Serpent

Distinct from the Dragon, and the most reversed form on this page. Almost every reading of it — good and bad — descends from one physical fact: an animal that periodically sheds its skin and continues.

Instances

Asklepios (Greek — the healing staff ⚕) · Eden (Hebrew — the deceiver) · Ouroboros (Greco-Egyptian — the tail-eater) · Quetzalcoatl (Nahua — creator) · Nāga (South Asia — guardian of waters) · Wadjet (Egyptian — the uraeus of royal protection)

The flip

The renewal that makes the serpent an emblem of medicine is the same renewal that makes it an emblem of duplicity: a creature that changes its skin is reborn or two-faced depending entirely on who is telling it. The sharpest evidence is not cross-cultural but internal — the tradition that puts a serpent at the tree in Eden also has Moses raise a bronze serpent on a pole to heal those who look at it, a few books later and in the same canon. The flip does not require two cultures. One will do.