Serpent-Worship, and Other Essays, with a Chapter on Totemism

BY C. STANILAND WAKE
LONDON GEORGE REDWAY YORK STREET COVENT GARDEN 1888.
The lines of development of the religious faiths of mankind have been aptly termed by Major-General Forlong “Rivers of Life.” The streams of faiths are marvellously depicted by this writer in a chart which shows “the rise and fall of the various religious ideas, mythologies, and rites which have at any time prevailed among nations.” This chart ingeniously shows, moreover, “the degrees of intensity manifested at stated periods by any particular wave of doctrine or worship, and the mode in which the tributary streams of mythological or theological thought become in turn absorbed in the central River of Life.” The views adopted by General Forlong have much in common with those embodied in the works of Godfrey Higgins and some later writers, but they have a special value as being based on personal observation. The author of “Rivers of Life” had the inestimable advantage of being admitted to shrines and of receiving instructions in sacred mysteries which are generally closed to European inquirers, and of having made “a diligent exploration of ruined temples, pillars, and mounds, and all such traces of a primitive symbolism, which lie scattered over the East and West, as religious fossils underlying the superficial crust of theological strata.”
Rivers of religious life have a beginning, like other streams, and what are the sources to which man’s primitive faiths may be traced? The early “symbolic objects of man’s adoration” are arranged by General Forlong in the following order: First, Tree; 2nd, Phallic; 3rd, Serpent; 4th, Fire; 5th, Sun; 6th, Ancestral. The first “breathings of the human soul” were manifested under the sacred tree or grove, whose refreshing shade is so highly valued in the East. All nations, particularly the Aryan peoples, have considered tree-planting a sacred duty, and the grove was man’s first temple, “and became a sanctuary, asylum, or place of refuge, and as time passed on, temples came to be built in the sacred groves.” If tree-worship had such an origin as this, its origin ought to be shown in the ideas associated with it. What, then, are those ideas? General Forlong, after referring to Dr. Fergusson’s statement that the tree and serpent are symbolised in every religious system which the world has known, says that the two together are typical of the reproductive powers of vegetable and animal life. The connection between tree and serpent-worship is often so intimate that we may expect one to throw light on the other. The Aryans generally may be called “tree-worshippers,” and according to Fergusson they as a rule destroyed serpents and serpent-worshipping races. Yet at Athens and near Rome both those faiths flourished together, as they appear to have done also in many parts of Western Asia. They are intimately associated with religious notions of many Buddhist peoples. This is shown curiously in the early legends of Kambodia. These are said by General Forlong to present two striking features. First, a holy tree, which the kingly race, who came to this serpent country, reposed under, or descended from heaven by; secondly, that this tree-loving race are captivated by the dragon princess of the land. It is the serpent king, however, who builds the city of Nakon Thom for his daughter and her stranger husband. It is not improbable that Buddhism originated among a people who were both tree and serpent-worshippers, although the former became more intimately and at an earlier period associated with its founder.