Masters of Serpents

TL;DR

• The Classic of Mountains and Seas (Shanhaijing) gives its gods a fixed formula: they hold snakes, wear snakes at the ears and tread on snakes.
• The same handful of poses turns up on Bronze Age seals from Iran and Bactria, in Minoan Crete, on a Gotland picture stone, in Bengal, in Taiwan, at Cahokia, in the Andes and in the Hopi Snake Dance.
• This is a gallery of those poses, sorted by what the body does with the serpent, with a map of where each one is found.
• In several rites the snake-handler and the bullroarer appear in the same ceremony: the Greek mysteries of Dionysus and Sabazios, the Hopi Snake-Antelope rite, Yolngu python ceremonies and the Dogon Great Mask.

The formula #

The Shanhaijing is a guide to a world of strange peoples and spirits, compiled between the Warring States and the early Han. When it reaches the four seas at the edge of the earth, it gives each sea a god, and it draws all four the same way. The god of the Northern Sea, Yuqiang 禺彊, has “a human face and a bird’s body; he wears two green snakes at his ears and treads on two green snakes.” The gods of the east, south and west differ only in the colour of their snakes. The Rain Master’s consort, Yushi Qie 雨師妾, is black, “holds a snake in each hand, has a green snake at the left ear and a red snake at the right.” (Shanhaijing, Chinese Text Project)

Three verbs carry the whole image: 操 cao, to grip; 珥 er, to wear as an ear ornament; 踐 jian, to tread. A god who holds, wears and stands on serpents is a god who commands them, and in these texts that command belongs to the powers of sea, rain and the edges of the world.

The poses are not Chinese property. A frontal figure gripping a snake in each fist is one of the oldest images of power in western Asia. It is cut into the chlorite vessels of Jiroft and the bronze seals of Bactria around 2500–1700 BCE, and it is the stance of the faience goddess of Knossos. Snakes at the ears reappear on the far side of the Pacific. Treading on the serpent is the posture of Horus on the crocodiles, of Krishna on Kaliya and of the Bengali snake goddess Manasa. I have made the case elsewhere that this whole family of images descends from a cult that handled real snakes; see The Snake Cult of Consciousness. Here the plates are allowed to speak for themselves.

Where the masters of serpents are found #

The map shows each object or rite in the gallery. Switch the poses on and off. Amber discs mark rites in which the bullroarer sounds in the same ceremony as the serpent.

Download the data (CSV)

Two patterns stand out. Holding a snake in each hand is densest in a band from the Iranian plateau to Bactria in the third and second millennia BCE, the overland road toward China, with outliers in Crete, Egypt and Gotland. Snakes at the ears, the Shanhaijing’s signature, are absent from the Near East; their closest matches are on the Pacific rim, among the Paiwan of Taiwan and the Moche of Peru.

1. A snake in each hand #

The cleanest form of the motif: a frontal figure, arms out, gripping one serpent on each side. It is densest in Iran and Bactria. The Jiroft and Khafajah vessels show it travelling as trade goods into Sumer, a real road for the image.

Read more: Serpents as Control-Surfaces on the Iranian Plateau covers Jiroft’s snake-handling hero; Venom & Valhalla covers the Gotland stone, Qetesh and the Mistress of Animals.

2. Snakes at the ears #

珥兩蛇, “two snakes worn at the ears,” is the Shanhaijing’s signature. It is missing from the Near Eastern record. Its closest matches lie east, across the Pacific: Paiwan ancestors framed by paired vipers at the head, and Moche lords who wore gold snakes in their ears.

Read more: Nüwa and Fuxi gathers the serpent-bodied ancestors of early China.

3. Snakes underfoot #

踐兩蛇, “treading on two snakes.” Standing on the serpent is the gesture of the dragon-tamer. In Egypt and India it carries a specific charge: mastery of venom, and of the water the serpent poisons or withholds.

Read more: Snakes That Bestow Beast-Speech on Kaliya’s venom; Herakles, Adam, and Krishna were initiated.

4. Snakes from the body #

Zahhak’s shoulder snakes are the famous case, but the image is two thousand years older than the Shahnameh. A Sumerian god led Gudea of Lagash with serpents rising from his shoulders. In Gaul and on the Black Sea steppe the snakes become the legs themselves.

Read more: Serpent Sovereignty on the Iranian serpent grammar behind Zahhak; The Serpents Who Founded the Human World on Herodotus’ snake-bodied mother of the Scythians.

5. Snakes worn, held and carried #

Belts, diadems and live snakes on the shoulders. In Greece this is the dress of the Dionysiac mysteries, the same mysteries whose sacred toys included the rhombos, the bullroarer. In Mesoamerica and the Andes the serpent rises from the headdress or opens its jaws around the seated lord.

Read more: The Serpent in the Snuff on Chavín; The Olmec Mysteries and the Serpent Before Quetzalcoatl; The Serpent Is the Road on the Maya Vision Serpent.

6. Early China in bronze and lacquer #

The Shanhaijing is a text. These are objects from the same centuries and earlier.

The Gaozhuang tomb was excavated in 1978. Its gods are engraved on hammered bronze less than a millimetre thick, on a dish, a ewer and sieve-shaped vessels, and they fall into three types: gods with snakes in both hands or at the ears, sometimes with snakes underfoot; gods with an axe in one hand and a snake in the other; and gods who grip a beast in each hand. Zhang Lusheng gathers them with the Jingmen and Suizhou gods under the heading “the gods of mountains and seas all hold snakes.”¹ The axe-and-snake god survives into the Eastern Han. A tomb guardian from a cliff tomb at Tianhuishan, Chengdu, stood about a metre tall with an axe in one hand, a snake in the other and a tongue hanging below his waist. Only his head is now on display, in the Sichuan Museum.

Farther north and east, Middle Jōmon figurines from the Yatsugatake foothills of Nagano, about 4,700 years old, wear a coiled snake on the crown of the head. Evenki shaman costumes in Siberia hang snake-headed strips down the back for the shaman’s journey through the worlds, and a Nanai robe shows the guide spirit Buchu riding a serpent.

7. The roaring serpent #

In several rites the snake-handler and the bullroarer stand in the same ceremony. These are the plates where the gesture and the sound meet.

Two more cases have no plate. Among the Yolngu of Arnhem Land, the python-painted roarer swung on its cord is the voice of the great snake Yurlunggur, who swallowed the Wagilag sisters and spat the first monsoon clouds into the sky (Bullroarer Atlas record). Among the Dogon of Mali, the Great Mask holds the soul of the first ancestor, who died in the form of a serpent, and its voice is the whirled rhombe (Griaule 1938).

In Greece, Clement of Alexandria quotes the Orphic verses that list the rhombos among the toys of the child Dionysus, symbols of his mysteries. Demosthenes mocks Aeschines for squeezing fat-cheeked snakes and lifting them over his head in his mother’s initiations, crying “euoi saboi” (On the Crown 259–260). The Gurob papyrus puts both in a single rite: a god drawn through the initiate’s robe, and a bullroarer in the sacred basket.

Read more: The Snake, the Roar, and the Mirror; The ‘Snake Venom Entheogen’ Theory in Ancient Mystery Cults; Eve’s Serpents on the Hopi Snake Dance; The God Behind the Rainbow. On the Bullroarer Atlas: The Serpent’s Voice, Live Snakes, Serpents and Bullroarers in Hopi and Greek Ritual, The God Through the Bosom and The Rainbow Serpent.

Who has said it is one type #

Few scholars have put the serpent-holder on one map. These came closest.

• Balaji Mundkur, “The Cult of the Serpent in the Americas: Its Asian Background,” Current Anthropology 17 (1976), and The Cult of the Serpent (1983). He rejected late contact and argued that the unity of American snake cults points to old Asian roots carried across Beringia.
• K. C. Chang, Art, Myth, and Ritual (1983). He read the Shanhaijing figures who wear and grasp snakes as shamans with animal helpers, part of a shamanic layer shared around the Pacific.
• Carl Hentze, Mythes et symboles lunaires (1932) and Objets rituels, croyances et dieux de la Chine antique et de l’Amérique (1936). He set Shang serpent and tongue motifs beside Mesoamerican, Northwest Coast and Andean art.
• Ling Chunsheng 凌純聲. His “circum-Pacific culture” tied the snake-totem Bai Yue of south China to Taiwan and Oceania.
• Viktor Sarianidi, Myths of Ancient Bactria and Margiana on its Seals and Amulets (1998). He read the Bactrian snake-master seals as one mythology shared with Elam and Mesopotamia.
• Philip Kohl (1978) and Pierre Amiet (1986). They traced the snake-and-figure chlorite of Jiroft and Tepe Yahya into Sumer.
• F. A. M. Wiggermann, “Transtigridian Snake Gods” (1997). He gathered the shoulder-snake gods into one complex on the Iranian border.
• Nanno Marinatos, The Goddess and the Warrior (2000). She joined the Minoan snake goddess, the Gorgon as mistress of animals and the Levantine Qetesh type.
• Marija Gimbutas, The Gods and Goddesses of Old Europe (1974). A Neolithic snake goddess running unbroken into Minoan Crete.
• Michael Witzel, The Origins of the World’s Mythologies (2012). The serpent in the oldest “Laurasian” storyline, from Eurasia into the Americas.

Further reading #

• The Snake Cult of Consciousness and The Snake Cult of Consciousness, Two Years Later, Vectors of Mind.
• The Bullroarer: Much More Than You Wanted to Know, Vectors of Mind.
• The Bullroarer Atlas, and the atlas itself at bullroarer.org.
• The Serpent Without a Self, on the Mal’ta snake plaque.

Notes on the plates #

Images come from Wikimedia Commons, museum open-access collections, the Art Gallery of Western Australia, early printed editions of the Shanhaijing and line drawings published with Chinese excavation reports. Each plate links to its source page. Dates are the objects’; for texts and prints both are given. Region labels use modern countries for findspots. The selection is a gallery, not a census: it favours objects with good public images, so it over-represents museum collections in Europe and North America.

Sources #

1. Shanhaijing 山海經. Chinese Text Project. Haiwai and Dahuang chapters.
2. Fewkes, J. Walter, A. M. Stephen and J. G. Owens. The Snake Ceremonials at Walpi. Journal of American Ethnology and Archaeology 4, 1894.
3. Evans, Arthur. The Palace of Minos, vol. 1. Macmillan, 1921, pp. 495–505.
4. Sarianidi, Viktor. Myths of Ancient Bactria and Margiana on its Seals and Amulets. Moscow: Pentagraphic, 1998.
5. Wiggermann, F. A. M. “Transtigridian Snake Gods.” In I. L. Finkel and M. J. Geller, eds., Sumerian Gods and their Representations. Cuneiform Monographs 7. Groningen: Styx, 1997, pp. 33–55.
6. Kohl, Philip L. “The Balance of Trade in Southwestern Asia in the Mid-Third Millennium B.C.” Current Anthropology 19 (1978): 463–92.
7. Marinatos, Nanno. The Goddess and the Warrior. Routledge, 2000.
8. Mundkur, Balaji. “The Cult of the Serpent in the Americas: Its Asian Background.” Current Anthropology 17 (1976): 429–55.
9. Chang, Kwang-chih. Art, Myth, and Ritual: The Path to Political Authority in Ancient China. Harvard University Press, 1983.
10. Demosthenes. On the Crown 259–260.
11. Clement of Alexandria. Exhortation to the Greeks 2.17–18, trans. G. W. Butterworth, Loeb, 1919.
12. Euripides. Bacchae 101–104, 697–698.
13. Griaule, Marcel. Masques dogons. Institut d’Ethnologie, 1938.
14. Stanner, W. E. H. On Aboriginal Religion. Oceania Monographs 11, 1966.
15. Wang Lishi 王立仕. “Huaiyin Gaozhuang Zhanguo mu” 淮阴高庄战国墓. Kaogu xuebao 1988.2: 189–232.
16. Zhang Lusheng 张露胜. "‘山海神皆执蛇’：‘操蛇’‘衔蛇’图像与神鬼信仰". Dazhong kaogu 2025.1.
17. Chaffin, Cortney E. “Strange Creatures of Chu.” Arts 12.1 (2023): 3.
18. Li Xueqin 李學勤. “‘Bing bi Taisui’ ge xinzheng” “兵避太岁"戈新证. Jiang Han kaogu 1991.2.
19. Quibell, J. E. The Ramesseum. London: Egyptian Research Account, 1898, pl. III.