Ouroboros Archives | Neel Burton

How the Serpent Came to Represent Life and Death, Poison and Cure, Fear and Wisdom

By Dr Neel Burton — Psychiatrist, philosopher, and wine writer; Fellow of Green Templeton College, University of Oxford; author of over twenty books.

Essay substantially revised on 13 August 2026.

Few creatures carry as many contradictory meanings as the snake. Across cultures, the serpent has come to represent life and death, poison and cure, fear and wisdom.

A snake is an animal; a serpent is also an idea.

For thousands of years, snakes have slithered through our myths and dreams, sometimes as monsters or tempters, sometimes as healers, protectors, and teachers. Even today, more than two thousand years after Hippocrates, the snake remains the pre-eminent symbol of medicine and allied professions.

How did one animal come to represent so many apparently contradictory things?

Snakes and Seers

In myth, snakes, or serpents, are often connected to seers and oracles.

Teiresias is the most notorious seer in Greek myth. As a young man, he came upon a pair of coupling serpents on Mount Cithaeron and, in disgust, struck them with his staff. This offended the goddess Hera, who turned him into a woman.

Teiresias spent the next seven years as a priestess of Hera, and even married and had children in that time. After seven years as a woman, he once again chanced upon a pair of coupling serpents, but this time gave them a wide berth. Seeing this, Hera released him from her curse.

Later, Zeus and Hera dragged Teiresias into an argument about who has the more pleasure in sex: woman, as Zeus claimed, or man, as Hera countered. Teiresias averred that, ‘Of ten parts, a man enjoys only one.’ For this, Hera struck him blind, but Zeus compensated him with the gift of foresight and a lifespan of seven generations.

Already, the serpent is associated with transgression, gender, sexuality, punishment, and knowledge or wisdom.

Ancient Oracles

The ancients took divination extremely seriously. Leaders would consult an oracle or seer before any major undertaking. Aristotle, that paragon of logic and reason, even wrote a lesser-known treatise entitled On Divination in Sleep.

Oracles were considered superior to seers because they had a direct channel to God, or a god. They were, however, difficult to consult, each with their own seasons and capricious conditions, such that most of the demand for divination was met by seers like Teiresias.

The oracular tradition may have originated with the oracle of the Egyptian goddess Wadjet at Per-Wadjet, near modern-day Alexandria. Wadjet was depicted as a snake—usually an Egyptian cobra—or as a combined woman and snake. She nursed the infant Horus and protected Ra by coiling herself upon his head.

The snake goddess figurines excavated at the Minoan palace of Knossos may have been connected to Wadjet, as may the uraeus, the stylised upright cobra used as a symbol of sovereignty and divine authority, and mounted upon the crowns and masks of the pharaohs—including, famously, Tutankhamun.

So long before the serpent came to symbolise evil in the Christian imagination, it could represent protection, sovereignty, divinity, secret knowledge, and insight or wisdom.

The Fear of Snakes

But there is a more primitive reason for the snake’s hold upon our imagination: snakes frighten us.

Ophidiophobia, the fear of snakes, is one of the most common specific phobias. Whereas many anxiety disorders tend to take hold in adulthood, specific phobias such as ophidiophobia and arachnophobia often go back to early childhood, perhaps because they relate to the sorts of dangers that threatened our remote ancestors.

Today, man-made hazards such as motor cars and electric cables are much more likely to strike us down, yet our most primitive fears remain disproportionately attached to natural dangers. Unlike snakes, technological innovations have not been around for long enough to haunt us—sorry, ‘imprint themselves onto our genomes’.

The snake strikes our imagination not despite our fear of it, but in part because of that fear. What can kill us must command our attention.

Poison and Cure

Although the snake can kill us, it can also cure us.

Snake venom is a deadly poison, but its constituents can also have medicinal properties—having been used, for example, to control pain or stem haemorrhage. According to the Book of Numbers, Moses erected a bronze serpent upon a pole to save Israelites bitten by the ‘fiery serpents’ sent by God in retribution—thereby turning one snake against another, or others.

The same archetype recurs in the two symbols of the medical profession: the more traditional Rod of Asclepius, god of healing, with one snake; and the more commercial Rod of Hermes, or Caduceus, with two snakes. The rod or staff represents control over the dual nature of the snake, or the Moses-like harnessing of its powers.

It is one of medicine’s oldest truisms, that many a substance is a cure, until it becomes a poison. Like a sorcerer, a doctor is an expert at measuring poisons.

Death and Rebirth

It is for more than their venom that serpents came to stand at the threshold of life and death. Snakes live close to the ground and disappear into holes and crevices, connecting them in the imagination with the nourishing earth and the underworld. More strikingly, they shed their skins, seeming to cast off their old bodies and emerge anew. It is not difficult to see how they became symbols of rebirth and immortality—and, by extension, of creativity, culture, and wisdom.

The ouroboros—Greek for ‘tail eater’—depicts a serpent or dragon eating its own tail. Originating in Egypt and later passing into the Greek mystery cults, Gnosticism, and Hermeticism, it symbolises the circle of life: destruction continually giving rise to creation, death folding back into birth. The ouroboros may also symbolise sexual intercourse, with the tail representing the male organ and the mouth the female one.

The Serpent of Eden

The most notorious serpent of all is the one in Eden, at the foot of the tree of the knowledge of good and evil.

According to the Book of Genesis, the serpent is the most ‘subtil’ of all the beasts in God’s creation and, like Adam and Eve, has the ability to speak and reason. The only other animal that speaks in the Pentateuch is Balaam’s ass, and then only because God opened its mouth. Seduced by the serpent, Eve, and then Adam, ate of the tree, and ‘the eyes of them both were opened.’ As well as casting Adam and Eve out of Eden, as we remember only too well, God cursed the serpent to go on his belly and eat dust, and put enmity between the serpent and man:

And the Lord God said unto the serpent, Because thou hast done this, thou art cursed above all cattle, and above every beast of the field; upon thy belly shalt thou go, and dust shalt thou eat all the days of thy life: And I will put enmity between thee and the woman, and between thy seed and her seed; it shall bruise thy head, and thou shalt bruise his heel.

The serpent introduces poison, death, and seduction into Eden, but, like the tree itself, it also brings knowledge and enlightenment. Unlike the lamb or the lion, the snake cannot easily be made to stand for one thing. Instead, it stands for the antinomies of the human condition: life and death, poison and cure, fear and wisdom. And so it endures.