the tip of their tail” (6.18).