A great deal has been written on serpent-worship, “the first variation,” says Bryant, “from the purer Sabaism;”[224] and the number of suggested explanations of the curious cultus is almost legion. I hesitate about touching on the subject; but some statements on it are called for, to render the treatment of the matter on hand reasonably complete.
In a recent able work, Mr. C. F. Keary, of the British Museum, presents some interesting facts and inferences on the origin of the worship. He maintains that the tree, mountain, and river were the three great primitive fetich-gods, and forcibly argues that a serpent was the symbol of the last, which, it may be noted, is nearly always a life-giving power, an early and substantial type of the fontaine de jouvence. Without pretending to account for their original worship, he “takes it for certain that, at a very early time, rivers became through symbolism confounded with serpents.”[225]
Remnants of the three fetich-gods of Mr. Keary are preserved in later and more abstract cults, and may be largely found in Indo-European mythologies. The Greeks and Romans appear to have regarded rivers and mountains with particular favor, while the Celts and Teutons were more especially devoted to trees. The wells of knowledge and of magic and the fountains of youth which are met with in myth and legend are simply the narrowing to particular instances of the magic, the sacredness, and the healing gifts which were once universally attributed to streams. The monstrous python which Apollo encountered and destroyed at Delphi was, according to Mr. Keary, a river, and a harmful one,—the river of death. “The reptile was, we know,” says he, “before all things, sacred to Æsculapius, and was kept in his house, as, for example, in the great temple at Epidaurus. It would seem that the sun-god has the special mission of overcoming and absorbing unto himself this form of fetich. This is why Apollo slays the python, and why the snake is sacred to Æsculapius.”[226]
Mr. Keary was by no means the first, I may say, to emphasize the association of serpents with rivers. The fact has been dwelt on by Dr. Brinton. Says this distinguished student of American archæology: “The sinuous course of the serpent is like nothing so much as that of a winding river; which, therefore, we often call serpentine. So did the Indians. Kennebec, a stream in Maine, in the Algonkin, means snake, and Antietam, the creek in Maryland of tragic celebrity, in an Iroquois dialect, has the same significance. How easily could savages, construing the figure literally, make the serpent a river- or water-god.”[227]
I believe, however, that it would be a mistake to hold that the serpent was at any time exclusively a symbol of the river. Both Mr. Keary and Dr. Brinton say as much. In the old world, as well as in the new, it was widely recognized as a symbol of lightning, and believed to have power over wind and rain.
Some have turned to the heavens for an explanation of serpent-worship. Thus, Mr. Arthur Lillie, in an interesting little work, says: “Like all old religious ideas, the serpent-symbol was, probably, in the first instance, astronomical.[228] Two thousand eight hundred and thirty-six years before Christ, a large star was within one degree of the celestial pole. This was the A of Draco.”[229] Much interest was taken in this star of Draco, formerly, as Mr. Proctor says, “the polar constellation”[230] in different countries,[231] as, for instance, in Egypt. In their studies of the great pyramid Jizeh, both Proctor and Piazzi Smyth[232] dwell on the subject at length.[233] The passage from the north, which slants downward at an angle of 26° 17´ into the immense structure, would seem to have been constructed so that A of Draco shone down it. When this was the case, the star was 3° 42´ from the pole, which was its position both about 2170 and 3350 B.C. “We conclude,” says Proctor, “with considerable confidence, that it was about one of the two dates, 3350 and 2170 B.C., that the erection of the great pyramid began, and from the researches of Egyptologists it has become all but certain that the earlier of these dates is very near the correct epoch.”[234] Smyth takes 2170 B.C. as the correct date, but his unscientific method of study renders him an unreliable authority. The question is highly interesting and important.
However, the constellation of Draco was represented in ancient astronomy by a tortuous serpent, either alone or in connection with a tree. Those familiar with the description of the shield of Hercules,[235] attributed to Hesiod, and which, it is believed, was suggested by a Zodiac temple[236] of the Chaldeans, imitations of which were to be found in Egypt and elsewhere, will recall the reference to Draco,[237] as follows:—
“The scaly terror of a dragon coil’d
Full in the central field; unspeakable;
With eyes oblique, retorted, that aslant