Serpents and scorpions

That serpent which glides here as the ākhū, as the vyūkha, making a rustling sound—against it you are the encircling medicine, the crusher of scorpions.

Against it you are the encircling medicine, the crusher of scorpions.

And whoever set out toward the Path, but was heedless of what the company seeks, and lagged behind in the journey, and put on the garments of harm (*al-ḍayr*) — those deficiencies appeared to him as serpents and scorpions, chains and fetters;

And surely we know (saving the simplicity of the Scripture — for not even could the beasts themselves harm where faith was) that figuratively scorpions and serpents portend spiritual things of wickedness, of which their very prince too is reckoned under the name of serpent and dragon and of each most eminent beast with the Creator, who granted this power to his former Christ, as the ninetieth psalm to him:

For the rest, how should his kingdom still stand within its boundaries and laws and offices, whom, though with the world entire, that stronger god of Marcion could even thus have seemed to overcome, if the Marcionites too did not even die according to his law, flowing down into the earth, often taught even by a scorpion that the Creator is not overcome?