As ever, a recent humble and unlikely source made me notice a fascinating piece of holisticity. One of those things that’s so glaringly obvious it never remotely registered in my tiny little humanised brain. Just a little thing really, but enough to send my addled mind into overdrive.

Where a hero of mine saw a representation of a double helix, I saw instead a caduceus.

So how is it that a patron god’s 4,500 year old symbol associated with the very preservation of life since the 7th century so closely resembles the very building blocks of humanity, discovered only in 1953? And why did I never notice this before?

Hermes, the god of boundaries and of the travelers who cross them, of shepherds and cowherds, of orators, literature and poets, of athletics, of weights and measures and invention and commerce in general, of liars, and of the cunning of thieves. As a translator, he is the messenger from the gods to humans.

The Eye of Horus

Beyond its modern association with medicine (and in some cases there are even base pairs drawn between the two snakes, highlighting this similarity), the caduceus has always been a very potent and revered symbol since ancient times. It remains present in a great deal of occult literature, though often in the background - a quiet and unfanfared image often just out of sight (a bit like the Egyptian Eye of Horus or Wadjet eye, added almost as an afterthought to the exterior of some caskets. As an interesting side note, the mirror image - left eye to Horus’s right, or moon to Horus’s sun - is the Eye of Thoth. Thoth is closely associated with Hermes in the Ancient Greek pantheon. Furthermore, and perhaps as more of a personal observation, Wadjet in Egyptian mythology was a serpent goddess, and closely associated with Leto in Greece, e.g. the Temple of Leto at Buto, which I was meant to be again attempting to visit in October, but after my Dad said there was no reason to go out with him this year it looks increasingly unlikely I will ever visit this site. Leto’s son Apollo, the Hellenic sun god, is of course closely identified with Horus…. Hmmn, maybe this isn’t a side note after all. I clearly need to look into the relationship of these two symbols and their associated deities much more. I feel like I’ve opened up a great big bag of intertwining holistic goings on just by looking closer into the history of this one symbol).

I even saw a caduceus just recently on my travels. It represents the balance of life and death; mortality; conflict and yet harmony; the division of God and beast and the gulf between the two where man has made a home. And what are these concepts if not quintessentially human attributes? Metaphorical ingredients into the very building blocks of human life?

Looking at the similarity of the two images - one an ancient metaphor for life and the other its most fundamental structure - I’m starting to wonder if I didn’t have Von Däniken all wrong, and that maybe he wasn’t just reading one too many comics.