Serpents and the Invention of Consciousness

TL;DR

• Across cultures, serpents appear at thresholds where humans gain more awareness: ethical discernment, ritual law, shamanic vision, esoteric knowledge, or mystical liberation.¹
• Genesis, the Epic of Gilgamesh, and the bronze serpent tradition already link snakes to the discovery of “knowledge of good and evil,” mortality, and focused attention.Genesis 3; Numbers 21:8–9; Utnapishtim episode ²
• Indian Kundalinī yoga literalizes this: the “Serpent Power” coiled at the spine rises through chakras, awakening higher states and finally liberating consciousness.Woodroffe 1919; Sat-Cakra-Nirūpaṇa ³
• Aboriginal Australian Rainbow Serpent myths, Maya “Vision Serpents,” Quetzalcōātl as Feathered Serpent, and Chinese Nüwa/Fuxi all place serpents at the moment where raw nature is shaped into law, culture, and cosmic order. ⁴
• Greek, Norse, and European fairy tales preserve a second motif: ingesting serpent flesh or blood grants the ability to understand hidden languages and acquire supernatural wisdom.Fáfnismál; ATU 673 “White Serpent’s Flesh” ⁵
• Mircea Eliade, C. G. Jung, and later scholars argue that serpents condense a set of experiential features—stealth, suddenness, venom, skin-shedding—that make them near-perfect emblems for dangerous, transformative consciousness.Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation; Jung, Symbols of Transformation ⁶

The serpent’s symbolism glides through almost the entire history of religions, from ancient civilizations to contemporary fantasy; it can signify both paradisiacal wholeness and radical rupture.
— Ombrosi, “The Serpent’s Curse Compared to That of Eve” (2024)^{7 8}

Snakes, Thresholds, and the Question of Consciousness#

If you ask different civilizations, “What does it feel like to wake up?”, many of them answer with a snake.

The biblical serpent promises that “your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” ⁹ The Indian Tantric tradition calls the latent spiritual energy kuṇḍalinī, “the coiled one,” a goddess-serpent asleep at the base of the spine until aroused by yoga.Woodroffe 1919 ³ Australian Aboriginal elders speak of the Rainbow Serpent whose movement sculpts the land and whose laws separate humans from animals.Japingka Aboriginal Art, “The Rainbow Serpent” ⁴

This essay develops a simple but loaded thesis: across a wide band of mythic and ritual material, serpents do not merely stand for “nature,” “chaos,” or “evil.” They repeatedly appear at thresholds where new kinds of awareness become possible: ethical reflection, shamanic vision, ritual law, political self-consciousness, or mystical liberation. In that sense, the serpent is a recurring symbol of consciousness-bestowing power—dangerous, ambiguous, but indispensable.

The argument proceeds by case studies, then by synthesis. I am not claiming a single historical “serpent cult of consciousness” diffused everywhere; rather, I suggest that certain biological and phenomenological features of snakes make them a natural symbolic technology for dramatizing transitions in consciousness. Jung and Eliade groped toward this; we can sharpen it.

Why Snakes Make Good Symbols for Waking Up#

Before the textual tour, it helps to ask: what is it about snakes that begs to be mythologized?

Several features recur in ethnographic and historical discussions:¹⁰

1. Stealth and suddenness. Snakes appear out of nowhere, forcing abrupt hyper-awareness. One moment you’re daydreaming; the next, every neuron is on fire.
2. Venom as pharmakon. Snakebite brings an altered state, often dancing on the edge between death and visionary experience. A pharmakon in Greek is both poison and remedy; venom concentrates that ambiguity. ¹¹
3. Shedding skin. Snakes visibly “die” and are reborn through ecdysis, making them ready-made symbols of regeneration and transformation.Serpent-symbolism surveys ¹²
4. Body as spine. A snake is “mostly backbone,” as Jung liked to say; it naturally evokes the human spinal cord and central nervous system.Jung ETH Lectures ¹³

Jung read serpents as archetypes of the unconscious and of psychospiritual transformation, with the ouroboros—the snake biting its own tail—signifying the primordial, pre-differentiated psyche and its capacity to renew itself.Jung, Symbols of Transformation; GnosisJung essay on Ouroboros ¹⁴

Eliade, more historically minded, traces serpent symbolism through “paradisiacal” motifs (immortality, healing springs, tree of life) and initiatory motifs (being swallowed and regurgitated, death-and-rebirth in a monster’s belly). ⁶ In both readings, the serpent is not merely a threat but a process: something that destabilizes ordinary life and reorganizes it at a higher—or at least different—level of meaning.

With that in view, we can watch serpents show up wherever cultures narrate the invention of consciousness.

Eden, Gilgamesh, and the Near Eastern Serpent

The Eden serpent and the birth of moral reflexivity#

In Genesis 3, the serpent tells Eve:

“For God knows that when you eat from it your eyes will be opened, and you will be like God, knowing good and evil.” (Gen. 3:5) ⁹

After the transgression, God confirms that “the man has become like one of us, knowing good and evil” (Gen. 3:22). Whatever else this means, the text explicitly links serpent, forbidden knowledge, and a change in the structure of human awareness.

Second Temple and later Christian interpretations usually emphasize the serpent’s deceit; but even conservative commentators concede that the serpent’s promise contains “a grain of truth” insofar as humans now understand evil and thus become responsible moral agents.GotQuestions analysis ¹⁵ In more phenomenological terms: the Eden story mythologizes the moment when humans cease to live in unreflective immediacy and instead experience themselves as morally divided, self-conscious creatures.

The serpent is the catalyst of that transition. It does not simply represent evil; it midwives the birth of a conflicted, reflexive consciousness.

Gilgamesh’s serpent and the acceptance of mortality#

The Epic of Gilgamesh offers a complementary drama. In Tablet XI, after surviving the flood narrative and learning from Utnapishtim, Gilgamesh acquires a plant that can restore youth. On his homeward journey:

A serpent smells the plant, steals it, and sloughs its skin as it departs, renewing itself, while Gilgamesh weeps, realizing his loss of immortality.Trujillo de Gutiérrez, “A Serpent Steals the Plant of Immortality”; summary discussion ¹⁶

Commentators have long noted the narrative inversion: unlike Eden, the serpent’s act in Gilgamesh forces the hero to relinquish magical escape from death and to return to Uruk as a wiser, more present king.Biologos discussion ¹⁷ The snake embodies the cyclical, natural immortality of shedding skin, while Gilgamesh must accept a different kind of “eternity” grounded in conscious recognition of mortality and cultural achievement.

Again, the serpent sits precisely at the pivot where consciousness shifts—here from obsessive denial to lucid acceptance.

Bronze serpents and Egyptian uraei: attention and protection#

Numbers 21 tells of Israelites bitten by “fiery serpents.” God commands Moses to make a bronze serpent; those who look at it live (Num. 21:8–9). ¹⁸ Later, this bronze serpent (Nehushtan) is destroyed by Hezekiah as an idolatrous object (2 Kings 18:4). Scholarly treatments emphasize the paradox: a deadly creature becomes a healing image, but only when properly gazed upon.Gafney, “Nehushtan, the Copper Serpent” ¹⁹

In the wider ancient Near East, serpents and winged snakes appear as protectors, especially in Egyptian iconography: the uraeus cobra on pharaonic crowns signifies royal power and the fiery, vigilant eye of the sun god.Visual commentary on bronze serpent; discussion of Egyptian serpent imagery ²⁰

Here the serpent is a focus of attention and a guardian of the conscious, solar order. Look properly and you live; misuse the image and it devolves into idolatry. Mythologically, this is about the discipline of awareness: the same psychic energy that can destroy can also heal, depending on how it is held in consciousness.

Kundalinī: The Serpent Power and Vertical Consciousness#

Indian Tantric sources move from metaphor to neuro-mythology with indecent clarity.

The Ṣaṭ-Cakra-Nirūpaṇa, a Sanskrit text on the six (later seven) chakras, describes Kundalinī as a serpent power (śakti) “coiled three and a half times” at the base of the spine, asleep until awakened by yogic practice.Sat-Cakra-Nirūpaṇa translation ²¹ John Woodroffe’s classic English study, The Serpent Power (1919), comments:

“The power is the Goddess Kundalini, or that which is coiled; for Her form is that of a coiled and sleeping serpent in the lowest bodily centre, at the base of the spinal column, until… She is aroused in that Yoga which is named after Her.” ³

When aroused, Kundalinī ascends through the chakras—the subtle centers aligned with the spinal axis—piercing each lotus until uniting with Śiva in the crown center, producing liberation (mokṣa) or at least radical shifts in consciousness.Woodroffe 1919 ³

Several features bear on our theme:

• The serpent is literally identified with the nervous system: Jung explicitly notes that in Gnostic and Tantric imagery “the serpent is a symbol for the spinal cord and basal ganglia, because a snake is mainly backbone.” ¹³
• Awakening is vertical and staged; consciousness climbs, integrating bodily, emotional, and cognitive strata.
• The process is dangerous; classical texts warn of madness or physical breakdown if Kundalinī is forced or misdirected.

Indian tradition thus encodes an explicit model of consciousness as serpent: coiled potential energy, dangerous if mishandled, world-transforming when integrated.

Rainbow Serpents and Initiation Law in Aboriginal Australia#

Aboriginal Australian mythologies feature a family of Rainbow Serpent beings (Ngalyod, Julunggul, Yurlunggur, etc.) who shape the landscape, control water, and enforce ritual law.Aboriginal Art Library, “Rainbow Serpent”; Mandel Gallery overview ²²

One widely cited narrative describes how the Rainbow Serpent carved out rivers and waterholes; those ancestral beings who obeyed the Serpent’s laws were transformed into humans, while those who disobeyed became stones and features of the landscape.Fish Enterprises retelling ²³ In other variants, the serpent swallows initiates and regurgitates them, transformed, sometimes linked to menstruation and blood symbolism.Knight, “The Rainbow Snake” ²⁴

Mircea Eliade summarizes a Central Australian initiation in which medicine men symbolically throw the candidate into the jaws of a subterranean serpent; he is swallowed, reduced to the size of an infant, and later expelled, reborn with new powers.Rites and Symbols of Initiation ⁶

The pattern is clear:

• The serpent is creator of topology: rivers, waterholes, rock outcrops, the literal ground of experience.
• The serpent is also the giver and enforcer of law: who gets to be “truly human” versus who is frozen into stone.
• Initiation is explicitly framed as being swallowed by the serpent and returned with new status and knowledge.

In terms of consciousness, Rainbow Serpent complexes dramatize the passage from pre-cultural existence into a ritually structured, law-conscious human world. To become an initiated person is to pass through the body of the serpent.

Feathered and Vision Serpents in Mesoamerica

Quetzalcōātl, the Feathered Serpent of knowledge and wind#

In central Mexican sources, Quetzalcōātl—“Feathered Serpent”—is both a god and a culture hero. Nahua and later colonial accounts relate him to wind, the planet Venus, the priesthood, and the arts of learning.Standard overviews ²⁵

Sahagún’s Florentine Codex and derivative scholarship portray Quetzalcōātl as a patron of priests and sages, associated with calendrical knowledge and ritual propriety.Wirth, “Quetzalcoatl, the Maya Maize God, and Jesus Christ”; Austin, “Temple of the Feathered Serpent” ²⁶ Codex Borgia imagery shows feathered serpents associated with wind, Venus cycles, and seasonal change; Milbrath’s reading of Borgia 36 argues that undulating Ehecatl–Quetzalcōātl serpents mark the rising winds that bring the rains, tying celestial cycles to agricultural time.Milbrath, “A Seasonal Calendar in the Codex Borgia” ²⁷

Quetzalcōātl thus fuses:

• the serpent (chthonic, earthly, underworld),
• feathers and wind (sky, breath, spirit),
• and technical knowledge (calendar, ritual, priesthood).

If you wanted a visual glyph for a consciousness that integrates underworld instincts, social order, and celestial pattern-recognition, you could do worse than a feathered serpent.

Vision Serpents and bloodletting: shamanic consciousness in Classic Maya art#

In Classic Maya art, serpent imagery often mediates visionary states. The Yaxchilán lintels (8th century AD) famously show Lady K’ab’al Xook performing a bloodletting ritual; from a bowl of blood and incense, a great serpent arises, and from the serpent’s mouth emerges an armed figure—either an ancestor or a royal double.Khan Academy, “Yaxchilán—Lintels 24 & 25”; British Museum, Lintel 25 description ²⁸

Steiger’s detailed study of Yaxchilán bloodletting iconography notes that Lintel 25 marks the first clear monumental use of the “vision serpent” motif at the site; the serpent becomes a standard way of depicting the conduit between the blood-offering and the appearance of otherworldly beings.Steiger, “Classic Maya Bloodletting Iconography in Yaxchilan Lintels” ²⁹

Here serpent = channel of vision. Blood (life-force, pain, sacrifice) + altered state = serpent aperture through which the invisible becomes visible. Consciousness, in the shamanic sense of accessing other levels of reality, literally takes a serpentine form.

Chinese Serpents of Order: Nüwa, Fuxi, and the White Snake

Nüwa and Fuxi: serpent-bodied civilizers#

Pre-Qin Chinese texts and later mythographers present Nüwa (女娲) and Fuxi (伏羲) as primordial culture-bringers, often depicted with human torsos and serpent tails, entwined and holding compass and square.Huainanzi; Shanhai jing summaries; New World Encyclopedia, “Nuwa” ³⁰

In many retellings, Nüwa:

• creates humans from clay,
• repairs the shattered sky after a cosmic disaster,
• restores harmony of the “five phases” and re-establishes order after a flood.Acutonics summary; contemporary syntheses ³¹

Iconographically, the serpent lower body marks these figures as liminal—part earth, part spirit—while their tools (compass and square) signify the imposition of intelligible pattern on chaos. They are not just creators of biological life but architects of a structured cosmos.

The Legend of the White Snake: revelation and unbearable knowledge#

Later Chinese folklore crystallizes serpent-consciousness themes in The Legend of the White Snake (白蛇传). The immortal serpent Bai Suzhen assumes human form, marries a man, and lives as his devoted wife—until a monk forces her to drink wine that reveals her true serpent nature. The revelation shatters her husband’s ordinary perception; he literally dies from the shock, unable to reconcile love and the terrifying truth.Hangzhou cultural summary; psychological reading ³²

The story is many things—romance, morality tale, religious polemic—but in our frame it reads as an allegory of consciousness encountering its own inhuman depths. The beloved spouse is also a vast, uncanny serpent; seeing that truth is both enlightenment and trauma. Bai Suzhen’s “true form” is precisely the sort of serpentine unconscious Jung thought moderns spend their lives half-glimpsing and half-repressing.

Serpents, Healing, and the Medical Imagination#

Greek religion and later medical iconography cemented another facet of serpent symbolism: healing as controlled encounter with dangerous knowledge.

Asclepius, god of medicine, bore a rod with a single serpent coiled around it—the archetype for modern medical emblems.Wikipedia “Asclepius”; Science Museum Group blog, “symbols of medicine” ³³ Ancient stories say a serpent licked Asclepius’ ears and taught him secret knowledge, or that he observed a serpent using herbs to revive another and thereby learned the art of resurrection.Review in Istanbul Medical Journal; toxicology overview ³⁴

Balacci and colleagues note that in classical understanding, the Rod of Asclepius symbolizes not just healing but “divinity, regeneration, and the power to face death.” ³⁵ The snake’s ability to shed its skin and to kill or cure with the same venom makes it an apt emblem for medicine as a disciplined traffic with mortality and transformation.

If we read “healing” in broad phenomenological terms as the reorganization of the self around new insight (e.g., that one is mortal, finite, embedded in complex causal networks), then the medical serpent is yet another figure for a consciousness that learns to ingest its own poison without disintegrating.

Eating the Serpent: Wisdom Motifs in Norse and European Folklore#

European myth and folktale preserve a recurrent motif: consuming serpent flesh or blood confers the ability to understand hidden languages or to gain supernatural wisdom.

The Poetic Edda’s Fáfnismál and the Völsunga saga narrate how the hero Sigurðr (Sigurd) slays the dragon Fáfnir, roasts his heart, and, upon tasting a drop of the heart’s blood, suddenly understands the speech of birds. The birds warn him of betrayal and advise him to eat the whole heart “to know all wisdom.” ⁵

The Brothers Grimm tale “The White Snake” (KHM 17) has a servant secretly eat a piece of a white serpent prepared for the king; he immediately begins to understand animals and later succeeds in a series of impossible tasks with their help.Grimm, “The White Snake” ³⁶ Folklorists classify this as ATU 673 “White Serpent’s Flesh,” a motif in which eating a white snake confers supernatural knowledge or capacities, widely attested across Europe and beyond.Kuusela, “Initiation by White Snake and the Acquisition of Supernatural Knowledge” ³⁷

Kuusela explicitly interprets these legends as symbolic initiations: low-status individuals gain access to powers normally reserved for elites through secret consumption of serpent flesh. The serpent—white, dragon, or otherwise—is wisdom concentrated into a body that can be ingested.

In all these tales, wisdom is not acquired by reading or polite dialogue; it is acquired by eating the serpent, incorporating into oneself a dangerous, chthonic knowledge that ordinary social order would prefer to keep at arm’s length.

Comparative Overview#

To keep the swarm under control, here’s a compact table of serpent figures that specifically bestow or reshape consciousness rather than simply representing chaos or evil:

Table 1. Serpent figures and consciousness-bestowing functions#

This is not exhaustive, but it is enough to see a pattern: when myths want to show consciousness being turned up a notch, a serpent is often in the room.

Theoretical Synthesis: Serpents, Nervous Systems, and Second-Order Awareness#

At this point we can risk a synthesis, fully aware that it is a working model rather than a proven theorem.

1. Serpents as embodied metaphors for the nervous system#

Jung’s observation that a snake is “mainly backbone” is more than a cute line; it hints at why serpent motifs cling to experiences of altered awareness.Jung ETH Lectures ¹³ A long, flexible, segmented body that moves via waves and coils is a good external model for the spinal cord and its propagating signals.

Kundalinī imagery makes this explicit: the serpent is the psychic energy latent in the spine, and its ascent is literally the nervous system coming to consciousness of itself.Woodroffe 1919 ³ The Eden story does something similar at a mythic level: the serpent lives in the tree of knowledge, and its intervention reorganizes the human psyche into a reflexive, ethically aware structure.

2. Venom, pharmakon, and the double-edged nature of self-awareness#

Serpent venom dramatizes the ambivalence of consciousness. It can kill quickly; in some ritual contexts, it may induce altered states or be handled as a sacred power.Tsoucalas & Karamanou, “Asclepius and the Snake as Toxicological Symbols” ¹¹ Similarly, self-consciousness can be both medicine and poison: the Eden story insists that moral knowledge is inseparable from shame and death-awareness.

The bronze serpent, the Rod of Asclepius, and the Rainbow Serpent’s law all encode this: look at the serpent properly and live; relate to it wrongly and die. Consciousness here is pharmacological—dose and context matter.

3. Shedding skin and the temporality of consciousness#

Ecdysis, the snake’s shedding of skin, offers a visible analog for ego death and renewal. Gilgamesh losing the plant to a shedding serpent is a cruel joke about biological versus cultural immortality. The ouroboros, endlessly devouring and renewing itself, is practically a diagram of recursive consciousness: a mind that can take itself as object, “eat its own tail,” and thereby reorganize its own patterns.Jung on Ouroboros ³⁹

Initiatory myths of being swallowed by a serpent and reborn echo the same temporal structure. Eliade points out that many of these rites regress the neophyte to embryonic status before reintroducing them into social time; the serpent’s belly is a kind of amniotic eternity.Eliade, Rites and Symbols of Initiation ⁶

4. Serpents as mediators between levels of reality#

In almost all the cases surveyed, serpents connect levels:

• earth and sky (Feathered Serpent, Rainbow Serpent’s arc),
• underworld and human world (vision serpent emerging from blood trance),
• pre-cultural chaos and ordered cosmos (Nüwa’s repaired sky, law-giving Rainbow Serpent),
• mortal and immortal (Gilgamesh’s serpent, Asclepius’ resurrection lore).

Henderson and Oakes’ The Wisdom of the Serpent—a classic Jungian comparative study—argues that serpents are “mediatory figures par excellence,” linking death, rebirth, and the acquisition of new modes of consciousness.Henderson & Oakes, The Wisdom of the Serpent ⁴⁰

From a cognitive perspective, it makes sense that cultures project the felt threshold experiences of trauma, initiation, ecstatic practice, and moral awakening onto powerful, ambiguous animals that already live at ecological thresholds (water/land, burrow/surface) and perceptual thresholds (often noticed only at the last possible moment).

5. Moral valence: not all snakes are nice#

This is not an attempt to sanitize serpent symbolism into a purely “spiritual” emblem. Many myths underscore the catastrophic, even nihilistic, side of snake-consciousness: Jörmungandr encircles the world and helps bring about its end; Tiamat, in later readings, is a monstrous dragon slain by Marduk to create order.Enuma Elish synopses; Britannica on Tiamat ⁴¹

Ombrosi’s recent theological essay emphasizes that while many traditions attribute a “positive aura” to serpents (healing, wisdom, fertility), the biblical tradition often harnesses the symbol polemically, casting the serpent as radical adversary.Ombrosi 2024 ⁸

Yet even in hostile portrayals, the serpent remains bound to questions of knowledge, order, and cosmic structure. Killing the dragon is never just pest control; it is always an act of world-making, and the dragon’s body often becomes the world.

FAQ #

Q 1. Are serpent myths evidence of a single ancient “serpent cult of consciousness”? A. No; the more economical explanation is convergent symbolism: similar animals and similar threshold experiences (initiation, moral awakening, shamanic trance) produce analogous myths in different places, though historical diffusion certainly amplifies some serpent traditions.

Q 2. How is Kundalinī different from other serpent symbols like the Eden snake? A. Kundalinī is an explicit psychophysiological model—serpent as spinal energy—embedded in a yoga system, whereas the Eden serpent functions narratively as tempter and catalyst of ethical self-consciousness; both, however, link serpents to dangerous increases in awareness.

Q 3. Why do so many healing symbols (Rod of Asclepius, pharmacy signs) use snakes? A. Ancient medicine saw snakes as emblems of regeneration (skin-shedding), liminality between life and death (venom), and secret knowledge; Asclepius’ snake became shorthand for the risky, transformative art of confronting illness and mortality. ³⁴

Q 4. Do serpent-eating motifs (Sigurðr, the White Snake) imply literal psychoactive use of snake parts? A. There’s little direct evidence; folklorists usually read them symbolically as initiations into hidden knowledge, though they may echo real practices of ingesting potent animal substances or venoms in shamanic contexts.Kuusela 2021 ³⁷

Q 5. How do Jung and Eliade differ in reading serpents? A. Jung treats the serpent archetypally and psychologically (unconscious, libido, transformation), while Eliade tracks its roles in specific ritual systems (initiation, death-and-rebirth, “paradisiacal” motifs); together they map both interior and historical faces of the symbol.Jung 1952; Eliade 1958/1960 ¹⁴

Footnotes#

Sources#

1. Ombrosi, Ornella. “The Serpent’s Curse Compared to That of Eve: For a New Reading of Genesis 3:14–15.” Religions 15, no. 8 (2024). ⁸
2. Woodroffe, John (Arthur Avalon). The Serpent Power: Being the Ṣaṭ-Cakra-Nirūpana and Pādukā-Pañcaka. 1st ed. 1919; numerous reprints. ³
3. “Sat-Chakra Nirupana – Kundalini Chakras.” English translation PDF with commentary. ²¹
4. “The Deceitful Snake in Genesis 3.” Christ Overall, 2025. ⁴²
5. “Genesis 3:5.” BibleHub. ⁹
6. “Numbers 21:9.” BibleHub. ¹⁸
7. Gafney, Wilda C. “Nehushtan, the Copper Serpent: Its Origins and Fate.” TheTorah.com, 2017. ¹⁹
8. Trujillo de Gutiérrez, Estéban. “A Serpent Steals the Plant of Immortality in the Eleventh Tablet of the Epic of Gilgamesh.” Samizdat, 2015. ¹⁶
9. “Utnapishtim.” Epic of Gilgamesh entry. ³⁸
10. “Serpent symbolism.” Wikipedia overview. ¹²
11. Eliade, Mircea. Rites and Symbols of Initiation. (French original 1958; English tr. 1959). ⁶
12. “The Rainbow Serpent.” Japingka Aboriginal Art. ⁴
13. Knight, Chris. “Chapter 13: The Rainbow Snake.” In Blood Relations: Menstruation and the Origins of Culture (unpublished chapter PDF). ²⁴
14. “Rainbow Serpent in Aboriginal Art & Culture.” Aboriginal Art Library. ²²
15. “Quetzalcōātl.” Wikipedia entry. ²⁵
16. Wirth, Diane E. “Quetzalcoatl, the Maya Maize God, and Jesus Christ.” Journal of Book of Mormon Studies 11, no. 1 (2002): 4–17. ²⁶
17. Milbrath, Susan. “A Seasonal Calendar in the Codex Borgia.” 2016. ²⁷
18. Austin, Alfredo López. “The Temple of Quetzalcoatl at Teotihuacan.” 1991. ⁴³
19. “Maya: The Yaxchilán Lintels.” Smarthistory. ⁴⁴
20. “Lintel 25 of Yaxchilán Structure 23.” British Museum collection. ⁴⁵
21. Steiger, Kristina R. “Classic Maya Bloodletting Iconography in Yaxchilan Lintels.” MA thesis, BYU, 2010. ²⁹
22. “Nuwa (女娲).” New World Encyclopedia. ⁴⁶
23. “Mythology: Nuwa.” IntroTravelChina. ³⁰
24. “The Myth of Nü Gua, Chinese Snake Goddess.” Acutonics. ³¹
25. “Nuwa: The Goddess Who Created Humanity and Repaired the Sky.” The Elemental Mind (2025). ⁴⁷
26. “Quetzalcoatl – the Feathered Serpent.” Malinche Info (2011). ⁴⁸
27. “Asclepius.” Wikipedia entry. ³³
28. Güner, Esra. “Why Is the Medical Symbol a Snake?” Istanbul Medical Journal 19, no. 3 (2019): 227–231. ³⁴
29. Tsoucalas, Gregory, and Marianna Karamanou. “Asclepius and the Snake as Toxicological Symbols in Medicine.” In Toxicology: An Interdisciplinary Approach, 2019. ¹¹
30. Balacci, Sergiu, et al. “The Rod of Asclepius – symbol of healing.” (2025 preprint). ³⁵
31. Kuusela, Teemu. “Initiation by White Snake and the Acquisition of Supernatural Knowledge.” Religionsvidenskabeligt Tidsskrift 74 (2021): 35–52. ³⁷
32. “The White Snake.” Wikipedia entry. ³⁶
33. “Fáfnismál.” Wikipedia entry. ⁵
34. “The Children of Odin: The Sword of the Volsungs – Sigurd’s Youth.” Sacred Texts. ⁴⁹
35. Henderson, Joseph L., and Maud Oakes. The Wisdom of the Serpent: The Myths of Death, Rebirth, and Resurrection. Princeton University Press, 1963. ⁴⁰
36. Jung, C. G. Symbols of Transformation. Collected Works, vol. 5. ¹⁴
37. “Carl Jung on the ‘Serpent’.” Jung Depth Psychology site. ¹³
38. “Carl Jung and the Ouroboros.” GnosisJung.org, 2025. ³⁹
39. “The Rainbow Serpent Dreamtime Story.” Mandel Art Gallery blog. ⁵⁰
40. “Epic of Gilgamesh – Tablet XI summary.” GradeSaver. ⁵¹

(And assorted minor web sources cited inline above.)