Snake, Lizard, and Related Animals

Snake, Lizard, and Related Animals

Now the serpent was more subtle than any beast of the field which the Lord God
had made.

—Genesis 3:1


Snakes can have dozens of young at a time, and so they are often symbols
of fertility. They resemble vegetation, especially roots, in their
form and frequently in the green and brown of their skins. The form
of a snake also suggests a river. A point of muscular tension passes
through the body of a snake and drives the animal forward, like a mo-
ment moving along a continuum of days and years. Like time itself, a
snake seems to progress while remaining still. In addition, the body of
a snake resembles those marks with a stylus, brush, or pen that make
up our letters. Ornamental alphabets of the ancient Celts and others
were often composed of intertwined serpents. It could even be that
the tracks of a snake in sand helped to inspire the invention of the alphabet.
The manner in which snakes curl up in a ball has made people
associate them with the sun.

According to one legend, Sakyamuni, who later became the
Buddha, was once walking beside a cliff when he looked down and
saw a great dragon renowned for wisdom. Seeking enlightenment,
Sakyamuni asked many questions, and the dragon answered all of
them correctly. Finally, Sakyamuni asked the meaning of life and
death. The dragon replied that it would answer only when its hunger
had been stilled. Sakyamuni promised his body as food, and the
dragon revealed the ultimate truth. Then Sakyamuni hurled himself
into the open jaws of the dragon, which suddenly changed into a lotus
flower and carried him back to the precipice. The snake, in this
case a dragon, is an eternal mediator between opposites: good and
evil, creation and destruction, female and male, earth and air, water
and fire, love and fear.

Since the snake does not have exposed sexual organs, it is very
hard to tell the male snakes from the female ones. Serpents often represent
a primeval androgynous state before the separation of male
and female. In the ancient world, however, serpents were associated
with a vast number of goddesses. These include the Greek Athena, the
Mesopotamian Ishtar, the Egyptian Buto, and the Babylonian Tiamat,
a primeval goddess from whose blood the world was created. The
pharaohs of ancient Egypt would wear uraeus on their heads, a protective
image of the goddess Wadjet in the form of a cobra, leaning
back and ready to strike.

As people turned more to patriarchal deities, there was a massive
revolt against the cult of the snake. This is why serpents are so often
destructive in mythologies from very early urban civilizations.
Egyptians believed that the serpent Apep would try to devour the
boat of the sun god Ra, who sailed through the earth every night. Serpents
have been killed by just about every major god or hero of the
ancient world and by many heroes in medieval times as well. The
Babylonian Marduk killed the serpent-goddess Tiamat, and Zeus
killed the primeval serpent Typhon. Apollo, the son of Zeus, killed the
serpent Python to gain the shrine at Delphi, formerly sacred to the
goddess Gaia. As an infant in his crib, Hercules killed two serpents.

Cadmus, a legendary founder of Greek civilization, killed a serpent
and then planted its teeth, whereupon warriors sprang from the earth
to become the ancestors of the noble families of Thebes. Sigurd, the
Norse hero, killed the dragon Fafner. Saint George—patron of England,
Russia, and Venice—killed a dragon, while Saint Patrick drove
the snakes out of Ireland. Even today in some communities in Texas,
people festively collect rattlesnakes, tease them, and finally kill them
for food during annual rattlesnake roundups.

Images of the snake are often similar in cultures that appear to
have little or no contact with each other. In Aztec mythology, for example,
there was once a female serpent, the earth mother Coatlicue, in
a primordial sea. The gods Quetzalcoatl and Tezcatlipoca made
Heaven and earth from two parts of her body, an act of creation
strangely reminiscent of the creation myth about the Babylonian serpentine
goddess Tiamat. Quetzalcoatl, who vanquished Coatlicue,
also took on ophidian features, and he was depicted as a feathered
serpent of jade. Some of the mythology of serpents may go back to a
time before humanity spread across the world and divided into different
cultures.

After expelling Adam and Eve from Eden for eating from the
Tree of Knowledge, Yahweh placed a curse on the serpent, which has
ever since crept upon the ground. But just as the biblical Yahweh does
not seem unequivocally good, so the serpent of Eden does not appear
entirely evil. Both, in fact, are figures that appear to transcend all
earthly categories. In the Middle Ages and Renaissance, the serpent of
Eden was often painted with a human head, usually that of a woman.

At times, the serpent is a mirror image of Eve. Even in paintings
where the head of the serpent is bestial, the serpent and Eve often
seem to be exchanging meaningful glances, while Adam simply looks
confused. Eve and the serpent share a feminine wisdom. The serpent
of Eden has also been identified with Lilith, the first wife of Adam,
who was also a Sumerian goddess-demon.
The large, intense eyes of the snake are very mysterious. Pliny
the Elder and countless subsequent writers have reported that snakes
can hypnotize and even kill with a simple gaze. The basilisk, a serpent
with a crown and wings, reportedly had this ability, as did the rattlesnake
in the United States. Many authors, from journalists and novelists
to serious natural scientists, reported that snakes could draw
birds out of the sky by looking upward and could sometimes even
work their powers of fascination on human beings.
The serpent has frequently been revived and even deified, especially
by the Gnostics and the alchemists. What is feared as “regression”
may also be celebrated as “rejuvenation.” Serpents are ancient
symbols of healing. In the Mesopotamian epic of Gilgamesh, the serpent
steals the plant of immortality, then sheds its skin and lives forever.
Ancient physicians from Greece to China realized that venom
extracted from certain serpents could be used to cure ailments such as
paralysis. Serpents are associated with the Greek healer Asclepius,
who once raised a man from the dead. The ancient Greek physicians,
or Asclepiadae, had so much confidence in the healing powers of the
serpent that they would sometimes place snakes in the beds of patients
with high fevers. The snakes may have served as a sort of
placebo, and the coolness of the serpents’ flesh could have convinced
the sufferer that he was recovering. The caduceus, a wand with two
serpents entwined around it, was carried by Hygeia, daughter of Asclepius,
and by the god Hermes. Today it remains a symbol of the
medical profession.

The alchemists saw the serpent as an animal that joined all of the
four elements from which the cosmos was formed. Of all animals, serpents
are the most intimately associated with the earth. This further
associates them with fire, since that element escapes from the earth in
volcanoes. The red tongue of many serpents, ending in a fork and
flickering in and out, also suggests flame. Dragons, especially in Eu-
ropean traditions, often breathe fire. Furthermore, serpents may also
frequently be found in water, and their rhythmic motion suggests
waves. Many dragons and other serpentine figures are often depicted
with wings.

Among the most popular images among the alchemists was the

ouroboros, a snake with its tail in its mouth, a symbol of primal unity
that goes back to ancient Egypt—at least to the time of The Egyptian
Book of the Dead, written around 1,500 B.C.—and was later taken over
by the esoteric religions of Greece. An analogous figure is the serpent
Mitgard of Norse mythology, which is coiled around the earth. The
Chinese used the V-shaped fangs of a serpent to symbolize the
essence of life, and the upside-down version represented the spirits of
deceased ancestors.

From the point of view of folklore, lizards may generally be regarded
as snakes, even though most (though not all) lizards have legs.
Because these animals are often found lying in the desert sun, they
have sometimes been associated with contemplative ecstasy. Pliny the
Elder reported that the salamander, a black-and-yellow lizard found
in most of southern Europe, would seek the hottest fire to breed in
and would quench the flames with the coldness of its body. Paracelsus,
an influential alchemist and physician of the Renaissance, believed
that the salamander was a being of pure fire. The salamander
sitting inside a furnace became a symbol of esoteric knowledge. The
salamander was compared to the three young Hebrews in the book of
Daniel who were thrown into a fiery furnace by the king of Babylon
but were not harmed by the flames (3:22–97) and to Christ descending
into Hell.

Even the Hebrews, who reacted so vehemently against the archaic
cult of the serpent, have occasionally attributed godlike power
to this animal. In the book of Exodus, Moses and Aaron were demanding
of Pharaoh that the people of Israel be released from
bondage. To demonstrate the power of his god, Aaron threw his staff
down in front of Pharaoh and his court. It immediately turned into a
serpent. At the direction of Pharaoh, the magicians of the court of
Egypt took their staffs and performed the same magical act. Then the
serpent that had been Aaron’s staff swallowed those of the magicians
(7:9–13). Later, on the journey to Canaan, the Hebrews were stricken
by a plague of fiery serpents. Moses directed the people of Israel to
erect a bronze serpent on a standard. All those who looked upon the
brazen serpent were saved from death (Num. 21:4–9). Had these stories
not been sanctioned by scripture, the bronze serpent would probably
have seemed to the Jews like sorcery and idolatry. Among the
most extravagant dragons of all was the one that did battle with Saint
Michael in the biblical Revelation. It had seven heads, each bearing a
crown, and ten horns, and it swept a third of the stars from the sky
with its tail (12: 1–9).

A positive view of the serpent has also frequently been preserved
in folk culture. During his wanderings after the fall of Troy, Aeneas’
father, Anchises, had died. Landing on the coast of Sicily, Aeneas
began the funeral rites by pouring out wine, milk, and the blood of
sacrificial victims. Then he cast flowers upon the funeral mound and
started his oration.

He had barely begun to speak when, in the words
of Virgil’s Aeneid, translated by John Dryden:

Scarce had he finished, when, with speckled pride,
A serpent from the tomb began to glide;
His hungry bulk on sev’n high volumes roll’d;
Blue was his breadth of black, but streaked with scaly gold:
Thus riding on his curls, he seem’d to pass
A rolling fire along, and singe the grass.
More various colors thro’ his body run,
Than Iris with her bow imbibes the sun.
Betwixt the rising altars, and around,
The sacred monster shot along the ground;
With harmless play amidst the bowls he pass’s,
And with his lolling tongue assay’d the taste:
Thus fed with holy food, the wondrous guest
Within the hollow tomb retir’d to rest. (book 5)

The snake was the spirit of his father, whom Aeneas would later visit
in Hades. Romans would sometimes feed snakes at household altars.
In Zoological Mythology, Angelo De Gubernatis wrote that the
practice of keeping a snake in the home for good luck survived among
Italian peasants into modern times. The Sythians, who lived by the
Black Sea and were known for their fierceness, traced their ancestry to
the daughter of the Dnieper River, who was a woman above the waist
but whose body ended in a serpent’s tail. Not only the ancient Romans
but many other peoples—for example, Australian Aborigines—
have believed that ancestors return in the form of snakes. Zulu kings
of legend sometimes would return to this world in the form of a powerful
snake.

Despite, or because of, the fact that they are not easily distinguished
by gender, snakes appear highly sexual, and there are many
tales of serpentine paramours. One fable from the Hindu-Persian Pan-
chatantra tells of a Brahman and his wife who had longed for children
but were unable to conceive. One day a voice in the temple promised
the Brahman a son who would surpass all others in both appearance
and character. Ashort time later his wife did indeed become pregnant,
but she gave birth not to a human being but to a snake. Her friends
advised her to have the monster killed, but she insisted on raising the
snake as her child, keeping him in a large box, bathing him regularly,
and feeding him fine delicacies. At her urging, the Brahman even
arranged for the snake to marry a beautiful girl, the daughter of a
friend. The girl, who had a strong sense of duty, accepted the marriage
and took over the care of the reptile. One day, a strange voice
called her in her chamber. At first she thought a strange man had broken
in, but it was her husband, who had climbed out of the snakeskin
and taken on human form. In the morning the Brahman burned the
snakeskin, so his son would not be transformed again, then proudly
introduced the young couple to all the neighbors.
Both snakes and dragons are designated by the same word,
draco, in Latin. We can generally regard dragons as snakes, just as zoologists
of the Middle Ages and Renaissance did. Edward Topsell, for
example, wrote in The History of Four-Footed Beasts and Serpents and Insects
(1657), “There be some Dragons which have wings and no feet,
some again have neither feet nor wings, but are only distinguished
from the common sort of Serpents by the combe growing upon their
heads and the beard under their cheeks” (vol. 2, p. 705). The variety
and range of dragons vastly exceed those of any other mythic animal.
Dragons often have features of other animals, such as the wings of
bats or horns of stags, but these are set upon serpentine forms. Just as
it mediates between the elements, the snake seems to combine features
of all creatures in its incarnation as the dragon.

The Chinese dragon known as “lung” is among the most colorful
and extravagant composites. When first born, it appears as a simple
serpent. Over thousands of years of life, it acquires the head of a
camel, the scales of a carp, the horns of a deer, the eyes of a hare, the
tusks of a boar, and the ears of an ox. It also has four short legs with
enormous claws, a mouth with long teeth, and a flowing mane running
down its back. A combination of fire and steam issues from its
nostrils to form the clouds, and so it controls the weather. These dragons
are the most beneficent figures of the Chinese zodiac.

In European culture, opposites are generally thought of as mutually

exclusive, whereas Asians tend to view them as complementary.
Because of this, Western culture has alternated between admiration
and scorn for the serpent, while the Chinese have expressed both
at once. In very archaic times, the serpent was almost universally
revered in China. Into the twentieth century, several temples in southern
China have followed the tradition of keeping sacred serpents that
are offered wine and eggs on the altar. Chinese culture gradually began
to distinguish sharply between the snake and the dragon, yet the
two are associated as contraries. The snake represents qualities opposite
to those of the dragon in the Chinese zodiac, where its symbolism
is remarkably close to that in the Judeo-Christian tradition; the snake
is as deceitful as the dragon is exuberant.

As the modern period began, people increasingly thought of the
snake as masculine. The traditional eroticism of the snake was originally
considered primarily a feminine attribute, later a male one. The
latter view was sanctioned especially by Freudian psychology, where
people have usually interpreted the snake as phallic. In James Joyce’s
Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man, the hero, Stephen Dedaelus, calls his
sexual organ “the serpent, the most subtle beast of the field” (chap. 3).
Legend usually locates fantastic beasts on the frontier of human
exploration, and the serpent is a good example. With the expansion of
maritime trade at the end of the Middle Ages, the Great Sea Serpent
was second in importance only to the mermaid as a figure in the law
of mariners. Sightings of serpentine creatures were reported everywhere
from Loch Ness in Scotland to the coasts of the New World and
were often attested to by persons who had reputations for good judgment
and sobriety. The animals were identified with many mythological
creatures, from the Norse serpent Mitgard to the biblical
Leviathan. While the descriptions differed in their details, they generally
described the serpent as extremely long and as moving with an
undulating motion. On August 21, 1936, for example, newspapers reported
that several Newfoundland fishermen had seen a monster that
was at least 200 feet long, had “eyes as big as an enamel saucepan,”
snorted blue vapor from its nostrils, and stirred up such waves that
“for days no boat dared venture out to sea” (O’Neill, pp. 194–195).
The symbolism of the snake has changed far less fundamentally
than has that of other animals such as the dog or horse. It seems to surface
whenever people contemplate origins, whether of humanity, of
life, or even of the universe itself. Today, the DNA code that directs the
development of the embryo is sometimes called “the cosmic serpent.”

Selected References

Gubernatis, Angelo De. Zoological Mythology or the Legends of Animals.
Chicago: Singing Tree Press, 1968.
Joyce, James. A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. New York: Barnes
and Noble Books, 1999.
234 Snake, Lizard, and Related Animals
Milton, John. Paradise Lost and Paradise Regained. New York: Penguin,
1976.
Mundkur, Balaji. The Cult of the Serpent: An Interdisciplinary Survey of
Its Manifestations and Origins. Albany: SUNY Press, 1983.
Nott, Charles Stanley. The Flowery Kingdom. New York: Chinese Study
Group of America, 1947.
O’Neill J. P. The Great New England Sea Serpent: An Account of Unknown
Creatures Sighted by Many Respectable Persons between 1638 and the
Present Day. Camden, ME: Down East Books, 1999.
Roob, Alexander. Alchemy and Mysticism. New York: Taschen, 1997.
Rybot, Doris. It Began before Noah. London: Michael Joseph, 1972.
Ryder, Arthur W., ed. The Panchatantra. Chicago: University of
Chicago Press, 1964.
Sax, Boria. The Serpent and the Swan: The Animal Bride in Folklore and
Literature. Blacksburg, VA: McDonald and Woodward, 1998.
Sun, Ruth Q. The Asian Animal Zodiac. Edison, NJ: Castle Books, 1974.
Topsell, Edward, and Thomas Muffet. The History of Four-Footed Beasts
and Serpents and Insects (3 vols.). New York: Da Capo, 1967 (facsimile
of 1658 edition).
Virgil. Virgil’s Aeneid. Trans. John Dryden. New York: P. F. Collier and
Son, 1937.