that takes the form of a great serpent, and lies at night in some
deep dark pool; and should a man incautiously approach and look down
into the water he would be held there by the power of the great
gleaming eyes, and finally drawn down against his will, powerless and
speechless, to disappear for ever in the black depths.
Not less strange than this statue-like immobility of the serpent, the
effect of which is increased and made more mysterious by the flickering
lambent tongue, suddenly appearing at intervals like lightning playing
on the edge of an unmoving cloud, is that kind of progressive motion
so even and slow as to be scarcely perceptible. But on this and other
points relating to the serpent’s strangeness I have spoken in the
preceding chapter. Even in our conditions of self-absorption and
aloofness--the mental habit of regarding nature as something outside of
ourselves and interesting only to men of curious minds--this quality
of the serpent is yet able to affect us powerfully. How great was
its effect on the earlier races, and what great things resulted from
it, when the floating scattered threads of all strange sensations and
experiences, all unaccountable things, were gathered and woven into the
many-coloured and quaintly figured cloth of religion, anthropology has
for some time past been engaged in telling us.
We have seen in the history of palaeontology that, when the fossil
remains of some long-extinct animal have been discovered, in some
district still perhaps inhabited by one or more representatives of
archaic form, naturalists have concluded that the type was peculiar
to the district; but subsequently fresh remains have been discovered
in other widely separated districts, and then others, until it has
been established that the type once supposed local has, at one time
or another, ranged over a very large portion of the habitable globe.
Something similar has been the case in the extension of the area
over which evidences of serpent-worship have been brought to light
by inquiries into the early history of mankind. It had existed in
Phoenicia, India, Babylonia, and, in a mild form, in Greece and Italy
in Europe; Persia was added, and, little by little, Cashmir, Cambodia,
Thibet, China, Ceylon, the Kalmucks; in Lithuania it was universal;
it was found in Madagascar and Abyssinia; the area over which it
once flourished or still flourishes in Africa grows wider and wider,
and promises to take in the entire continent; across the Atlantic it
extended over a greater part of North, Central, and South America,
and exists still among some tribes, as it still does in Egypt, India,
and China. Meanwhile the area over which it once held sway in Europe
has also been extended; among those who once regarded the serpent as a
sacred animal we now include the Goths, British Celts, Scandinavians,
Esthonians, and Finns. It would no longer be rash to say that in every
part of the earth inhabited by the serpent this animal has at one time
or other been reverenced by man.
Into the subject of serpent-worship, about which scores of books
and hundreds of papers have been written, I do not wish to go one
step further than I am compelled by my theme, which is, primarily,
the serpent, and the effect on the human intelligence of its unique
appearance and faculties. At the same time the two matters are so
closely connected that we cannot treat of one without touching on the
other. We find that the authorities are divided in their opinions as to
the origin of this kind of worship, some holding that it had its rise
in one centre--Furgusson goes so far as to give the precise spot--from
which it spread to other regions and eventually over the earth; others,
on the contrary, believe that it sprang up spontaneously in many places
and at different periods.
The solution of this question is, I believe, to be found in
ourselves--in the effect of the serpent on us. Much is to be gained by
personal experience and observation, and by close attention to our own
sensations. Just as the individual who has passed the middle period
of life, or attained to old age, has outlived many conditions of mind
and body so different and distinct that when recalled they seem to
represent separate identities, and yet has preserved within himself
something of them all--of adolescence, of boyhood, even of childhood
and infancy--an ineradicable something corresponding to the image,
bright or dim, existing in his memory; so do we inherit and retain
something of our forgotten progenitors, the old emotions and obsolete
modes of thought of races that have preceded us by centuries and by
thousands of years.
In the next chapter, dealing with the subject of man’s irrational
enmity to the serpent, there will be more said on this subject;
nevertheless, at the risk of some overlapping, I must in this place
dwell a little on my own early experiences, which serve to illustrate
the familiar biological doctrine that the ancient, outlived characters
of the organism tend to reappear for a season in its young. The mental
stripes on the human whelp are very perceptible. From an aesthetic,
that is, _our_ aesthetic, point of view, there is not much to choose
between an English infant, whether of aristocratic or plebeian descent,
and a Maori, Patagonian, Japanese, or Greenland infant. The Greenland
infant might be the fattest--I do not know. After the features and
expression change, when infancy and early childhood is past, they are
still alike in mind. The similarity of all children all the world over
sometimes strikes us very forcibly. One day I stood watching a group
of a dozen children playing in a small open green space in London;
its openness to the sky and the green, elastic turf under their feet
had suddenly made them mad with joy. Watching them I could not help
laughing when all at once I remembered having once watched a group of
children of about the same size as these on a spot of green turf in a
distant region, playing the same rude game in the same way, with the
same shrill, excited cries; and these were children of unadulterated
savages--the nomad Tehuelches of Patagonia! In some savage tribes the
adults are invariably of a gloomy, taciturn disposition--the “buoyant
child surviving in the man” would be as astonishing a phenomenon to
them as a fellow-creature with the melodious throat of a Rubini, or a
pair of purple wings on his shoulders. The children of these people sit
silent and unsmiling among their elders in the house, as if the burden
of eternal care had been inherited by them from birth; but every day
the grave young monkeys find a chance to steal off, and when they have
got to some secluded spot in the woods, out of earshot of the village,
a sudden transformation takes place: they are out of school, and as
merry and shrill at their games and mock battles as any rough set of
urchins just released from their lessons in our own land.
Many pages might be filled with similar instances. And when we consider
what the law is, and that the period during which the human species
has existed in any kind of civilisation, making its own conditions,
is but a span compared with its long life of simple barbarism, it
would be strange indeed if we did not find in the civilised child the
psychological representative of primitive man. We do not look for the
emotions and inherited or traditional habits proper to the adult. The
higher mental faculties, which have had their growth in a developed
social state, are latent in him. His senses and lower mental faculties
are, on the contrary, at their best: in the acuteness of his senses,
and the vividness and durability of the impressions made on him by
external stimuli; in his nearness to or oneness with Nature, resulting
from his mythical faculty, and in the quick response of the organism
to every outward change, he is like the animals. His world is small,
but the bright mirror of his mind has reflected it so clearly, with
all it contains, from sun and stars and floating clouds above, to the
floating motes in the beam, and the grass blades and fine grains of
yellow sand he treads upon, that he knows it as intimately as if he had
existed in it for a thousand years. And whatever is rare and strange,
or outside of Nature’s usual order, and opposed to his experience,
affects him powerfully and excites the sense of mystery, which remains
thereafter associated with the object. I remember that as a child, or
small boy, I was affected in this way on seeing mushrooms growing in a
chain of huge rings in a meadow; also by the sensitive-plant, when I
saw it shrink and grow pale at the touch of my fingers. Other plants
and flowers have affected me with a sense of mystery in the same way;
and throughout the world, among inferior or savage races, plants of
strange forms are often regarded with superstitious fear or veneration.
Something of this--the mythical faculty of the primitive man and of
the child--remains in all of us, even the most intellectual. There is
a story told of an atheist who, coming from an orchid show, said that
he had been converted to belief in the existence of a devil. A feeling,
about which he probably knew little, was father to the witticism.
To pass from plants to animals. As a child I was powerfully moved at my
first meeting with a large owl. I was exploring a dimly lighted loft
in a barn, when, peering into an empty cask, I met its eyes fixed on
mine--a strange monster of a bird with fluffed, tawny plumage, barred
and spotted with black, and a circular, pale-coloured face, and set
in it a pair of great luminous yellow eyes! My nerves tingled and
my hair stood up as if I had received an electric shock. Recalling
this experience, the vividness of the image printed on my mind, and
the sense of mystery so long afterwards associated with this bird,
it does not seem strange that among all races in all parts of the
globe it should have been regarded as something more than a bird, and
supernatural--a wise being, something evil and ghostly, a messenger
from spirit-land, and prophet of death and disaster; a little sister
or some other relation of the devil; and finally the devil himself;
also, as in Samoa, a god incarnate. Its voice, as well as its strange
appearance, had doubtless much to do with the owl’s supernatural
reputation. The owl is first, but only one, of a legion of feathered
demons, ghosts, witches, and other unearthly beings, usually nocturnal
birds with cries and notes that resemble the human voice expressing
physical agony, incurable grief, despair and frenzy, always with
something aerial and ventriloquial in it, heightening its mysterious
and terrible character; and the birds that emit these sounds are of
many families--night-jars, herons, rails, curlews, grebes, loons, and
others.
But great as the owl is among birds that have been regarded as
supernatural, or in league with the unseen powers, it has never risen
to the height of the serpent in this respect: it had only its strange
appearance, silent flight, and weird voice; the serpent had many and
more impressive qualities. First and foremost is the strength and
lastingness of the impression produced by its strangeness, and its
beautiful, infinitely varied, and, to the unscientific mind, causeless
motions; its spectre-like silence and subtlety; its infinite patience
and watchfulness, and its power to continue with raised head and neck
rigid as if frozen to stone for a long period; and its wonderful
quietude when lying day after day in sun or shade on the same spot,
as if in a deep perpetual sleep, yet eternally awake, with open
brilliant eyes fixed on whosoever regards it. A sense of mystery
becomes inseparably associated with its appearance; and when habitually
regarded with such a feeling, other qualities and faculties possessed
by it would seem in harmony with this strangeness, and outside of the
common order of nature:--its periodical renewal of youth; the power
of existing without aliment and with no sensible diminution of vigour
for an indefinite time; the faculty of fascination--a miraculous power
over the ordinary lower animals; and the deadliness which its venom
and the lightning-like swiftness of its stroke give it, and which is
never exercised against man except in revenge for an insult or injury.
To this inoffensiveness of the lethal serpent, together with its habit
of attaching itself to human habitations, about which it glides in
a ghostly manner, may be traced the notion of its friendliness and
guardianship and of its supernatural power and wisdom; the belief that
it was a reincarnation of a dead man’s soul, a messenger from the gods,
and, finally, the Agathodaemon of so many lands and so many races of
men.
The serpent’s strangeness and serpent-worship are thus seen as cause
and effect. Now, there is another effect, or another subject, so mixed
up with the one I have been considering that this paper might appear
incomplete without some notice of it--I refer to the widely prevalent
belief in the existence of serpents of vast size and supernatural
powers; in many cases the daemons or guardian spirits of rivers, lakes,
and mountains. Given the profound veneration for the natural serpent,
and the mental condition in which the mythical faculty is very strong,
men would scarcely fail to see such monsters in certain aspects of
Nature coinciding with certain mental moods; and that which any person
saw, and gave an account of, as he would have done of a singular tree,
rock, or cloud which he had seen, the others would believe in; and
believing, they would expect to see it also; and with this expectation
exciting them, when the right mood and aspect came they probably would
see it.
Even to our purged and purified vision Nature is full of suggestions
of the serpent--that is, to those who are familiar with the serpent’s
form and have been strongly impressed with its strangeness. Ruskin has
called the serpent a “living wave,” and compares it in motion to a
“wave without wind.” In many of its aspects the sea is serpent-like;
never more so than when the tide rises on a calm day, when wave
succeeds to wave, lifting itself up serpentwise, gliding noiselessly
and mysteriously shorewards, to break in foam on the low beach and
withdraw with a prolonged hissing sound to the deep. Again, he has
compared the serpent in motion to a “current without a fall.” Before
I had read Ruskin, or knew his name, the swift current of a shallow
stream had reminded me on numberless occasions of a serpent in rapid
motion. When rushing away at its greatest speed, the creature, as one
looks down on it, changes its appearance from a narrow body moving in
a sinuous line to a broad straight band, the outward and inward curves
of the body appearing as curved lines on its surface, and the spots and
blotches of colour forming the pattern as shorter lines. The shallow
pebbly current shows a similar pattern on its swiftly moving surface,
the ripples appearing as light and dark slanting lines that intersect,
cross, and mingle with each other.
Viewed from an elevation, all rivers winding through the lower levels,
glistening amidst the greens and greys and browns of earth, suggest the
serpent form and appear like endless serpents lying across the world.
Probably it is this configuration and shining quality of rivers, as
well as the even, noiseless motion of flowing water, which has given
rise to the belief among many savage tribes of huge water-serpents,
like that of the stupendous Mother of the Waters, supposed to lie
extended at the bottom of the Amazon, Orinoco, and other great
rivers of tropical South America. The river boa of these regions is
probably the largest existing serpent on the globe, but it is a small
creature to the fabled monster that rests beneath the flood--so small
comparatively that it might well be regarded as one of the unseen
monster’s newly born young.
There is also something in the hypnotic effect produced by deep clear
water when gazed on steadily and for a long time which may have given
rise to the African superstition of the Icanti already mentioned. Among
some North American tribes there also existed a belief in a serpent of
enormous size that reposed at the bottom of some river or lake, and
once every year rose to the surface showing a shining splendid stone on
his head.
The mountains, too, have their serpent-shaped guardians: thus, it
was believed by the neighbouring tribes that a huge camoodi, or boa,
rested its league-long coils on the flat top of the table mountain of
Roraima in Venezuela. Doubtless a serpent of cloud and mist; of the
white vapour that, forming at the summit, dropped down in a long coil,
or crept earthwards along the deep fissures that score the precipitous
sides.
Other beliefs of this kind might be adduced, and other resemblances
to the serpent’s form and motion in nature traced, but enough on this
point has been said. If it is due to these resemblances that the savage
is disposed to see the life and intelligent spirit he attributes
to Nature, and to all natural objects, take the serpent form, may
we not believe that the serpent-myths of the earlier civilised
races originated in the same way? Doubtless in many cases, with the
development of the reasoning powers and the decay of the mythical
faculty, the fable would be somewhat changed in form and embellished,
and perhaps come at last to be regarded as merely symbolical. But
symbolism does not exist among barbarians and savages: it comes in
only when the intellect has progressed sufficiently far to become
enamoured of subtleties. When the savage Shawnees heard the hissing of
a great snake in the thunder, and saw in the lightning a fiery serpent
descending to the earth, the beings they heard and saw were real--as
real as the rattlesnake. The same may be said of the monster serpent
with a precious stone for a crown of the Iroquois and Algonquins; and
of the mighty _Onnient_, the serpent of the Hurons, bearing a horn on
its head with which it was able to pierce through rocks and hills.
Greater than these (as gods are greater than heroes) were some of the
serpents of old, and they also had a vastly greater influence on human
destiny; but in their origins they were probably the same--merely the
strange births of the mythical faculty and the lawless imagination
of the primitive mind: the Mexican Cihua Cohuatl, “the woman of the
serpent,” and mother of the human race; and the serpent of the Edda
that encircled the world; and Persian Ahriman, “the old serpent having
two feet,” who seduced Mechia and Mechiana, the first man and woman;
and, most awful of all, Aphôphis, “the destroyer, the enemy of the
gods, and devourer of the souls of men; dweller in that mysterious
ocean upon which the Boris, or boat of the sun, was navigated by the
gods through the hours of day and night, in the celestial region.”
XVI
THE BRUISED SERPENT
Some hold that our abhorrence of the serpent tribe, the
undiscriminating feeling which involves the innocent with the harmful,
is instinctive in man. Many primitive, purely animal promptings and
impulses survive in us, of which, they argue, this may be one. It is
common knowledge that the sight of a serpent affects many persons,
especially Europeans, in a sudden violent manner, with a tremor and
tingling of the nerves, like a million messages of startling import
flying from the centre of intelligence to all outlying parts of the
bodily kingdom; and these sensations of alarm, horror, and disgust
are, in most cases, accompanied or instantly followed by an access
of fury, a powerful impulse to crush the offensive reptile to death.
The commonness of the feeling and its violence, so utterly out of
proportion to the danger to be apprehended, do certainly give it the
appearance of a true instinctive impulse; nevertheless, such appearance
may be deceptive. Fear, however it may originate, is of all emotions
the least rational; and the actions of a person greatly excited by it
will most nearly resemble those of the lower animals.
Darwin, on the slightest evidence, affirms that monkeys display an
instinctive or inherited fear of snakes. There are many who would
think any further inquiry into the matter superfluous; for, they would
argue, if monkeys fear snakes in that way, then assuredly we, developed
monkeys, must regard them with a feeling identical in character and
origin. To be able thus to skim with the swallow’s grace and celerity
over dark and possibly unfathomable questions is a very engaging
accomplishment, and apparently a very popular one. What is done with
ease will always be done with pleasure; and what can be easier or more
agreeable than to argue in this fashion: “Fear of snakes is merely
another example of historical memory, recalling a time when man, like
his earliest ancestors, the anthropoid apes, was sylvan and solitary;
a mighty climber of trees whose fingers were frequently bitten by
bird-nesting colubers, and who was occasionally swallowed entire by
colossal serpents of arboreal habits.”
The instinctive fear of enemies, although plainly traceable in insects,
with some other creatures low in the organic scale, is exceedingly
rare among the higher vertebrates; so rare indeed as to incline any
one who has made a real study of their actions to doubt its existence.
It is certain that zoological writers are in the habit of confusing
instinctive or inherited with traditional fear, the last being the
fear of an enemy which the young learn from their parents or other
adults they associate with. Fear is contagious; the alarm of the adults
communicates itself to the young, with the result that the object that
excited it remains thereafter one of terror. Not only in this matter of
snakes and monkeys, but with regard to other creatures, Darwin lays it
down that in the higher vertebrates the habit of fear of any particular
enemy quickly becomes instinctive; and this false inference has been
accepted without question by Herbert Spencer, who was obliged to study
animal habits in books, and was consequently to some extent at the
mercy of those who wrote them.