May he give them strength never to neglect his word,
following the serpent’s voice, whom his hands had made.
And may the god of divine speech expel from his five thousand that wicked thousand
who in the midst of his heavenly song had shouted evil blasphemies!
It will be observed that there were already hostile gods to whom these riotous angels were sent. It is clear that in both the Egyptian and Assyrian cosmogonies the upper gods had in their employ many ferocious monsters. Thus in the Book of Hades, Horus addresses a terrible serpent: ‘My Kheti, great fire, of which this flame in my eye is the emission, and of which my children guard the folds, open thy mouth, draw wide thy jaws, launch thy flame against the enemies of my father, burn their bodies, consume their souls!’[12] Many such instances could be quoted. In this same book we find a great serpent, Saa-Set, ‘Guardian of the Earth.’ Each of the twelve pylons of Hades is surmounted by its serpent-guards—except one. What has become of that one? In the last inscription but one, quoted in full, it will be observed (third line from the last) that eleven (angel) tribes came in after Bel’s battle to inspect the slain dragon. The twelfth had revolted. These, we may suppose, had listened to ‘the serpent’s voice’ mentioned in the last fragment quoted.
We have thus distributed through these fragments all the elements which, from Egyptian and Assyrian sources gathered around the legend of the Serpent in Eden. The Tree of Knowledge and that of Life are not included, and I have given elsewhere my reasons for believing these to be importations from the ancient Aryan legend of the war between the Devas and Asuras for the immortalising Amrita.
In the last fragment quoted we have also a notable statement, that mankind were created to fill the places that had been occupied by the fallen angels. It is probable that this notion supplied the basis of a class of legends of which Lilith is type. She whose place Eve was created to fill was a serpent-woman, and the earliest mention of her is in the exorcism already quoted, found at Nineveh. In all probability she is but another form of Gula, the fallen Istar and Queen of Hades; in which case her conspiracy with the serpent Samaël would be the Darkness which was upon the face of Bahu, ‘the Deep,’ in the second verse of the Bible.
The Bible opens with the scene of the gods conquering the Dragon of Darkness with Light. There is a rabbinical legend, that when Light issued from under the throne of God, the Prince of Darkness asked the Creator wherefore he had brought Light into existence? God answered that it was in order that he might be driven back to his abode of darkness. The evil one asked that he might see that; and entering the stream of Light, he saw across time and the world, and beheld the face of the Messiah. Then he fell upon his face and cried, ‘This is he who shall lay low in ruin me and all the inhabitants of hell!’
What the Prince of Darkness saw was the vision of a race: beginning with the words (Gen. i. 3, 4), ‘God said, Let there be Light; and there was Light; and God saw the Light that it was good; and God divided between the Light and the Darkness;’ ending with Rev. xx. 1, 2, ‘And I saw an angel come down from heaven having the key of the bottomless pit, and a great chain in his hand. And he laid hold on the dragon, that old serpent, which is the Devil and Satan, and bound him a thousand years.’