(three-headed Serapis, from Bartoli's Lucernae Veterum Sepulchrates)

Serapis was the god created by Ptolemy Sotor, the Greek ruler of Egypt, who needed a deity that could be worshipped by both his Greek and his Egyptian subjects. The name Serapis is a combination of the names Osiris and Apis. Osiris is the Egyptian lord of the dead, and the Greeks associated Serapis with their own ruler of the underworld, Hades.

According to a legend related by Plutarch, Ptolemy had a dream about an idol which he had never seen that resided in the Greek town of Sinope, on the Pontus. The statue came to life and told the king to move it to Alexandria. In spite of the reluctance of the townspeople to part with their god, this was accomplished three years later -- legend says that the statue moved itself, but we may suspect that Ptolemy had some hand in the transportation of the idol.

The Egyptian Serapis is a human figure with the head of a bull. Plutarch relates the following: "Timotheus the Interpreter, and Manetho, as soon as the statue was shown to them, from the Cerberus and Dragon that accompanied it, concluded that it was designed to represent Pluto, and persuaded the king that it was in reality none other than the Egyptian Sarapis; for it must be observed, that the statue had not this name before it was brought to Alexandria, it being given to it afterwards by the Egyptians, as equipollent, in their opinion, to its old one of Pluto."

From these remarks, we may suspect that the image above is not a version of Serapis proper, but of the "Cerberus and Dragon that accompanied it" to Alexandria. The three heads of the god are those of a lion in the middle, wolf on the left, and dog on the right. These three heads were also sometimes attached to Cerberus, the demon hound that guards the gates of Hades (see Carus, The History of the Devil, page 475, the footnote). The two large serpents twined around the image might easily be characterized as dragons -- in ancient times the python was known as a dragon, and the term was loosely applied to any large snake.