School of Suspicion

Category: The Serpent and the Slayer

A hero meets a serpent. It may be the most widely distributed plot in the ancient world: Indra against Vritra, Apollo against Python, Perseus against the Gorgon, and the promise in Genesis that the woman’s offspring will crush the serpent’s head. These articles follow the pattern and ask whose interest it served.

  • Cadmus — The Dragon’s Teeth

    Cadmus — The Dragon’s Teeth

    Cadmus kills the guardian of the spring, sows its teeth, and founds Thebes with the survivors. Read once as courage and reparation, once as a foreign settlement told from the side that won.

  • The Serpent Slayers

    The Serpent Slayers

    Genesis 3:15 is usually called the first messianic prophecy, and the reading is old and serious. God turns to the serpent, promises lasting hostility between its offspring and the woman’s, and says that one will be struck on the head and the other on the heel. Christian tradition has read that as the announcement of…