Another point in connection with religious ideas, which is of great importance in relation to the above subject, is the origin of serpent-worship. M. Lenormant remarks that “the Arcadians made the serpent one of the principal attributes and one of the forms of Héa.” This deity, who closely resembles Waïnamoïnen, one of the three principal gods of the Finns, occupied a very important position in the Pantheon of the ancient Chaldeans. Héa, like the Finnish god, was “not only king of the waters and the atmosphere, he was also the spirit whence all life proceeded, the master of favourable spells, the adversary and conqueror of all personifications of evil, and the sovereign possessor of all science.” The worship of serpent-gods is a practice to which many of the primitive Turanian tribes have been addicted. This accounts for the curious association of serpent-worship with Buddhism and Siva-ism. Both of these faiths, as exhibited in the marvellous sculptures of the ruined temples of Cambodia, are intimately connected with serpent-worship. This cult was no doubt very prevalent among the native populations before the arrival of the Hindoos, as legend states that the banished Indian Prince, for whom the city of Nakon-Thom was built, married a daughter of the King of the Nagas or Serpents, and became the sovereign of the country. Serpent-worship, indeed, would seem to have been prevalent throughout Northern India. The territory of the king of the serpent city Taxila reached nearly to Delhi, and it probably extended over Kashmere and part of Afghanistan. Here was a very important centre of serpent-worship. General Forlong states that in Kashmere this cult appears everywhere, “and the records of the country point to its beautiful lake and mountain fastnesses as the earliest historic seats which we have of the faith.” It is remarkable that a King of the Naga race was reigning in Magadha when Gautama was born in 626 B.C., and, according to a Hindoo legend, even the Buddha himself had a serpent lineage. If this was so, it is not surprising that his teachings should be accepted by the Naga races, who no doubt belonged to the pre-Aryan stock.

The constant introduction of the serpent, especially of the sacred Cobra, into the sculptures of the Cambodian temples, is remarkable. M. Moura states that the ancient Khmers of Cambodia recognised both good and evil serpents, the former of which lived in the water and the latter inhabited the land. The Buddhists of India and Indo-China had the same idea, and M. Moura supposes that the good serpents represented the human Nagas who became Buddhists, and the bad serpents those who refused to abandon their native serpent-worship. This explanation, however, is not necessary, as the ancient Egyptians entertained analogous ideas. No other people, except, perhaps, the Hindoos and allied races, were more thoroughly imbued with the serpent superstition than the Egyptians. Mr. Cooper, in his “Observations on the Serpent Myths of Ancient Egypt,” remarks that “the reverence paid to the snake was not merely local, or even limited to one period of history, but prevailed alike in every district of the Pharian Empire, and has left its indelible impress upon the architecture and the archæology of both Upper and Lower Egypt.” The Cobra di Capello of the Hindoos and Cambodians was the sacred Uræus of the Egyptians. With the latter it was used as the symbol of fecundity and immortality, and was also universally assumed as the “emblem of divine and sacro-regal sovereignty.” The Uræus was always represented in the female form, and all the Egyptian goddesses were adorned with it, as the images of the Hindoo gods were often surmounted with the sacred Naga. Among the Egyptians another kind of serpent was also held in universal veneration. It was a gigantic species of Coluber, which from the earliest ages was regarded as “the representative of spiritual, and occasionally physical, evil.” This was the great snake of the celestial waters, the adversary of the gods with which the soul had to contend after death. The Egyptians had thus a good and an evil serpent, the former of which was small and the latter large. Among the Cambodians the reverse was the case, as the small serpent was the representative of evil, and the great serpent, the Naga-Naga, of good.

We have already seen that the cobra occupies an important place in the Buddhist sculpture, and that the great serpent with its human supporters was represented at both Amravati and Angkor Wat. Curiously enough a similar idea to this is represented on certain Egyptian monuments. On the sarcophagus of Oime-nepthah I. is sculptured a long serpent, which, says Mr. Robert Sewell, is doubled into folds just like the roll of the Buddhist frieze, and having a god standing on each fold in the places occupied by the sacred emblems of the Buddhist faith at Amravati. He supposes the long roll of the Amravati frieze to be intended to represent a serpent, and to have had its origin in Western Asian or Egyptian ideas. I had already, before meeting with this observation, been struck with the similarity between the Egyptian and the Buddhist representations, especially when considered in the light of the Cambodian sculptures which undoubtedly represent the Naga-Naga. The gigantic serpent of the celestial ocean of Egyptian mythology is Aphôphis, the spirit of evil, and in the contest between him and Horus we have, according to M. Le Page Renouf, a form of the Indra and Vritra myth. An Accadian text speaks of “the enormous serpent with seven heads,” the “serpent which beats the waves of the sea ... extending his power over heaven and earth.” This is supposed to refer to Héa, and it reminds us of the heavenly Naga-Naga of Hindoo mythology, which, like the Accadian serpent deity, was representative of the good principle. Such was also the case among all the old Turanian nations, and it was only when, as remarked by M. Lenormant, “the Iranian traditions were fused with the ancient beliefs of the Proto-Medic religion, the serpent-god naturally became identified with the representative of the dark and bad principle.” It cannot be doubted that this was the later notion, and that the Turanian belief which associated with the serpent ideas of goodness was of earlier date. Thus, the Dragon, says Mr. Doolittle, “enjoys an ominous eminence in the affections of the Chinese people. It is frequently represented as the greatest benefactor of mankind.... The Chinese delight in praising its wonderful prospects and powers. It is the venerated symbol of good.”

The veneration of the serpent must have been of very early origin to occupy so strong a hold over the Chinese, whose spoken language, according to M. Terrien de Lacouperie, forms a link between the Accadian and the Ugro-Finnish divisions of the Ural-Altaic languages. The art of metallurgy was practised by the peoples belonging to both these divisions, and yet, according to M. Lenormant, it was not known to the early Chinese. We must thus suppose that the latter left the common home before the invention of metallurgy, and, therefore, that they represent a very early condition of the stock from which the Turanian peoples sprang. We seem, indeed, to be carried back to the very earliest period of the legendary history of the Cainite race, and possibly to that of the legendary ancestor of the race. According to the tradition preserved in Genesis, there was a peculiar association between Adam and the serpent. This animal is there the tempter Satan, but according to another view Adam, or rather Ad, who was apparently the traditional ancestor of a portion at least of the old Turanian stock, was himself the serpent. A rabbinical tradition makes Cain the son, not of Adam, but of the serpent-spirit Asmodeus. The name Eve is connected with an Arabic root which means both “life” and “a serpent,” and if Eve was the serpent mother, Ad must have been the serpent father of the race. There is reason for believing that Adam was the legendary ancestor of the Cainites, as distinguished from the descendants of Seth. The name Adam, no doubt, signifies in the Semitic languages “the man,” but it has been pointed out that the name borne by the son of Seth, and therefore the ancestor of Noah, that is Enoch, is in Hebrew the exact synonym of Adam, and also signifies “the man.” There is, moreover, almost an exact parallel between the descendants of Adam, through Cain on the one hand, and those of Seth through Enoch on the other, and each line is terminated by three heads of races, that of the Cainites by the sons of Lamekh and that of the Enocides by the grandsons of Lamekh. In the latter there is the insertion of one additional generation, that of Noah, between Lamekh and the division of the family into three branches. This is, however, capable of explanation. M. Lenormant shows, by a comparison of the various legends referring to the primitive age of mankind, that the number 7 or 10 was used by all the ancient nations as a round number for the antediluvian ancestors of the race. Tradition seemed to float between these two numbers until the influence of the Chaldæo-Babylonians caused the number 10, which is that of the generations of the Sethites, to dominate over the number 7, that of the Cainites. It is to that influence we would ascribe the existence among the descendants of Seth of the legendary ancestor of the three Caucasian races. The Chaldean Noah was Khasisatra, whose vessel was saved during the Flood by the god Héa. This god himself was, however, supposed to have a vessel in which he sailed over the celestial ocean. He was, in fact, the fish-god Oannes, from whom the Chaldeans were said to have derived their civilisation, and we probably have in Oannes the point of identification between Héa and Noah himself. The Caucasian races, whose fathers had been saved from the Deluge, could not have a better legendary ancestor than the divine teacher who, issuing from the Egyptian sea, was the god Héa, not only the soul of the watery element but the source of all generation. If Noah, then, be a mythological being, introduced into the Sethite genealogy under Chaldean influence, Lamekh becomes the direct ancestor of the Caucasian stock as he is of the Turanian peoples. An argument in favour of this view is furnished by the Scripture account itself. Among the sons of Noah a peculiar position is occupied by Ham. He and his son Canaan are cursed, in like manner as Cain was cursed. The sins were different, and therefore the punishments were different, but there appears to be a kind of parallelism between Cain and Canaan for which a good reason probably existed in the mind of the writer of Genesis. We have seen that the Hamites were intimately connected with peoples belonging to the Turanian stock, and they were the special recipients of the old Cainite civilisation. It is, indeed, far from improbable that they were more Cainite than Sethite. The three sons of Noah would seem to answer to the three sons of Adam, and as Ham or Canaan is a reproduction of Cain, so Japheth and Shem are reproductions of Abel and Seth. In either case the elder brothers were put on one side or cursed, that the youngest brother might enjoy the inheritance. Perhaps an explanation of this conduct may be found in the race relationships of the Semites. That they had a closer affinity to the Hamites than had the Japhethites is unquestionable, and it can hardly be less doubted that the latter were the purest branch of the Caucasian stock. The Semites were, indeed, a mixed race, but as the Hebrews professed to be the chosen people it was necessary that the Hamite and Japhethite races should be put on one side, as Abel and Cain had been, that their ancestor Shem might take the chief place. The Semites thus became the representative Caucasian people who, as children of light, stand in opposition to the Turanian Hamites, in like manner as the sons of Seth were opposed to the descendants of Cain.

We have been led to believe that the civilisation of the ancient world originated among the Cainites, of whom the Turanians are the line of descendants. We have seen reason, moreover, for supposing that the particular branch of the Turanian stock, among whom the development of the art of metallurgy first took place, was the Ural-Altaic, to which the earliest inhabitants of Chaldea belonged, and whom Dr. Topinard supposes to be the connecting-link between the fair types of Europe and the brachycephalic types of Asia. The building art was one of the earliest to be developed, as is evident from the reference in Genesis to the building of a city by Cain. The erection of the first city is connected with the slaying of Abel, and therefore the origin of architecture may be referred back to almost the earliest period of human culture, and we may well suppose that some of the least cultured Turanian tribes represent a still earlier stage of Cainite civilisation. M. Lenormant objects to Herr Knobel’s theory that the Chinese and the Mongolian peoples are Cainites, that “the geographical horizon of the traditions of Genesis did not extend far enough to include them.” If, however, when the Chinese first descended into the plains they were still in the stone age, they may have been true Cainites, the more so as their immediate ancestors were located much nearer than are their descendants to the primeval home of Adamite man. The remarkable influence which the veneration for the serpent has obtained among the Chinese, a superstition which was developed no less remarkably among the peoples belonging to the Western branch of the Turanian family, and through them among the Hamitic peoples, would seem to prove that it was of primeval origin. The arts of metallurgy and architecture appear to have had a later development, and to have originated among the Turanian Aithiopians or Kuths, to whom the civilisation of the ancient world was ascribed. After leaving their home in West-Central Asia they settled in Chaldea, from whence they gradually spread throughout Western Asia, Northern Africa, and Europe, where, in later years, they came in contact with the Caucasian races, who gave a higher tone to their intellectual culture and their religious ideas, the latter being especially observable in the position assigned to the great serpent as the embodiment of evil.

Note.—The legend of the slaying of Abel by his brother Cain referred to at page 138, is met with in the Mythologies of some of the American tribes. See Monographie des Dènè Dindjié, by C. R. E. Petitot, pp. 62-84, and for a similar legend of the Aztecs, see American Hero-Myths, by Daniel G. Brinton, pp. 64-68.

[CHAPTER VI.]
SACRED PROSTITUTION.

Mr. Darwin, in his work entitled “The Descent of Man” (vol. ii., p. 361), seems to endorse the opinion that the high honour bestowed in ancient times on women who were utterly licentious is intelligible only “if we admit that promiscuous intercourse was the aboriginal and therefore the long revered custom of the tribe,”[230] and I propose, in the present chapter, to show that the fact referred to has nothing at all to do with the custom sought to be supported by it.