In his study of the cult of Hermes, Lewis Richard Farnell (1909) assumed that the two snakes had simply developed out of ornaments of the shepherd's crook used by heralds as their staff.Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States, vol. 5, p. 20, cited in Tyson 1932:494. This view has been rejected by later authors pointing to parallel iconography in the Ancient Near East. It has been argued that the staff or wand entwined by two snakes was itself representing a god in the pre-anthropomorphic era. Like the herm or priapus, it would thus be a predecessor of the anthropomorphic Hermes of the classical era. Frothingham characterizes Farnell's simplistic view of the origin of the symbol as a "frivolous and futile theory".
In his study of the cult of Hermes, Lewis Richard Farnell (1909) assumed that the two snakes had simply developed out of ornaments of the shepherd's crook used by heralds as their staff.Farnell, The Cults of the Greek States, vol. 5, p. 20, cited in Tyson 1932:494. This view has been rejected by later authors pointing to parallel iconography in the Ancient Near East It has been argued that the staff or wand entwined by two snakes was itself representing a god in the pre-anthropomorphic era. Like the herm or priapus, it would thus be a predecessor of the anthropomorphic Hermes of the classical era. Frothingham characterizes Farnell's simplistic view of the origin of the symbol as a "frivolous and futile theory".