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Animals & Totems

Snake

Reptiles

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Origin 150 to 400 CE

Snakes shed the entire skin in one piece, which is the observation behind almost every association they carry with renewal. Egyptian religion gives the uraeus, the rearing cobra on the pharaoh's brow, and Apep, the serpent of chaos attacked each night. Genesis 3 makes the serpent the tempter, while Numbers 21 has Moses raise a bronze serpent that heals those who look at it, a text John 3:14 applies to the crucifixion. The staff of Asclepius, a single snake on a rod, is the genuine medical emblem; the two-snake caduceus of Hermes is a nineteenth-century American confusion. Indian tradition gives the nagas, and the kundalini serpent coiled at the base of the spine, a yogic image attested in tantric texts from about the eleventh century.

Facts
Disputed
Contested or Appropriated Modern Use
The words spirit animal and totem are used in popular Western practice for a personal animal ally. Native scholars and communities object to both usages, on the ground that they take the vocabulary and the authority of particular Indigenous traditions and apply them to a generic and commercial practice. 3
Suzanne Owen's The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality (Continuum, 2008) documents the objection Indigenous communities in North America raise, ongoing and in the present tense, against the commercial "spirit animal" genre. Owen's study examines how the practice borrows specific Indigenous terms and claimed lineages, presenting them as licensing a service sold to outside customers, and sets that use against the communities' own accounts of what those terms and practices mean within their traditions. What is disputed, on Owen's reading, is not that people generally feel a kinship with animals, a widely attested feeling that belongs to no one tradition, but the specific commercial borrowing of Indigenous vocabulary and claimed authority. The atlas records the animal, records that the modern commercial practice exists, and records that this documented objection is made, without adjudicating between the parties.
Correspondences
Element Correspondence
Fire 1
Attestation
Meaning in the Attesting Source
The Physiologus gives the serpent several natures, among them that when it grows old it fasts until its skin is loose and forces itself through a narrow crack in the rock to shed it. The reading is an exhortation to put off the old self, and it is why the shedding of skin means renewal in this tradition. 2Tradition: Physiologus and the medieval bestiaries
Identity
Creature Type
Reptiles 1
Origins
Origin Period
150 to 400 CE 2Tradition: Physiologus and the medieval bestiaries
Origin Period
1980 to 2000 1Tradition: Modern Western esotericism
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Shedding, Healing, and the Two Staffs

A snake sheds its skin whole, emerging with the old one left behind intact. No other common animal offers so plain an image of renewal, and almost every positive association snakes carry traces back to it.

The medical emblem is the clearest case. The Rod of Asclepius is a single serpent coiled around a plain staff, carried by the Greek god of healing, whose sanctuaries at Epidaurus and elsewhere kept live non-venomous snakes; patients slept in the abaton and the snakes moved among them. It is the genuine and ancient symbol of medicine.

The caduceus is a different object: a winged staff with two serpents, carried by Hermes, god of commerce, thieves, travellers and messengers, with no medical association whatever. Its use as a medical badge is a nineteenth- and twentieth-century error that took hold particularly in the United States, decisively when the US Army Medical Corps adopted it in 1902. Professional medical bodies in most of the world use the single serpent; American commercial medicine is full of the wrong one. This is a well-documented mistake and it is worth naming precisely.

Scripture gives both valences. Genesis 3 makes the serpent the subtlest of creatures and the tempter, and the curse on it is aetiological, explaining why snakes move as they do. But at Numbers 21:6-9 Moses is instructed to make a bronze serpent and set it on a pole, and those bitten who look at it live. The object persists: 2 Kings 18:4 records Hezekiah destroying a bronze serpent called Nehushtan because Israel had been burning incense to it. John 3:14 turns the pole into a type of the crucifixion, so the same image serves as tempter and as saviour within one canon.

Cobras, Nagas, and the Coiled Serpent

Egypt. The uraeus, a rearing cobra worn at the brow of the pharaoh, represents the goddess Wadjet and is a protective device: it spits fire at the king's enemies. It appears on crowns, coffins and temple cornices from the Old Kingdom onward and is among the most immediately recognisable elements of Egyptian royal iconography. Against it stands Apep, the serpent of chaos who attacks the solar barque each night and must be defeated for the sun to rise, a nightly rather than final victory, which is characteristic of Egyptian cosmology.

India. Nagas are serpent beings, often shown as cobras or as human above and serpent below, associated with water, fertility, treasure and the underworld, and they are ambivalent rather than evil. Shesha or Ananta supports Vishnu, who reclines on the coils between world-ages. Mucalinda shelters the meditating Buddha from a storm with his hood, an episode that is among the most reproduced in Buddhist sculpture. Nagas are worshipped in their own right, and Nag Panchami is a living festival.

Kundalini is the serpent power coiled at the base of the spine, which yogic practice seeks to raise through the centres to the crown. The image is genuinely attested in tantric texts, appearing in that developed form from roughly the eleventh century, and it is neither Vedic nor as old as is often claimed. Its Western popularity dates from the translations and syntheses of the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, particularly John Woodroffe's The Serpent Power of 1919.

Mesoamerica. The feathered serpent, Quetzalcoatl among the Nahua, Kukulkan among the Maya, is one of the oldest continuously attested deities in the region, with imagery reaching back to the Olmec horizon.

Cross-Tradition Connections

Associated With

Yi (Wings), Chinese Xiu (Mansions)

Named as the emblem animal of the lunar mansion Yi (Wings) in the twenty-eight xiu list.

Attested in Region

Egypt, Regions

The uraeus on the brow of the king, and Apep, the serpent the sun must pass each night.

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Greece, Regions

The snakes of Asclepius, and the household snake as the guardian of the place.

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Indian Subcontinent, Regions

The nagas, Shesha, and the cobra at Shiva's neck.

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Mesoamerica, Regions

The feathered serpent, and the vision serpent of Maya bloodletting rites.

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
Oceania and Australia, Regions

The Rainbow Serpent, one of the most widely attested beings in Aboriginal Australia.

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)
West Africa and the Caribbean, Regions

Damballa, and the rainbow serpent of Dahomean tradition.

Source Encyclopedia of ReligionMircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.)

Disciplines That Use This

Animal Spirits, Disciplines

One of the animal spirits gathered under this discipline. Where a tradition restricts this material, the restriction is recorded on the tradition itself rather than repeated for each animal.

Source The Appropriation of Native American SpiritualitySuzanne Owen

Related To

Owo Foro Adobe, Adinkra Symbols

Owo Foro Adobe takes its name and form from a snake climbing the raffia palm despite having no limbs.

Source The Adinkra Dictionary: A Visual Primer on the Language of AdinkraW. Bruce Willis
Sources
1. Shamans and Religion: An Anthropological Exploration in Critical Thinking
Alice Beck Kehoe, Waveland Press, 2000ch. on core shamanism and its commercial forms
2. Physiologus
Anonymous (Physiologus tradition), University of Texas Press, 1979introduction: date, place and transmissionView the Source
3. The Appropriation of Native American Spirituality
Suzanne Owen, Continuum, 2008ch. on the marketing of Native spirituality
Encyclopedia of Religion
Mircea Eliade (ed.); Lindsay Jones (ed., 2nd ed.), Macmillan Reference, 2005s.v. serpentsView the Source
The Holy Bible
Anonymous (multiple authors), Robert Barker, 1611Genesis 3; Numbers 21:4-9; John 3:14View the Source
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