In Hesiod's narrative, "Echidna" was a serpent-nymph living in a cave far from any inhabited lands, and the god Targī̆tavah, assimilated to Heracles, killed two of her children, namely the hydra of Lerna and the lion of Nemea.

Thus, in this story, "Heracles" functioned as a destroyer of evils and a patron of human dwellings located in place where destruction had previously prevailed.

[1][11] The connection of the Snake-Legged Goddess to the life-giving principle is attested by her posture where her hands and legs were spread wide, which constituted a "birth-giving attitude".

[1] Multiple headgear pendants from three kurgans respectively found in Mastyuginskiy, Tovsta Mohyla, and Lyubimovskiy have been discovered which represent a goddess with large hands raised in a praying gestures and sitting on the protomēs of two lions in profile.

[1] The Snake-Legged Goddess was represented on a diadem from the Kul-Oba kurgan as bearded and winged while wearing a kalathos hat and having tendril-shaped legs ending in sea-monsters from which sprouted pomegrenates being eaten by birds.

[15] A similar image was found at Olynthos, in which a bearded winged deity with an ornament that emphasises her breasts is depicted with two panthers emerging from beneath her waist between which are a dove.

[16][7] The Snake-Legged Goddess was also represented in her androgynous form on two 4th century BCE marble thrones from Athens, each decorated with the image of a winged and bearded deity with a kalathos hat on the head and wearing women's clothes while holding the ends of vegetal tendrils.

[18] The tendril limbs of the goddess also had a similar function, and they represented fertility, prosperity, renewal, and the after life because they grow from the Earth within which the dead were placed and blossom again each year.

[2][18] The Snake-Legged Goddess was thus a liminal figure who founded a dynasty, and was only half-human in appearance while still looking like snake, itself being a creature capable of passing between the worlds of the living and of the dead with no hindrance.

[18] In the Scythian genealogical myth, the snake legs of the mother goddess and her dwelling place within the earth marked her as a native of Scythia.

The ambiguous features of the mother goddess, such as her being both human and animal, high-ranking and base, monstrous and seductive, at the same time, corresponded to Greek perceptions of Scythian natives.

[19][20] The role of the Snake-Legged Goddess in the genealogical myth is not unlike those of sirens and similar non-human beings in Greek mythology, who existed as transgressive women living outside of society and refusing to submit to the yoke of marriage, but instead chose their partners and forced them to join her.

[28][29] Depictions of the Snake-Legged Goddess were also found in the Sindo-Maeotian areas on the Asian side of the Cimmerian Bosporus, and her representations in her tendril-legged form became more predominant in the first centuries CE and appeared in Bosporan Greek cities, where they became a common design on sarcophagi, as well as in graves in Chersonesus.

One of the plaques depicts a seated male figure (an ancestral hero and likely Thracian equivalent of the Scythian "Hēraklēs") with a female figure (the Thracian Great Goddess) straddling him from above, both of them explicitly engaging in sexual intercourse, and symbolising the king's acquirement of royal power through intercourse with the Great Goddess similarly to the Scythian king's obtaining of royal power through his union with Artimpasa.

[1] In the late 5th century BCE, imagery inspired by the Snake-Legged Goddess started appearing in Greece, with feminine protomēs emerging from scroll ornaments being painted on Attic vases, among which two lēkythoi were adorned with the depictions of a female helmeted head between branches.

[31] The image of the Snake- and Tendril-Legged Goddess later became prevalent in northern Greece during the 4th century BC, where feminine half-figures wearing kalathoi hats and foliate skirts appear in Macedonia on a mosaic from the palace of Aigai, and a winged tendril-legged goddess wearing a kalathos had was depicted on the gables of 4th century BCE tombstones from Aigai.

[34] During the Hellenistic period, the decoration of the Parthenōn at Athens included a relief of a tendril-limbed winged goddess accompanied by a small lion hiding under the foliage.

[34] The image of the goddess with vegetal shoots as legs became popular at the main cult centres of various goddesses in Hellenistic Anatolia,[32] and the image of a winged feminine torso wearing a kalathos hat emerging from akanthos leaves decorated the akrōtērion of Artemis Leukophryēnē at Magnesia and the capitals of the temple of Zeus Sōsipolis, who was closely connected to Artemis Leukophryēnē.

[32] At Aphrodisias, the image of a foliate-skirted goddess holding akanthos stalks decorated the pilaster capitals at the main entrance of the Hadrianic baths.

[32] At Memphis in Egypt, a tendril-limbed goddess decorated the Hellenistic cast of a helmet, and was likely derived from the Macedonian artistic tradition of representing such figures.

[32] The image of the tendril-limbed first appeared in Etruscan Cerveteri in the 7th or 6th century BC on a pair of identical gold plaques depicting two branches ending in palmette-like ornaments sprouting from under the chest of a feminine being.

[32] The image of a goddess appearing from a floral scroll while leaves sprout from her face and neck also features in the temple of ʿAtarʿatah at Khirbet et-Tannur, and winged feminine figures rigsing from foliage decorated one of the pediments at Baalbek.