With the foregoing reservation, it is, indeed, probable that the Chaldean and Phenician legend of the fruit of the tree of Paradise was nearly akin in spirit to the cycles of ancient myths common to all the branches of the Aryan race. To the study of these M. Adalbert Kuhn has contributed a book of the highest interest.[72] He deals with such as refer to the invention of fire, and to the beverage of life. These are to be found in their most ancient form in the Vedas, and they then passed over, more or less modified by the course of time, to the Greeks, Romans, Slavs, as well as the Iranians and Indians. The fundamental conception of these myths, which are only to be found complete in their oldest forms, is of the universe as an immense tree, whose roots embrace the earth, and whose branches form the vault of heaven.[73] The fruit of this tree is fire—indispensable to human existence, and the material symbol of intelligence; and the leaves distil the Elixir of Life. The gods had reserved to themselves the possession of fire, which sometimes, indeed, descends on earth in the form of lightning, but which men were not themselves to produce. He who—like the Prometheus of the Greeks—discovers the method of artificially kindling a flame, and communicates this discovery to other men, is impious, has stolen the forbidden fruit from the sacred tree, is accursed, and the wrath of the gods pursues him and his race.
The analogy between these myths and the Bible narrative is striking indeed. They are, really, one and the same tradition, only bearing a quite different sense, symbolizing an invention of a material order, instead of dwelling on the fundamental fact of the moral order, and disfigured further by the monstrous conception, too frequent in Paganism, of the Divinity as a formidable and adverse power, jealous of the happiness and progress of man. The spirit of error among the Gentiles had distorted the mysterious symbolic memory of the events by which the fate of humanity was decided. The inspired author of Genesis took it up under the form that it had evidently retained among the Hebrews, as among the other nations where it had acquired a material meaning, but he restored to it its true significance, and made it the occasion of a solemn lesson.
Some remarks are still needed regarding the animal form assumed by the tempter in Bible story, that serpent who, as figured monuments have shown us, played the same part in the legends of Chaldea and Phenicia.
The serpent, or, more correctly speaking, different kinds of serpents, held a very considerable place in the religious symbolism of the peoples of antiquity. These creatures figure therein with most opposite meanings, and it would be contrary to the laws of criticism to group together confusedly, as some learned scholars were once wont to do, the contradictory notions linked in old myths with different serpents, so as to form out of them one vast Ophiological system,[74] referred to a single source, and brought into relation with the narrative in Genesis. But by the side of divine serpents, essentially benign in character, protective, prophetic, linked with gods of health, life, and healing, we do find in all mythologies a gigantic serpent, who personifies a hostile and nocturnal power, a wicked principle, material darkness, and moral evil.
Among the Egyptians we meet with the serpent, Assap, who fights against the sun and moon, and whom Horus pierces with his weapon. Among the Chaldeo-Assyrians we find mention made of a great serpent called the "enemy of the gods," aiub-ilani. We need not introduce here the myth of the great cosmogonic struggle between Tiamat, the personification of Chaos, and the god Masuduk, related in a portion of the epic fragments, in cuneiform character, discovered by George Smith. Tiamat assumes the form of a monster often repeated on monuments, but this form is not that of the serpent. We are distinctly told that it was from Phenician mythology that Pherecides of Syros borrowed his account of the Titan Ophion, the man-serpent precipitated into Tartarus, together with his companions, by the god Kronos (El), who triumphed over him at the beginning of things, a story strikingly similar to that of the defeat of the "old serpent, who is the accuser and Satan," repulsed and imprisoned in the abyss, which story does not, indeed, occur in the Old Testament, but existed among the oral traditions of the Hebrews, and makes its appearance in Chapters xii. and xx. of the Apocalypse of St. John.
Mazdeism is the only religion in whose symbolism the serpent never plays any but an evil part, for even in that of the Bible it sometimes wears a benign aspect, as, for instance, in the story of the brazen serpent. The reason is, that in the dualistic conception of Zoroastrianism the animal itself belonged to the impure and fatal creation of the evil principle. Thus, it was under the form of a great serpent that Angromainyus, after having tried to corrupt Heaven, leaped upon the earth; it was under this form that Mithra, god of the pure sky, fought with him; and, finally, it is under this form that he is eventually to be conquered and chained for 3000 years, and at the end of the world burned up with molten metals.[75]
In these Zoroastrian records, Angromainyus, under the form of a serpent, is the emblem of evil and personification of the wicked spirit as definitively as is the serpent of Genesis, and this in an almost equally spiritual sense. In the Vedas, on the contrary, the same myth of the conflict with the serpent has a purely naturalistic character, evidently describing an atmospheric phenomenon. The idea most frequently repeated in the ancient hymns of the Aryans of India at their primitive epoch, is that of the struggle between Indra, the god of the bright sky and the azure, and Ahi, the serpent, or Vritra, the personification of the storm-cloud that lengthens out crawling in the air. Indra overthrows Ahi, strikes him with his lightnings, and by tearing him asunder sets free the fertilizing streams that he contained. Never in the Vedas does the myth rise above this purely physical reality, never does it pass from the representation of the warring atmospherical elements to that of the moral conflict between good and evil, as it does in Mazdeism.
According to a certain school of modern mythologists, of which M. Adalbert Khun is the most prominent representative in Germany, this storm-myth is the pivot on which hinges a universal explanation of all ancient religions whatever. And in particular the fundamental source, origin, and true significance of the traditions we have been reviewing, including the Biblical accounts of the Fall, are all, according to him, to be looked for in this naturalistic fable of the Vedas. No doubt the allegory which served as starting-point to this myth was not unknown to the Hebrews. We find it distinctly expressed in a verse of the Book of Job (chap. xxvi. 13), where it is said of God, "By his Spirit he hath garnished the heavens; his hand hath formed the crooked serpent." Here, indeed, by the parallelism of the two clauses of the verse, the former determines the meaning of the latter. But the Vedic myth is only one of the applications of a symbolic statement, of which the source does not lie among the Aryans; but must be sought much further back in the primitive thought of humanity, anterior to the ethnical separation of the ancestors of Egyptians, Semites, and Aryans, of the three great races represented by the three sons of Noah; for it is common to all. The pastoral tribes, whence sprung the Vedic hymns, only connected it with an idea exclusively naturalistic, almost childish, and specially drawn from the phenomena that most interested their simple existence, to which all advanced civilization, whether material or intellectual, was still foreign. But among the Egyptians the same metaphor appear with a far more general and elevated significance. The serpent Assap is no longer the storm-cloud but the personification of darkness, which the sun, under the form of Ra or Horus, encounters during his nocturnal passage through the lower hemisphere, and has to triumph over before he appears in the east. Thus, the conflict between Horus and Assap is daily renewed at the seventh hour of the night, a little before the rising of the sun, and the "Book of the Dead" shows that this strife between light and darkness was taken by the Egyptians as the emblem of the moral strife between good and evil. Neither is the serpent the mere storm-cloud in those paradisiac legends of Chaldea and Phœnicia in which we have been able to discern a relation in form to the record in Genesis. The aspect of the cloud lengthening out in the sky may, indeed (I could not positively deny it without more positive certainty) have furnished the first germ of the idea of constituting the serpent the visible image of the adverse power, combining the intimately associated ideas of darkness and of evil—a notion from which, by a confusion of the physical and moral orders, no ancient religion, not even Mazdeism, was entirely able to free itself, unless it were that of the Hebrews. But with all the highly civilized peoples whose traditions we have scrutinized, the great serpent symbolizes that dark and evil power in its widest significance.
But be this as it may, my faith as a Christian finds no difficulty in admitting that, in order to relate the fall of the first pair, the inspired compiler of Genesis made use of a narrative which had assumed an entirely mythical character among neighbouring peoples, and that the form of a serpent assigned to the tempter may have had for starting-point an essentially naturalistic symbol. Nothing obliges us to understand the third chapter of Genesis literally. Without any departure from orthodoxy we are justified in looking upon it as a figure intended to convey a fact of a purely moral order. It is not, therefore, the form of the narrative that signifies here, but rather the dogma that it expresses, and this dogma of the fall of the human race through the bad use that its earliest progenitors made of their free will, remains an eternal truth which is nowhere else brought out with the same precision. It affords the only solution of the formidable problem which constantly returns to rear itself before the human mind, and which no religious philosophy outside of revelation has ever been able to solve.