Additions from Cyberdisciple
I asked Cyberdisciple:
Can you hook me up with some images of visual mythemes: rider horse donkey on path to see tree snake cut trunk debranched?
snake w/ branching legs = salamander lizard.
I saw some good bas reliefs but didn’t capture them.
Is the “Achaean Rider/horseman” a standard image?
Rider on horse/donkey on path walking on cloaks, right foot/hoof down & shown, = 2-level model of control
Why traveling left to right? To show right hoof/foot (down). = eternalism basis foundation of control, not possibilism.
Cyberdisciple wrote:
“Some good pictures in this post: https://cyberdisciple.wordpress.com/2011/11/05/examples-of-snakes-in-greco-roman-art/
Rider on horse approaching snake in tree on right is very common in Greek funerary monuments.
Not sure if there’s an academic article cataloguing examples.
The text of my post looks pretty inadequate from 2022’s vantage point because I don’t point out how many of those pictures show the snake *in a tree*, indicating branching and non-branching.
[yet to be written up: equivalence of snake on rock altar depicted in rock medium & snake in tree sometimes with cut branches or cut trunk. non-branching worldline in block universe -cm]
Check out the “iconography” section of this Wikipedia article:
https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_George_and_the_Dragon#Iconography [one image has been reversed! a common modern error in Tauroctony reproductions, eg Entheos issue 3 & the English edition of Manfred Klaus’ book-cm]
Usual image is of horse and rider over serpent, indicating basing control power on eternalism.
Strong image. Left/right checks out for donkey’s legs and Christ’s hands.
I sense some puzzle in the two trees, left and right. Why two trees?
On left, youth is in tree, grabbing branches with both hands [holding branching w/ left, breaking off branch with right? -cm], left hand higher. Indicates not yet perfected control system?
[youth phase culminates in initiation depicted by the youth removing branches; after remove branching, adult – see Eadwine row 2 right, below, for degrees of this: left-leg youth then right-leg youth then no-leg adult -cm]
On right, adult (?) [no; beardless -cm] on ground (?) indicating stable basis in eternalism reaches up to grab [remove -cm] branch with right hand only.”
— Cyberdisciple
[removed branches/branching on ground = on the level below the higher controller, on the path -cm]
[Christ’s right hand: the left two fingers branch, the right two fingers don’t branch; held together in contrast -cm]
Church of Saint Martin:
Original Post
snake in tree ~= youth in tree holding removed branch (or knife for branch removal) in right hand, holding branching with left hand.
The Egodeath theory 