The symbolism of the alphabet

...cup of Aesculapius The Greek god of medicine. In the Dionysian mysteries, the priests were crowned with serpents and cried out "Eva, Eva, Evoe, Evoe," which are names for the snake. The greatest boast of a Druid was to be considered a serpent.

The Athenians were known as Serpentigenae serpent-born. Even after the worship of Jehovah was established, Moses found it necessary to appeal to the people's faith by raising a bronze serpent in the wilderness to heal the terrified Israelites. Snake worship extended even to countries where serpents did not exist. They were unknown in Ireland (except on monuments) both before and after the time of St. Patrick. His achievement as a missionary was not in driving out living reptiles, but in suppressing the symbol of the serpent and replacing it with Christian emblems.

Among the Ophites A Gnostic sect that reversed the roles of the serpent and God in Genesis, the bread of the Sacrament was consecrated by being encircled with the coils of a serpent released from a chest or coffer for this purpose. The bread was then called the "Perfect Sacrifice." Our Lord Himself was referred to as the "True and Perfect Serpent."

Not only Hermes, but all those credited with inventing or spreading the alphabet have connections to serpents. Cadmus, who is traditionally said to have brought letters to Greece, is depicted as a man from the waist up and a serpent below. Thoth (or Tet) was said to be the inventor of the Phoenician alphabet; he was the first to introduce the worship of serpents, and the serpent is the actual meaning and symbol of the Phoenician letter that bears his name.

In Philo's treatise on Phoenician letters—translated from Sanchoniathon and preserved in the writings of Eusebius—great emphasis is placed on the close connection between the alphabet and serpents. His views are summarized by Bunsen: "The general sense seems to be that the forms and movements of serpents were used to invent the oldest letters representing the gods." He adds that there is "undeniable evidence that the letters representing the gods were hieroglyphics in which serpent forms were dominant." King, in The Gnostics and Their Remains, notes that the frequent construction of symbols on ancient monuments using lines ending in dots or heads strongly suggests a theory for their origin. In this regard, they look remarkably like certain characters in the oldest Babylonian alphabet.

A thousand years ago, the name of the alphabet of the gods, Devanāgarī, was believed to be derived from Nāga (a snake). However, modern Oriental scholars—forgetting the horror with which a mistake in poetic meter a "false quantity" was once viewed in school—insist that it comes from Nāga (a city). There seems to be a determined effort, almost a conspiracy...