The moon and snake symbolize ambivalent fertility tied to womanhood

Evidence

But once again ambivalence is at work here: while germination is always associated with death, death is also associated with fertility. Detested death is like a new birth, and so it is blessed. The dead hero like Osiris is resurrected every springtime, and he is regenerated by a new birth. Man’s supreme hope, says Jung, “is that the dark waters of death become the waters of life, that death and its cold embrace are the mother’s lap, just as the sea, while engulfing the sun, re-births in the depths.” The theme of the burial of the sun god within the sea and its dazzling reemergence is common to many mythologies. And man wants to live, but he also hopes for rest, sleep, for nothingness. He does not wish for immortality for himself, and thus he can learn to love death. “Inorganic matter is the mother’s breast,” Nietzsche wrote. “Being delivered from life means becoming real again, completing oneself. Anyone who understands that would consider returning to unfeeling dust as a holiday.” — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 328 (#corroborates, via linked claim)

For the Bhantas of India, or in Uganda, a sterile woman is considered dangerous for gardens. In Nicobar, it is believed that the harvest will be better if it is brought in by a pregnant woman. In Borneo, seeds are chosen and preserved by women. “One seems to feel in women a natural affinity with the seeds that are said by the women to be in a state of pregnancy. Sometimes women will spend the night in the rice fields during its growth period” (Hose and MacDougall). — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 173 (#expands, via linked claim)

Gender figures prominently in Gothic narratives in monsters cast as nuns, mothers, and other females and as landscapes that function as symbols of female genitalia. In the Gothic, “[a] rt withdraws into caverns, castles, prison-cells, tombs, coffins. Gothic is a style of claustrophobic sensuality. Its closed spaces are demonic wombs. The gothic novel is sexually archaic; it withdraws into chthonian darkness.” The tales examined below all express this sensibility: in Beckford’s Vathek, massacred boys are thrown into a subterranean pit; in Zofloya, there is no escape from the large dark forest that surrounds the victims; and in Dracula, there are numerous prisons—Dracula’s castle, the coffins, the mental hospital, and the illness that consumes Lucy and the monster’s other victims. These spaces are, as Paglia notes, all womb-like. Gender often characterizes Gothic monsters. Dracula is gender-ambiguous; he is presented as almost androgynous—attractive to both Jonathon and Mina—a Gothic David Bowie. — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 429 (#expands, via linked claim)

Categorization

• XREF: connects to: Prehistoric art centered female fertility first, then shifted to phallic imagery — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 178; Pre-agricultural societies attributed to women a mystical power over fertility and crops — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 173; Death and fertility are mythologically bound in a single ambivalent figure — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 328 (+3 more)

Broader Connections

• Death and fertility are mythologically bound in a single ambivalent figure #corroborates (0.85) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 328
• Pre-agricultural societies attributed to women a mystical power over fertility and crops #expands (0.80) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 173
• Gothic monster landscapes symbolize demonic wombs and female genitalia #expands (0.75) — Sophia Rose Arjana, Muslims in the Western Imagination, 429
• Desiring woman as transfigured nature drives men to make her artificial #complicates (0.72) — Simone de Beauvoir, The Second Sex, 351
• Pregnancy and breastfeeding trigger derogation of women when death and animality are salient #qualifies (0.72) — Sheldon Solomon, Jeff Greenberg, Tom Pyszczynski, The Worm at the Core, 603