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is healing staff as a

symbol (Figure 25). His features are the features carried by the world savior in the plastic art of antiquity. And this most exalted and serene god of departed souls has his roots in the subterranean realm, where the ser

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pent makes its hom

e. It is in t]le form of a serpent that he is accorded his earliest devotion. It is he himself who winds around his staff: namely, the departed soul

of the deceased, which sur

vives and reappears in the form of the serpent. For the snake is not only, as Cushing's Indians would say, the fatal bite in readiness or fulfillment, destroying without mercy; the snake also reveals by its own ability to cast off i

ts slough, slipping,

as it were, out of its own mortal remains, how a body can leave its skin and yet continue to live. It can slither into the earth and reemerge

. The return from within the eart

h, from where the dead rest, along with the capacity for bodily renewal, makes the snake the most natural symbol of immortality and of rebirth from s

ickness and mortal anguish.4

In the temple of Asclepius at Kos in Asia Minor the god stood transfigured in human form, a statue holding in his hand the staff with the serpent coiled

around it. But his truest

and most powerful essence was not revealed in this lifeless mask of stone but lived instead in the for

m of a serpent in the tem

ple's innermost sanctum: fed, cared for, and attended in cultic devotion as only the Mokis are able to care for their serpents. On a Spanish calen

dar leaf from the thirteenth

century, which I found in a Vatican manuscript, representing Asclepius as the ruler of the month in the sign of Sc

orpio, significa

EMRTCnt aspects of the Asclepian serpent cult are revealed in their coarseness as well as their refinement (Figure

RASS/SODAR Sounding Site

26). We can see here, hieroglyphically indicated, ritual acts from the cult of Kos in thirty sections, all identical, magical desire of the Indians to enter the realm of the

serpent. We see the rite of

incubation and the serpent as it is carried by human hands and worshipped as a deity of the springs. This medieval manuscript is astrological. In other words, it shows these ritual forms not as prescriptions for devotional practices, as had previously