“Snakes must be seen before you have to do with them,” replied Gimbo; “if they see you first you don’t come off so well. By keeping my eyes on the ground, I see them before they harm me, and soon they are out of the way, or I am. When your first acquaintance with a snake is made by tramping on him, there is a disagreeable surprise and a dangerous controversy. But it is not so with the Sun-serpent or the Alligator of Shoozoo, which you are always seeing and which never comes near; so that you are always frightened when there is no danger.”
A long religious controversy then ensued, which turned mainly on whether men should keep to the ways and traditions of their fathers, and walk, like them, on all fours, or whether they should stand up and look ahead. The latter course was thought to unsettle their faith and make them introduce new gods, if not to abandon entirely their religion. Gimbo thought there were swamp snakes enough to engage men’s attention, without troubling themselves about snakes in the air. “Shoozoo’s Alligator,” he said, “is a literal swamp reptile, and that is enough to worship. By introducing new snakes into our theology, you will confuse all our religion.”
Others, however, were not as conservative as Gimbo, but believed in acknowledging snakes wherever they found them. Religion is naturally progressive, they thought, and advancement in religion at this time was believed to consist in adding more snakes to theology.
While, therefore, Gimbo represented the Unitarians, or Mono-snakists, who claimed that there was only one great snake god—the Alligator of Shoozoo—there was a polytheistic, or poly-snake, party, which insisted on a many-snaked Pantheon, and particularly on a belief in the sun-snake and the wood-eating snake, which were thought by many to be one and the same; while still others thought that these, with the Alligator of Shoozoo, formed together a trinity of snakes which were in substance all one, but manifested themselves under the three forms of Sun-light, Wood-fire and Alligator.
CHAPTER XX.
There had up to this time been many sects in the religion of the Ammi. They all agreed simply in recognizing Shoozoo as its founder, and his fight with the Alligator as the great transaction on which it rested. There was early, however, a schism in the main body. One class had drifted away from the worship of Shoozoo to the worship of his Alligator, and in time they claimed that the Alligator was the god, instead of Shoozoo. This came from their habit of using the alligator, or figures representing it, as symbols of the Shoozoo religion, whereby the symbol became in time more important than the thing symbolized. There were, accordingly, in the Shoozoo religion, the pure Shoozoo party and the Alligator party, and for nearly a generation a fierce controversy raged between the two, resulting often in bloodshed.
The Alligator party, however, triumphed in the end, and many of the pure Shoozooists were exiled, and have since lived among the Lali and other apes, where they have continued to worship Shoozoo without any mixture of the Alligator, and have converted back some of the Apes to their faith.