Sometimes the discs—which might be termed Brick a Brack or, Bride’s Bairns—are centred by what looks like a tree (French arbre) or, in comparison with Fig. 295, from the catacombs, might be an anchor: it has no doubt rightly been assumed that this and similar carvings symbolised the Tree of Life with Adam and Eve on either hand. According to a recent writer: “The symbol group of a man and woman on either side of a tree with a serpent at times introduced is of pre-Christian origin. The figures narrowly considered as Adam and Eve and broadly as the human family are accompanied by the Tree which stands for Knowledge, and the serpent which represents Wisdom. This old world-wide symbol seems to crop up in Pictland twisted and changed in a curious fashion.”[554] One of these fantastic forms is, I think, the feathered elphin or antennaed solar face of Fig. 293.
Figs. 293 and 294.—From Archaic Sculpturings (Mann, L.M.).
Fig. 295.—From Christian Iconography (Didron).
Among the ancients the word Eva, not only denoted life, but it also meant serpent: the jumbled traditions of the Hebrews associated Eve and the Serpent unfavourably, but according to an early sect of Gnostic Christians known as the Ophites, i.e., Evites, or “Serpentites,” the Serpent of Genesis was a personification of the Good principle, who instructed Eve in all the learning of the world which has descended to us. There is frequent mention in the Old Testament of a people called the Hivites or Hevites, so called because, like the Christian Ophites, they were worshippers of the serpent. We meet again with Eff the serpent in F the fifth letter of the alphabet: this letter, according to Dr. Isaac Taylor, was formed originally like a horned or sacred serpent, and the two strokes of our F are the surviving traces of the two horns.[555]
Fig. 296.—From A Dictionary of Non-Classical Mythology (Edwardes and Spence).
The term Hivites is sometimes interpreted to mean Midlanders, which seems reasonable as they lived in the middle of Canaan. In connection with these serpent-worshipping Midlanders or Hivites it is significant that not only is the English Avebury described as being “situated in the very centre or heart of our country,”[556] but that it is geographically the very nave or bogel of the surrounding neighbourhood.