The story of Eve receiving the fruit of knowledge from the Serpent in Genesis is familiar, but most people don’t know that Western European artists depicted the Serpent as a Goddess from about 1200 to the 1600s. The earliest example I’ve found is a sculpture from Notre Dame de Paris during the 1200s. The Snake Goddess is coiled around the Tree of Wisdom:
Many illuminated manuscripts show the Snake Goddess coiled around the tree in the same way, like the kundalini serpent winding around the human spine, but wearing a ladies coif:
Another coiffed serpent, with dragon legs, from the Maastricht Book of Hours:
A lot of these illustrations are from Books of Hours, devotional books made for the upper classes. This French example shows the Serpent Goddess as inseparable from the Tree:
A Dutch or Flemish artist shows the Snake Goddess passing the apple to Eve, as in an initiatory transmission. The Tree of of Knowledge has been transformed into a crucifixion, a common conflation as pagan themes were being christianized.
The same theme comes through in stained glass art, from Germany:
Another coiling Serpent Woman, but with Death at the root of the once-Tree-of-Life (in European art if not in the original Hebrew). French translation of Augustine’s City of God, Virgil Master, Paris 1410-1412:
This one is my favorite, with its soulful Dragon Goddess and her chubby paws, in a Belgian Book of Hours from Bruges or Ghent, 1400s.
Next is a detail from Hieronymus Bosch, the Hay Wain, along the same lines. The Low Countries, France and Germany are the center of gravity for these Snake Goddesses.
But here’s an English version, showing the serpent woman as winged, and then the Expulsion of Paradise, here imagined as a fortress.
Michelangelo was still painting the Snake Woman coiled around the Tree in the 1500s.
The intent transmission from Goddess to Woman is not interrupted by his intrusive Adam.
This German illumination shows a mystic encounter between the Snake Goddess and Eve, standing at the confluence of rivers described in Genesis.
A number of manuscripts show the Serpent as a Dragon Lady, winged and with paws:
Another, even more chimeric Dragon Woman, a sort of cockatrice,
from a Dutch woodcut of the late 1400s:
And more phoenix wings on the Snake, from an unidentified manuscript:
The theme continues into the full 1600s:
And the last example that I’ve found (so far), for a span of over 400 years.
She has the dragon wings again:
The theme of the Serpent Goddess definitely resonated with Western European artists, though the Bible does not present the Snake as a female, much less a goddess. This same area of Europe has a deeper substrate, in which Mother Earth sits under a Tree giving suckle to a Serpent. I’ve found six or seven examples in the margins of manuscripts and in ivory diptychs carved as gospel covers for Frankish and German aristocrats. Some are featured in my book Witches and Pagans: Women in European Folk Religion, 700-1100.
Later, theologians transformed these remnants of Germanic heathenry into the figure of Luxuria (Sensuality) — one of the Seven Deadly Sins. The earliest versions, circa 1000, are quite pagan and brimming with vitality. But this figure gets increasingly demonized, and instead of the snakes nursing at her breast, they are shown as gnawing on her. She herself becomes skeletal, withered, and anguished in church sculptures of the 1300s, which often show her in the company of demons.
But appeal of the Snake Goddess persisted, in forms unwarranted by the Biblical narrative. They arose out of popular culture around a Tree of Life and submerged goddess traditions, even as those faded before the cult of the saints.
©2018 Max Dashu
You must be logged in to post a comment.