---
title: The Moon and the Serpent
description: The moon and the serpent.
author:
  name: Graciela Paula Caldeiro
  url: http://graciela-caldeiro.idoneos.com
canonical: https://mitosyleyendas.idoneos.com/en/304516/
source: en/304516/index.md
---

<h2 id="la-luna-y-la-serpiente">The Moon and the Serpent</h2>

<div class="itemImage">&#10;&#10;<p><near-ilustration title="Ocean Moonlight - Krienke - : click here"></near-ilustration></p>&#10;</div>

Anyone familiar with the mythologies of the goddess in primitive, ancient, and Eastern worlds will undoubtedly recognize biblical equivalents. Nevertheless, the transformations these narratives underwent are far from few, and in many cases their original meaning was altered. For example, in the episode of Eve and the tree, nothing is said about the fact that the serpent that appeared and spoke to her was a deity in its own right, one that had been worshipped in the Levant some seven thousand years before the composition of the Book of Genesis. In the Louvre there is a vase dated to around 2025 BC that corresponds to a late Sumerian manifestation of this consort of the goddess, who bore the name Ningizzida, "Lord of the Tree of Truth." In this piece, two winged dragons (lion-birds) and two copulating serpents are also depicted, intertwined around a staff in the manner of the caduceus of Hermes, the Greek god of knowledge and rebirth.

The serpent's remarkable capacity to shed its skin and thereby renew its youth has endowed it throughout the world with the character of lord of mystery and rebirth — of which the moon, waxing and waning, shedding its skin as its shadow changes and growing anew, is the corresponding symbol in the firmament.

In this way, the moon is the lord and measure of the creative rhythm of life in the womb, and therefore of time, through which beings come and go: lord of mystery, of birth and of death, which are nothing but aspects of a single state of being.

The moon governs the tides and the dew that falls during the night to refresh the grass that feeds the cattle. But the serpent, though it dwells on the earth, is also lord of the waters; it glides with the movement of a wave, or ascends the branches of trees, hanging from them like deadly fruit. It might be observed that there is a clear phallic reference, though as a devourer it also suggests the feminine. Thus it could be said that the serpent implies a dual image, one that operates implicitly on the plane of feeling.

Bibliography:

Campbell, Joseph. _The Masks of God_ Occidental Mythology