Which grew, long nourished in its slimy den,
A monster horrible, the dread of men.”[212]
Admitting, however, that Apollo overcame a mythical serpent, like many related divinities, from the Vedic sun-god, Indra, the destroyer of Ahis down, does not afford a satisfactory solution of the matter under discussion. The Agathodæmon is infinitely preferable to Typhon as the prototype of the serpent of Æsculapius. It, indeed, was the reptile sacred to Apollo as well as Tum.
A study of the origin of the association of the good serpent with Apollo and Ra-Tum and other sun-gods is interesting. In the search for it one may get a clue to it in comparative mythology. The close resemblance to one another of Apollo, Ra, Baal-Samen of the Phœnicians, Shamas of the Assyrians, and other sun-gods, would lead one to think that there was an archetypal one; and to find this original one the intelligent mind would naturally look to the East, to the region about the lower waters of the Tigris and Euphrates, and with a reasonable expectation of discovering it there.[213] For among the Turanians, in that locality, the worship of the heavenly bodies undoubtedly first acquired prominence; and in the same locality, too, among the same people, the worship of serpents, according to Bryant,[214] who has written learnedly on the subject, began, and, as Fergusson says, not only originated but “spread thence, as from a centre, to every country or land of the old world in which a Turanian people settled,”[215] becoming adopted to some extent also by Semites and Aryans. From Hea, one of the three great gods (Ana, Hea, and Bel) of the Accadio-Sumerians, and, later, of the people of Babylonia, doubtless sprang some features of the Apollo myth, and possibly in part through Horus of the Egyptians. To Baal-Samen, the baal of the heavens, of the Phœnicians, Apollo had many points of resemblance. It has been maintained, however, that Apollo was “a pure growth of the Greek mind.”[216] He was so in part.
Fig. 7.—A Symbol of Hea.
Speaking of Hea, Lenormant says that it was he “that animated matter and rendered it fertile, that penetrated the universe and directed and inspired it with life.”[217] As water was believed to be the vehicle of all life and the source of generation, he sprung from the ocean and was regarded as amphibious. Oannes[218] was the name by which he was known by the Greeks. Like Dagon, of the Philistines, whose prototype he was, it was usual to give him the combined form of a fish and a man. One of the symbols of him, according to Rawlinson,[219] was a serpent, an illustration of which is reproduced here. He was the god of life, and, significantly enough, the literal meaning of his name is serpent as well as life. Here, then, we have the serpent signifying life. This is a very noteworthy fact. In an interesting paper read in 1872 before the Anthropological Institute of Great Britain, by Mr. C. S. Wake, it is very properly said: “It is probable that the association with the serpent of the idea of healing arose from the still earlier recognition of that animal as a symbol of life.”[220]
It is not amiss to remark, in this connection, that it is curious fact that the American Indians associated a serpent with the great sun-god, or, rather, the god of light, Manabozho,[221] a healing divinity, the one that instituted the sacred Medicine-Feast. It is observed by Miss Emerson that “Apollo, as a god of medicine, was originally worshipped under the form of a serpent,[222] and men worshipped him as a helper; and we trace a similar idea among the Indians relative to Manabozho. And a further association of ideas suggests the mystic god, Unk-ta-he, the god of waters, pictured as a serpent, who was believed to have power over diseases.”[223] To this I may add that Hea sprang from the Persian Gulf, and was regarded as the god of waters as well as of life.
Fig. 8.—Manabozho.