Some patterns appear everywhere.
The serpent coils through the oldest myths we know — around the world tree in Norse cosmology, swallowing its own tail in ancient Egypt, breathing chaos beneath the primordial waters of Babylon, guarding the threshold between worlds in Greek tradition, dreaming the landscape into existence in Aboriginal Australia. Civilizations that never met, separated by oceans and millennia, independently made the serpent one of their most powerful symbols. Why this symbol, and not another? That question is at the heart of this site.
I am Laetitia Em. I completed my PhD at the University of Groningen, in the Netherlands, where my research focused on psychic distance — the perceived distance between countries that shapes how businesses and people engage across borders. It was there that I encountered the concept of cultural overlap: the idea that rather than endlessly mapping what separates cultures, we might look more carefully at what they unexpectedly share. The primordial serpent, I have come to believe, is one of the most striking illustrations of that overlap anyone could find.
My fascination with mythology began much earlier, in childhood, with Greek myths — the kind that stay with you long enough to shape how you think. It has since expanded considerably. This site is an attempt to follow that curiosity seriously — not as a catalogue of curiosities, but as a genuine inquiry into one of humanity’s most persistent and widely shared symbolic figures. The articles here draw on comparative mythology, history of religions, and anthropology. They are written for curious readers, not specialists, though I hope specialists might find something of interest too.
This project grew alongside the Ultimate Undulation collection — a series of generative art prints in which the primordial serpent travels through time: from the ancient civilizations of Egypt, China, and the Norse world, through the crises and tensions of the present, toward imagined futures and timeless concepts. Twenty colorways, four chapters, one unbroken symbol.
serpent-mythology.com is an independent editorial project.