To begin with, the Snake-Bird motif can be read directly from the evening sky, where the Bird manifests as the planet Venus, periodically appearing low and faint in the early dusk, and gradually increasing in intensity and height until it soars relatively high above the western night horizon.  Similarly, the coiled Snake appears periodically as the crescent New Moon, winding its way every month into conjunction with Venus.  These two luminaries, then, represent just those creative forces described in the summary of the Snake-Bird motif given above, and their Cosmic Egg, from which the newborn Sun is hatched on a daily and yearly basis, can actually be seen at each New Moon: it is the dark body of the Moon itself glowing in the reflected light of the Earth, sitting in crescent Snake/Nest.  What is more, this natural creation scenario repeats itself in regular eight-year cycles as Venus, the crescent Moon, and the sunset return to the same configuration against the background of the stars.  As a result, this celestial drama was readily visible to farmers of a very early date―easily as much as eleven thousand years ago.  And considering the countless instances of the Snake-Bird in world creation narrative, such symbolism must date back very early indeed.    Admittedly, not every instance in myth of a snake or a bird or even both together constitutes a token of the motif; these animals are simply too common in the world of ancient societies to admit such a generalization.  But actual occurrences of the Snake-Bird motif are easy enough to identify in myths around the world.  What is more, metaphor and metonymy imply, almost demand, that we interpret similar creatures in comparable relationships as parallel instance of the Snake-Bird motif.  For, just as the proximity of birds and stars in the sky (metonymy), not to mention the similar motion or “flight” of both (metaphor), leads naturally to their identification; and the similarity of shape (metaphor) and the proximity of snakes and roots in the ground (metonymy) admits of the same; so these hermeneutic devices for eliciting meaning allow us to view other, even imaginary, characters (such as winged-gods) as analogs of snakes and birds.
    A fine example of this tendency to develop meaning―and a pertinent one, too, since the ancients, not modern mythologists, produced the transformation―may be found in the myth of Herakles and the Hydra.²²  Perhaps due to the influence of Ovid, for whom the serpentine nature of the Hydra was a given,²³ the true nature of this mysterious water-beast has eluded modern translators.  As a result, the original Greek form of ‘hydra’ is usually translated as ‘water-snake’, but this was clearly not the case for the Greeks.  Euripides speaks of the Hydra as a hound;