Serpent lore and symbols of deity

Many heroes of antiquity were believed to be the sons of serpents. Alexander the Great took pride in being the child of Jupiter The Roman equivalent of Zeus, who was said to have visited Alexander's mother, Olympias, in the form of a serpent. According to Plutarch, Philip of Macedon—Alexander’s reputed father—once peeked through a crack in a door and saw his wife in the embrace of the disguised god; he was supposedly struck blind in the eye that witnessed the act.

On one occasion, Alexander signed a letter to his mother as "Alexander, son of Jupiter Ammon." Olympias immediately replied, "I wish you would hold your tongue and neither slander me nor provoke Juno The wife of Jupiter, known for her jealousy to incriminate me. She might do me great harm if you proclaim yourself to be HIS son."

However, others claim that she privately told Alexander the secret of his birth and urged him to act with the dignity expected of his divine origin. It is likely that the legend was fueled by the fact that Olympias was a devoted participant in the wild rituals of Bacchus Dionysus, the god of wine and ecstasy and introduced large serpents to make the ceremonies more impressive.

A similar parentage was attributed to Scipio Africanus. His mother had given up hope of having children until a huge serpent was found in her bed, after which a prophet predicted she would bear a son. Even a figure as great as Augustus Caesar was not given a common origin; his mother, while sleeping in a temple, was said to have been visited by a dragon,¹ who left an indelible mark of a snake on her body, forcing her to stop using public baths.

It is a testament to the high regard for the serpent that such stories, far from being shameful, were considered honorable and even glorious. This is not surprising, given that the serpent was sacred to many deities, including Jupiter, Neptune, Pluto, Apollo, Mercury, Serapis, Isis, Juno, Minerva, and Ceres, as well as the healing gods Aesculapius and Hygeia.

The serpent was not just a symbol of God but was called "very God" himself. Philo of Byblos describes the snake as the greatest of all the Gods and the Ruler of all things. It was the Agathodaemon original: "Agathodæmon," meaning "Good Spirit" or Holy Spirit of the Gnostics. Hippolytus states that the Naaseni from the Hebrew "nachash," meaning snake were a sect of Christian Gnostics who worshipped the Logos The Word or Divine Reason under the name and image of a serpent.

The "all-seeing eye" is actually a representation of a coiled serpent with its head in the center. The Greek word for God, "theos," is believed by the famous archaeologist Jacob Bryant to be derived from Taut or Theuth, which is represented by a snake in the Phoenician alphabet. The worship of the serpent was universal. In Mexico, Quetzalcoatl—the feathered serpent who hated cruelty, hated war, and taught men agriculture—was believed to have been immaculately conceived as an incarnation of the Great Father, who was also a serpent.

How, then, did the greatest of the Gods become the Devil?

¹ A land snake was called serpens, a water snake anguis, and those that frequented temples were known as dracones or dragons.