Board Thread:Series general discussion/@comment-28601337-20170518051547/@comment-2112031-20170520102758

Sol Pacificus wrote:

The Wikia Editor wrote: Another modern mainstream perception is that the Serpent in the Garden was also supposed to be Satan. There is nothing in the actual text to suggest that this creature was supposed to be anything other than a talking snake.

The idea comes from that one time that Jesus referred to Satan as "that old serpent", but he also referred to the Pharisees at one point as a "den of vipers", which is obviously not meant to be taken literally.

The serpent was cursed to forever crawl on its belly and eat dust until the end of its days, indicating that this was supposed to be a mortal creature who would one day die (not to mention the fact that Satan was depicted as walking in the Book of Job, which is supposed to take place later).

The connection between the serpent and the Devil was definitely not made in early Christianity. However, the Qur'an explicitly calls the serpent the Devil or Satan when recalling the tale of Adam & Eve, meaning that it had entered mainstream even among Christians of Arabia by the 7th century CE and may not be as modern as we think. Note that that is still 600 years after Christianity's foundation after all.

Good point. Funny enough, I remembered the Qur'an's retelling while writing the post but then completelyt blanked out on the time it was written in. The concept of Lilith, however, was already around c. 40 BCE, where a passage in the Dead Sea Scrolls briefly mentions her.

Alos, it really was the mainstream interpretation during the Renaissance that Lilith was the serpent, as depicted in numerous artworks and sculptures from that period, rather notably on the ceiling of the Sistine Chapel.

It's pretty how myths change over time, escpecially how we perceive the characters in it. Hades is by far the nicer than Zeus and Poseidon, and yet looks at how he's been depicted in mainstream media over the years.

I think Aphrodite and her son, Eros (Cupid), are an interesting example of this. People today think of them as benevolent deities who helped people find love, whereas the Greeks considered love to be akin to a mental illness, an unhealthy obsession that caused people to do dangerous and unwise things in order to be with the object of their desire. Aphrodite and Eros were seen in as Loki-like tricksters who, as a prank, would make people fall in love with someone and then watch as they ruined their lives and those of others in order to be with that someone.

Eros' twin brother, Anteros, god of requited love, is far closer to what people today consider Eros to be.