The amphisbaena outlived classical antiquity comfortably, passing into medieval and early modern bestiary tradition with its two-headed anatomy and its venomous reputation essentially intact, illustrated repeatedly in illuminated bestiaries as a serpent with a second head at the tail. Unlike some classical monsters that medieval compilers moralized heavily, reading elaborate Christian allegory into every beast, the amphisbaena's bestiary entries tend to stay close to Pliny's original natural-history framing, cataloguing its supposed habits and dangers rather than building an extended spiritual lesson around it, though its ability to move in two directions was occasionally read as an image of duplicity or of the serpent's fundamentally deceptive nature.
A separate, more folk-medical strand of the tradition credits the amphisbaena's dried skin, or a live specimen worn or carried, with protective properties entirely apart from its supposed venom: warding off cold, easing the pains of rheumatism, and in some later European folk-medical writing, protecting pregnant women specifically. This is a common pattern in the classical and medieval treatment of dangerous animals, where the same creature's body, once removed from the living animal, is credited with the power to guard against exactly the kind of harm the living creature was feared to inflict, and the amphisbaena's afterlife as an amulet is one of the clearer examples of that logic surviving into early modern folk practice essentially unchanged from its ancient sources.