April 1st, 1962. Socialist Romania. In the city of Constanta, the ancient Greek colony of Tomis, workers were toiling hard to remove the railroad tracks of the Old Railway Station and make room for the construction of apartment buildings. What they encountered was certainly no April Fool’s prank. The head of an ancient statue emerged from the earth: it was the goddess Tyche (Fortuna) the first and just one of the 24 remarkable statues carefully placed side by side: the marble treasure trove of Constanta. These were various deities dominating the Greco-Roman, Asian, and indigenous Thracian pantheon. Most of them date back to the 2nd and 3rd centuries AD. Most likely, they adorned the numerous temples of the cosmopolitan port city by the Black Sea.
But why were they gathered from all those temples and buried with such care and reverence? Most likely, because by the end of the 4th century and the beginning of the 5th century, Christianity had become the dominant religion in the Roman Empire. Once it became the official religion, a religion that had been persecuted for centuries, it could no longer tolerate ancient cults. So the only thing left for the dwindling pagan faithful was to hide their deities and beliefs underground, waiting for better times to come. However, those times never came…
Among the 24 sculptures, one was unique in the whole world, the Glycon Snake. The statue is carved from a single piece of marble, together with the base and represents a deity with a coiled serpent body, with human ears and hair, and a sheep’s snout. Its tail ends like a lion’s, in a tuft of hair. The sculptor must have been a true artist, who made every effort to reproduce in detail the scales and rings, carefully working on the inside of the statue. Moreover, the entire statue fits perfectly into a cone.
Its uniqueness lies in the fact that it is the only statue of such size and exceptional artistic quality representing the God Glycon. Only two other very small bronze statuettes were found in Athens, Greece, and Ankara, Turkey. But they don’t even come close to the craftsmanship of the one discovered in Tomis.
But what cult worshipped this serpent-god? Since prehistoric times and almost on all continents, people have worshipped snake deities. Ancient religions, mythology and history abound with references to serpents, seen as possessors of knowledge, fertility, and physical and spiritual healing, but they are above all symbols of rebirth, due to their ability to shed their skin, reappearing as if reborn, forever young. The serpent is also the animal that offered the forbidden fruit to Eve, leading to the expulsion of the biblical couple from Paradise. The Gnostics, worshipped it as the bringer of gnosis, that is, of knowledge, freeing humanity from the control of the Demiurge. Asclepius himself, the son of Apollo and god of medicine, was represented holding a staff around which a serpent was coiled. This has remained to this day the symbol of medicine and pharmacology. It is said that Asclepius could heal all diseases and even revive the dead using snake venom as a remedy or, conversely, as a poison.
However, all these cults based on ancient philosophies, beliefs, and symbols, which appeared almost simultaneously with humanity, do not apply to the Glycon Snake. This cult arose due to human cunning and naivety. We are told about this mundane deception, which quickly gained cult status throughout the Roman Empire, especially in its eastern part, by a contemporary, Lucian of Samosata.
The latter was a Greek prose writer of Syrian origin who distinguished himself in the fields of rhetoric and satire. His texts, sharp and comical at the same time, satirized speculative philosophy, superstitions, the absurdity of certain religious practices, the weaknesses, and the belief of people in the paranormal. In a letter to Celsus, a Greek Epicurean philosopher and opponent of early Christianity, he described this phenomenon and the person responsible for its spreading.
This was a certain false prophet, Alexander of Abonoteichus, a Greek, born in a small town of ancient Paflagonia, a region on northern coast of present-day Turkey. According to Lucian, when he Alexander was young, he was very handsome and “he prostituted himself shamelessly” to earn a living. Among his lovers there was a magus, a kind of sorcerer who, like the ones nowadays, claimed to be able to perform miraculous healings, break curses, and solve love problems. Alexander, being around him, learned the “trade” and after his death, being already at an age where he could no longer earn a living only by making use of his physical appearance, he associated himself with a certain Kokkonas, a chronicler from Byzantium (the ancient Greek city that later became Constantinople, the present day Istanbul). The two partners engaged in all kinds of sorcery and deceit, taking advantage of the gullibility of people’s simple minds.
Among the latter, there was a middle-aged wealthy woman, whom the two exploited. She took them with her to her hometown, Pella, the old capital of the Macedonian kings, which at that time was in decline and had few and poor inhabitants. There, the two partners saw impressively large but tamed and very peaceful snakes, which were fed by women and children, did not react when stepped on their tails and drank milk from the breast, like babies. We must mention here that ancient Macedonians were not an exception with regard to the deification of the serpent. There were various myths, including one according to which, Philip, the king of Macedonia and father of Alexander the Great, found his wife, Olympias, sleeping in bed with a snake when she was pregnant with Alexander. Returning to the two partners, they bought for little money the best and largest of these snakes.
The same Lucian tells us the sequel, “Those two cunning and insolent people, eager to do all evils, easily understood that people are governed by two great tyrants, hope and fear, and that the one who knew how to take advantage of them would quickly become rich because they saw that both the one who fears and the one who hopes, want and desire to know the future… because people are always constrained by the said tyrants, hope and fear, to address divinity and seek to know the future, and for this purpose offer great sacrifices and dedicate bricks of gold. Thinking about and discussing these things, they decided to establish an oracle, confident that if the business succeeds, they will quickly become rich and happy. But they not only succeeded, but the results exceeded their expectations and hopes…”
So they chose Abonoteichus, the city where Alexander was born, as the location to install their oracle, considering that its inhabitants and those of the Paflagonia region were easiest to deceive, being wealthy, superstitious, and ready to believe any charlatan who claimed to be a magus, a prophet, or a fortune-teller.
They started their activity in the city of Chalkidon, where there was a large temple of the god Apollo, where they secretly buried several bronze tablets on which they wrote that the god Apollo and his son Asclepius would soon appear in Abonoteichus. Then the tablets were “accidentally” discovered, and thus the news spread throughout the region but especially in Abonoteichus, where the inhabitants immediately decided to build a temple. Meanwhile, Kokkonas died – ironically – from the bite of a viper. But Alexander returned to his hometown, with long hair, wearing long, white and red clothes, and holding a sword like that of Perseus, claiming to be a descendant of this mythical hero.
There he continued his act, appearing in the midst of crowds as if possessed by a sacred mania, foaming at the mouth, (the foam was caused by the chewing of certain roots, known for these properties). At the same time, he made from cloth a snake head with human-like shapes and painted it as naturally as possible, using horsehair to be able to move its mouth where he also installed a black, bifurcated tongue, like that of a dragon, which was also operated by strings made of horsehair.
When he considered that time had come for the main act, Alexander went at night to the foundation of the temple under construction and placed in a small puddle of water, which had accumulated there, a duck egg in which, after emptying its contents, he put a baby snake. Then, in the morning, he began to run naked through the center of the city and, climbing on a high pedestal, he announced to the crowds that the god would come soon and be seen by all. Soon, women, children, and elderly people joined the present citizens who, moved by faith and enthusiasm, began to pray and worship. Alexandros continued his charade by spouting incomprehensible words in Hebrew or Phoenician, fascinating people who did not understand what he was saying, as they only caught the names of Apollo and Asclepius, which he occasionally pronounced among the incomprehensible words.
After gathering as many people as possible around him, he ran towards the pit that formed the foundation of the temple under construction and the headquarters of the future oracle, he entered the water, singing hymns to Asclepius and Apollo and asking the god to bless the city. Then he took the egg, which seemed intact, out of the water, and after cracking it, he took out the snake, claiming to hold in his hands Asclepius himself. “And all the people followed him, and they were all enthusiastic, being in a state equal to madness and nourishing an unspeakable hope.”
The fake prophet secluded himself in his residence in the following days, his reputation began to spread even outside the city, where thousands of credulous people from the entire region began to come. When the city was filled with people, Alexander began to receive visitors, sitting with sacred grandeur on a bed, in his small house, and holding “Asclepius” to his chest, actually the large and gentle snake he had bought in Pella. The snake coiled around his neck, only its tail being visible, which, being so long, reached the ground. The head of the snake was well hidden under Alexander’s armpit, as he only allowed the head made of cloth to be seen, pretending this was the true head of the god. In a not too strong light and with their imagination already overexcited with anticipation of miracles, people were fascinated by the image of the god, which in a few days had grown to such a size. In any case, coming in such large numbers to see the miracle, no one had enough time to stop and carefully examine the snake-god, being pressed by the crowd behind to move forward.
Those who went back to where they came from after seeing the miracle, continued to tell how they saw the god being born and how they touched him with their hands when, a little later, he grew and took human forms. Faith and commerce once again made a good partnership, and statues and icons of that holy snake began to appear, some made of wood, others of brass or silver, the god being named Glycon, following a divine command delivered by Alexander in a verse:
“I am Glycon, a third-degree descendant of Zeus, the light of men.”
When the false prophet noticed that the ground was ready for the exploitation of the credulous, he began to make prophecies and give prophetic advice, obviously in exchange for a predetermined price. As he was only a charlatan and did not have the power to predict the future, he instructed the desirous to write down their wishes or what they wanted to find out and then to seal the writing with wax or clay. Alexander received all these writings and, knowing several methods of opening them without breaking the seal, he read them, sealed them again, and then answered to each one. For most people, this was something incomprehensible in itself, considering that since the seal of their writings was intact, it meant that the god was truly omniscient.
Quickly, the cult of Glycon, the false deity, spread beyond the borders of the region where it had emerged and spread throughout the empire. Inscriptions with wishes or prayers for protection to the god Glycon were found in several major cities of the ancient world. Coins were minted with the image of the deity, and Abonoteichus, from an insignificant town, became a religious centre, changing its name to Ionopolis. Even the Roman governor of Asia, Publius Mummius Sisenna Rutilianus, declared himself the protector of the oracle of Glycon and married the daughter of Alexander, the pseudo-prophet. Lucian also tells us that another Roman governor, this time the governor of Cappadocia, Marcus Sedatius Severianus, was convinced by Alexander of Abonoteichus that he could easily defeat the Parthians, a people of Iranian origin, and get all the glory himself. He marched against the Parthians at the head of a legion and found his death in Armenia, his legion being massacred within just three days. Lucian also tells us that Emperor Marcus Aurelius himself resorted to the prophecies of Alexander and of the false deity of the latter.
However, in spite of all the success that Alexander’s charlatanry enjoyed, it shared the fate of other religions of the ancient Greco-Roman world, which sooner or later were buried, figuratively and literally, by the new rampant religion, Christianity.
Nowadays, Glycon is the symbol of the National Museum of History and Archaeology of Constanța and was represented on the banknote of 10,000 lei put into circulation by the National Bank of Romania in 1994. Additionally, Alan Moore, a renowned English comic book author, declared himself a follower of the snake god Glycon, saying: “Hello everybody, my name’s Alan Moore, and I earn a living by making up stories about things that have never actually happened. When it comes to my spiritual beliefs that’s perhaps why I worship a second century human-headed snake god called Glycon, who was exposed as a ventriloquist’s dummy nearly 2000 years ago. Famed throughout the Roman Empire, Glycon was the creation of an entrepreneur known as Alexander the false prophet, which is a terrible name to go into business under. …Looks aside, I’m interested in the snake god purely as a symbol, indeed one of humanity’s oldest symbols, which can stand for wisdom, for healing, or, according to ethno-botanist Jeremy Narby, for our spiralling and snake-like DNA itself.
But I’m also interested in having a god who is demonstrably a ventriloquist’s dummy. After all, isn’t this the way we use most of our deities. We can look through our various sacred books and by choosing one ambiguous passage or one interpretation over another we can pretty much get our gods to justify our own current agendas. We can make them say what we want them to say.
The big advantage of worshipping an actual glove puppet of course is that if things start to get unruly or out of hand you can always put them back in the box. And you know, it doesn’t matter if they don’t want to go back in the box, they have to go back in the box.”
However, Glycon, the fake god, left us two very important legacies. A lesson in the credulity of naive and superstitious people who have faith, and doubt not and a worldwide unique statue of exceptional beauty.