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, Ratu-mai-mbula was a serpent god who ruled the underworld (and made the sap run).
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 mediation. 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 interchangable 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 dove 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.
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).
Though 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:
When the young reforming king Hezekiah came to the throne of Judah in the late 8th century:
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. The idea of a serpent idol was shocking to the editors of Easton's Bible Dictionary, 1897: cf. the entry "Nehushtan."
Although in the minority, there are at least a couple ofpassages 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:
Snakes entwined the staffs both of Hermes (the cadeuceus, 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 experienced by Moses and later by his brother Aaron: