(3) BIBLICAL – VILLAIN: SERPENT

 

“Now the serpent was more cunning than any beast of the field the Lord God had made.”

That’s right – it’s all Biblical mythology from here on for my top three villains, because the Bible is unmatched when it comes to mythic villains. Indeed, I could have easily filled out this top ten entirely with Biblical villains (and can easily compile a Top 10 Biblical Villains – with many special mentions left over).

But you simply couldn’t feature villains of Biblical mythology without that original sinner, the Serpent in the Garden of Eden, at or close to the top.

This might seem somewhat surprising at first. The Serpent is not of monstrous size, operates on a similarly small scale (duping two people in a Garden), and has a walk-on one-hit-wonder bit part right at the start of the Bible. However it’s a bit part that has a big impact, changing everything and without which there’d be no story for the rest of the Bible.

That bit part was the successful temptation of Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, to disobey God and eat the forbidden fruit – the fruit of the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil, as inexplicably in the Garden of Eden as the Serpent itself. That saw God forever evict Adam and Eve from the Garden – paradise lost, lest Adam and Eve then eat the even more forbidden fruit of the Tree of Life.

In Genesis, “the serpent is portrayed as a deceptive creature or trickster, who promotes as good what God had forbidden and shows particular cunning in its deception.”

Of course, the Serpent’s deception is even more compelling because, almost uniquely among animals in the Bible, it has the ability to reason and to speak. In short, it could talk, begging the question of why no snake has spoken ever since, because while God cursed the serpent after its successful temptation of humanity, He did not curse it with losing its ability to speak,

Speaking of God’s curse on the Serpent, there’s something even more eldritch about the Serpent that’s easily overlooked which is implicit in the very bible narrative itself – it had legs! Or as I like to imagine it…wings? God curses it to crawl on its belly as punishment for its crime. If I came across a walking talking snake, I’d listen to whatever it said too – and quite frankly, the whole Garden of Eden set up smacks of a classic two-man con played by God and the serpent.

The ability of the Serpent to reason and to speak, so close to our own, suggests that the Serpent in Eden may be symbolic for an aspect of ourselves or our nature. Or perhaps an adversarial aspect of God – or, as became the common Christian interpretation, the Adversary himself.

Anyway, serpents are a recurring feature in the Bible – after all, “in the history of religions, the snake is the “sinister, strange animal par excellence” – but I like to imagine that all serpents in the Bible are aspects of the Serpent.

Or similarly to the Midgard Serpent in Norse mythology, that it may have started as a small snake but it grew to truly monstrous size as the Dragon that faces off against the Woman Clothed in the Sun in the Book of Apocalypse. It doesn’t matter that the Dragon is set in the War in Heaven prior to the Garden of Eden – as an eternal being, it is outside the linear flow of time.

 

ELDRITCH ABOMINATION RANKING

It’s a walking, talking snake. So yeah.

 

FANTASY DARK LORD RANKING

As the cunning and persuasive being it is, it ranks quite highly as a potential fantasy dark lord – although its lack of force as opposed to temptation suggests it is better suited to play the part of the Mouth of Sauron rather than Sauron.

 

RATING: 5 STARS*****

S-TIER (DEVIL TIER)