snipped-for-privacy@netscapeSPAM-ME-NOT.net (paghat) wrote in news: snipped-for-privacy@soggy72.drizzle.com:
It's easy enough to imagine how this came about, if you take 'snake' semantically to be 'limbless creature'. After all, maggots and various worms are easily associated with death and the idea of 'returning things to the earth'. A genuine ophidian, being the pinnacle of limblessness, despite not really having the same death associations of worms and maggots, would make a suitable herald or emissary for any chthonic diety.
Perhaps the notion of the snake as a healer can be explained by the use of venom medicinally. If you take that and the notion of sin as disease, then the cross-Jesus:caduceus-snake analogy fits well, at least superficially. (I've read some pendants arguing about the true nature of a caduceus, but I don't really recall the arguemnts; here I mean the physician's symbol, a winged staff interwined with two serpents).
The traditional Chinese royal symbols are the dragon ('long-2' in Mandarin) for males and phoenix ('feng-4') for females. The Chinese dragon may superficially resemble a snake, but the written character for dragon is absolutely distinct from the character for 'snake' ('she-2') [the character for 'snake' contains the morpheme/radical for 'limbless wriggly creature' (now referred to as "insect") while the character for 'dragon' occurs as it's own morpheme (still "dragon")] and the associated semantics should be as old as the writing system. There's no confusing the two, unless something got lost in translation. It's not the same as in English, where although both 'snake' and 'dragon' can occur as distinct ideas, both can use 'serpent' synonymously. There is no such metonymy in the Chinese.
I guess here is where the Western idea of 'snake' as agent of death and by extension 'dragon/uber-snake' (primordial snake that has not lost it's legs) as agent of destruction differs from the Chinese idea. Chinese dragons are masters of destruction, but also agents of creation, e.g. controlling the rain, bringing forth life when adequate, but flooding and destruction when too much. Normal "Chinese" snakes, (being regarded highly but also listed as one of the "five noxious creatures") have nothing to do with that (and don't normally have supernatural status).
There's also the Norse Midgard serpent being only the final source of death. I always thought he lived in the "World Tree" gnawing at it, but apparently Odin just chucked him into the ocean and dispensed with the tree.
- S