Snake

The Snake is a mythic figure in the book’s account of beliefs connecting the moon, fertility, and menstruation. It is presented not as an independent animal character in a narrative, but as an emblem whose meanings gather around regeneration, knowledge, and human mortality. Its significance lies in how those associations make women’s bodily experience part of a larger symbolic system.

Lunar Associations

A note identifies the moon as a source of fertility and describes it as the master of women. In the beliefs summarized there, the moon may take the form of a man or a Snake and couple with women; the Snake is understood as an epiphany of the moon. The image thus connects a celestial power to a creature that appears in stories of fertility and sexual origin.

Regeneration, Knowledge, and Mortality

The Snake’s symbolic force comes partly from its shedding and renewal: it molts and regenerates, and is described as immortal. It is also associated with the distribution of fertility and knowledge and with guardianship over sacred sources, the Tree of Life, and the Fountain of Youth. Yet its powers are ambivalent. The same figure that signifies renewal is also said to take immortality away from man, linking the possibility of continued life to the threat of loss.

Menstruation and Mythic Explanation

Persian and rabbinical traditions cited in the note attribute menstruation to the first woman’s intercourse with the Snake. This claim makes menstrual experience legible through a mythic origin story, joining the Snake’s lunar and fertile associations to a specifically gendered account of bodily difference. The book records the tradition as evidence of the symbolic beliefs surrounding menstruation, not as a biological explanation.

Function in the Book’s Account of Myth

The Snake’s associations exemplify the book’s wider argument that myths do more than preserve spontaneous interpretations of nature: patriarchal society can shape them into images that carry social imperatives into religion, tradition, language, and stories. Across the cited examples, the creature mediates between fertility and mortality, natural change and human meaning. Its significance therefore rests less on a single fixed identity than on the meanings assigned to it—and on how those meanings help frame women’s place within a male-made symbolic order.