This richly embellished royal door, though slightly damaged, has a complex program of relief sculpture, dominated by double-headed circular snakes that frame the rectangle and divide the door into three sections. At the very top is a frieze of four heads, with a crossed device in the center. The three center panels have subdivided rectilinear patterns within. In Bamum, the double-headed serpent is the highest ranking royal symbol. “Some ethnographic evidence cited recently by Geary (in The Idiom of War in the Bamum Court Arts) explains an identification of King with serpent through a legendary reference to the charismatic warrior king, Mbuembue, who ruled in the early nineteenth century: ‘Like a serpent with two heads, he was able to strike on two military fronts simultaneously, that is, conquer the enemy. This explanation postulates that the double-headed serpent is an allusion to the King’s strength and guile and does not correspond to a real animal, such as the python or boa” (Tamara Northern.