The sacred serpent: Asclepius, Wadjet and the Nāgas of India
Three faces of the sacred serpent: the staff of Asclepius and Epidaurus, the cobra Wadjet of the pharaohs, the Nāgas of Hinduism and Buddhism.
The serpent is perhaps the most ambivalent animal in religious history. It can embody chaos, like the serpent Apophis in Egypt, or temptation, as in the biblical story of the garden. Yet many cultures have venerated it as a guardian, a healer and a protector of kings. Three figures, born in very different contexts, show this positive face clearly: the serpent of Asclepius in Greece, the cobra Wadjet in Egypt and the Nāgas of the Indian world.
The staff of Asclepius
Asclepius, son of Apollo, was venerated in Greece as the god of medicine, and his main attribute was a staff around which a single serpent is coiled. The symbol should not be confused with the caduceus of Hermes, which has two serpents and two wings. The snake, which periodically sheds its skin, lent itself to evoking renewal, and live snakes were kept in the god's sanctuaries.
The most famous sanctuary was that of Epidaurus, in the Peloponnese, where pilgrims slept in a sacred portico, the abaton, hoping to receive a visit from the god in a dream. Inscriptions of the fourth century BC list the cures attributed to Asclepius, often with the intervention of sacred snakes or dogs. According to Livy and Ovid, after an epidemic broke out in 293 BC, Rome brought a sacred serpent from Epidaurus, which chose to settle on the Tiber Island, where the god's temple was built.
Wadjet, the cobra of the pharaohs
In Egypt the rearing cobra ready to strike was the image of Wadjet, protecting goddess of Lower Egypt, worshipped in the city of Per-Wadjet, which the Greeks called Buto, in the Delta. Together with Nekhbet, the vulture goddess of Upper Egypt, she formed the pair of the «Two Ladies», who protected the king and gave their name to one of the titles of his official titulary.
The cobra on the ruler's brow, called the uraeus from the Greek transcription, was the most visible sign of this protection. It was believed that it could spit fire at the pharaoh's enemies, and for this reason it appears on crowns, diadems and funerary masks, such as that of Tutankhamun, where the uraeus stands beside the vulture's head. Sometimes the motif was multiplied in friezes of cobras crowning chapels and shrines.
The Nāgas in Hinduism and Buddhism
In India the Nāgas are semi-divine beings in the form of cobras or with a human body and a serpent's hood, dwelling in underground and watery realms and guarding treasures and springs. In Hindu mythology the cosmic serpent Śeṣa, also called Ananta, «endless», supports the world and serves as the couch of Viṣṇu resting on the primordial ocean, while the serpent Vāsuki served as the rope in the churning of the ocean of milk.
Buddhism welcomed these figures. A well-known story tells that, during a storm, the Nāga king Mucalinda wrapped the meditating Buddha in his coils and sheltered him with his open hood, a scene frequent in the sculpture of Southeast Asia. Even today, during the festival of Nag Panchami, homage is paid to images of serpents in many regions of India.
Comparing these traditions does not prove a common origin, but it reveals recurring themes: the serpent linked to earth and water, to kingship and to renewal. The staff of Asclepius has survived as the emblem of many medical organisations, and the royal cobra still gazes at us from the masks of the pharaohs in museums, a reminder of how wide the prestige of this animal was in antiquity.