So I’m quite certain I rambled to a couple people about the snake/dragon symbolism in Tevinter’s heraldry. And that thing up there made me decide to make this post, specifically because of the imagery of a snake-dragon eating its own tail.
First of all, the snake and the dragon are sometimes interchangeable and similar in their symbolic function. I’ll just cite Ladon, snake-dragon of the Greek mythology taken from, among other sthings, Hesiod’s Theogony. Now y’all are going to indulge me in a little trip into etymology, because not only draco (aka the Latin root) means “huge serpent”, but also drakon (aka the Greek root) means both “serpent” and “huge seafish”. Bringing this back to its Tevinter relevance, not only a dragon-snake appears twice and intertwined in the Imperium’s heraldry, but also the cetus, a sea monster of the northern ocean, is a thing in Thedas (and not only in Thedas).
In short, snakes and dragons often overlap in meaning and function.
Now if I had to make a post about the entire symbology of snakes I would honestly never end, because it’s infinite and it has a place in so many religions and mythologies. I’ll just mention the main and better-known traits: fertility, rebirth, renovation, wisdom and knowledge, guardianship, betrayal and vindictiveness, poison and healing, dominion, prudence, medicine and magic, life and eternity, and a (strongly Christian) link to evil and temptation. It’s, clearly, an extremely ambiguous creature. Both chthonic (under-the-earth) and cosmic (around the world and infinite).
I’m going to concentrate on guardianship and the Ouroboros (that is to say, the snake that eats itself).
Up there you see my caption of the statue above the entrance of the temple of Razikale, in Jaws of Hakkon DLC. Snakes have a tradition of being guardians of treasures, but also of religious spaces. It’s a tradition of Buddhism, Norse Mythology, European Middle Ages, Native Americans. Obviously, Tevinter adored gods who were dragons, but even beyond that, it does make sense that there should be a snake-dragon guarding the temple entrance.
Now, onto the Ouroboros. It’s the image of a snake eating its own tail, represented in a circle. Not getting into the symbolism of circles and magic (because, again, it would never end), I’m just going to point out that this shape is hexagonal instead. That isn’t linked to real-world symbolism, but to Tevinter tradition. World of Thedas tells us that Tevinter has a habit of making angular things, and the more important is a chest/random things, there more sides the polygon will have. So that’s hexagonal pretty much because it’s the Tevinter way.
The Ourobors itself has a really old tradition (as everything snake-y) that dates back to the iconography of ancient Egypt and was then incorporated into other traditions through Greece. It became a significant part of western esoterism and magical-alchemic symbology. It’s, firstly, an image of renewal and the infinite cyclic nature of the universe, and in its original and most ancient meaning, a divine figure is surrounded by this motif, representing the beginning and the end of time. Among the many other meanings that it gained throughout time, it’s evidently strongly linked to divinity.
So that a snake-dragon shaped into a hexagonal Ouroboros should be placed above a temple’s entrance? Pretty good usage of symbolism right there. Sometimes I like what Bioware does with its visual canon. (Sometimes, because tbh ask me how many issues I have with the Tevinter architecture in DA:I to see just for how long I’m able to complain.)
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