The Dogon believe that Lebe is the very reincarnation of the Dogon's first ancestor-who was resurrected in the form of a snake. In their traditional African religious belief, they say that the Serpent Lebe guided the Dogon people from Mandé to the Bandiagara Escarpment (their current home) when they decided to migrate to flee Islamization and persecution. The mythology of the Dogon's primordial ancestor Lebe, it based almost entirely on a serpent mythology. The serpent plays an active role in Dogon religion and cosmogony. Like their Serer counterparts, the Dogon people of Mali also have great reverence for the serpent. A great degree of respect is afforded to snakes in Serer culture, as they are the very embodiment and symbol of their saints and ancestral spirits. For this reason, it is taboo in Serer culture to kill snakes. During this transformation, the snake hides in a tree. Before the soul can reach Jaaniiw in order to reincarnate ( ciiɗ in Serer ), it must transform into a black snake. When a person dies, the Serer believe that their soul must make its way to Jaaniiw (a place where goods souls go).
In Serer cosmogony and religion, the serpent is the symbol of the pangool, the saints and ancestral spirits of the Serer people of West Africa. "In a hymn to the goddess Mertseger, a workman on the Necropolis of Thebes relates how the goddess came to him in the form of a snake to heal his illness (Bunn1967:617). Hymns and offerings were made to it since it was believed that the Goddess could manifest through the snake. In Egypt the snake has healing abilities. Also, the snake biting its tail ( Ouroboros) symbolised the sea as the eternal ring which enclosed the world. In Egyptian myth, the state of existence before creation was symbolised as Amduat, a many-coiled serpent from which Ra the Sun and all of creation arose, returning each night and being reborn every morning. The circle was particularly important to Dahomeyan myth where the snake-god Danh circled the world like a belt, corseting it and preventing it from flying apart in splinters. Both circles and spirals were seen as symbols of eternity. Snakes were often also associated with immortality because they were observed biting their tails to form a circle and when they coiled they formed spirals. Some cultures regarded snakes as immortal because they appeared to be reincarnated from themselves when they sloughed their skins. The Great Goddess often had snakes as her familiars-sometimes twining around her sacred staff, as in ancient Crete-and they were worshipped as guardians of her mysteries of birth and regeneration.
"The snake dance is a prayer to the spirits of the clouds, the thunder and the lightning, that the rain may fall on the growing crops." In other cultures snakes symbolised the umbilical cord, joining all humans to Mother Earth.
During the dance, live snakes were handled and at the end of the dance the snakes were released into the fields to guarantee good crops. For example, the Hopi people of North America performed an annual snake dance to celebrate the union of Snake Youth (a Sky spirit) and Snake Girl (an Underworld spirit) and to renew fertility of Nature. In most cultures, snakes were symbols of healing and transformation, but in some cultures snakes were fertility symbols. the unblinking, lidless eyes) seemed to imply that they were intelligent, that they lived by reason and not instinct, and yet their thought-processes were as alien to humans as their ways of movement. The behaviour of snakes and their facial features (e.g. The Hindu and Buddhist serpent king Vasuki appears in the Indian Puranas creation myth Samudra manthan (churning of the ocean of milk), depicted above at Bangkok airport, Thailand.
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