Snake symbolism

In the Bible the serpent is “cunning” beyond every other beast (Genesis 3:1, Knox translation). It persuades Eve to eat the forbidden fruit, and God curses it to crawl on its belly and eat dust, and sets a feud between its offspring and the woman's: “she is to crush thy head”. In Numbers, when fiery serpents strike the Israelites in the desert, Moses makes “a serpent of bronze” on a staff, and those who look at it live. John's Gospel takes that bronze serpent as a sign: “this Son of Man must be lifted up, as the serpent was lifted up by Moses in the wilderness” (John 3:14). Jesus also tells his disciples to be “wary, then, as serpents, and yet innocent as doves” (Matthew 10:16); the dove has its own page, Dove.

In Roman legend, as Ovid tells it at the end of the Metamorphoses, Rome was struck by a plague and the Delphic oracle told the Romans to bring Aesculapius from Epidaurus. The god appeared to one of the Roman envoys in a dream, showed him the serpent coiled round his staff, and said he would come in that form; the serpent sailed to Rome and made its home on the island in the Tiber.

In Norse myth, in Snorri Sturluson's Edda, Odin (Alfather) threw Loki's son Jörmungandr, the Midgard serpent, into the sea, where he grew until he “surrounds all the earth, and bites his own tail.” At Ragnarok Thor kills him and walks nine paces before falling dead from the serpent's venom. The serpent biting its tail has its own page, the ouroboros.

In Egyptian myth, according to E. A. Wallis Budge, the enemy of the sun god Ra was the great serpent Apep, whose weapons were cloud, mist, rain and darkness.