once pristine

the serpent: a double headed snake, one head at each end, comes up in a dream — and a few days later the image is discovered, seemingly coincidentally, in the pages of a history book, as a double-headed snake forming an Aztec breast ornament 'probably representing the Aztecs' god Huitzilopochtli, "humming bird of the south" ' : In attempting to nail down down the significance of this returning serpent: Eliade, in his book Cosmos and History, The Myth of Eternal Return, in discussing "the symbolism of the center", referring to the Indian tradition of nailing the head of the snake that supports the earth to the center of the earth, declares that the serpent symbolizes 'chaos, the formless and nonmanifested.' : Joseph L. Henderson, in his essay in Carl Jung's Man and His Symbols, mentions, as does Eliade extensively, the heroic battle to conquer the primeval chaos represented by the snake : the twin snakes (although not double-headed, merely two snakes) occurs variously, as with Hercules killing two snakes as an infant, and Eliade mentions several mythical triple headed snakes and monsters : Henderson calls the snakes 'transcendent symbols of the depths', stemming from the 'depths of the ancient Earth Mother' and refers to the snake as 'Perhaps the commonest dream symbol of transcendence' : the notes from the dream state 'it was a long thick snake on the floor and I was afraid of it. I couldn't figure out which end was which as both ends had eyeless heads.' : The blindness of the heads calls to mind Shah's retelling of Aesop's sufi fable of the mole : the double snake heads appear again in Henderson's reference to '(the caduceus) [two snakes entwined around a rod with wings] was carried over to the Roman god Mercury [from the Greek god Hermes] who also acquired wings, recalling the bird as a symbol of spritual transcendence' : the investigation then comes full circle to the Aztec in the combination of feathers and serpent, as a snake represented god of the Aztec was called 'the plumed serpent', the duality further indicated by Quetzalcóatl's name comprising two meanings through the combination of two words quetzal (green feather) and cóatl (serpent) : Lucan spoke of the mythological snake with a head at both ends, called an 'Amphisbaena'