Fables and Prejudices regarding Serpents. 65 



the sensual emotions which it awakens.* The monuments of 

 the Mexicans, of the Japanese, and of many other nations who 

 owe the foundation of their civilization to the ancient inhabi- 

 tants of Asia, attest that the serpent played also a part more 

 or less important in their religious mysteries ; but time and 

 the relations which exist between those nations aad Euro- 

 peans, have partly abolished these usages ; and at this day it 

 is only among negro tribes, and on the west coast of Africa, 

 that the serpent figures among divinities of the first rank. 



It does not enter into the plan of my work to explain or 

 even to allude to the numerous allegories which the serpent 

 represented among the ancients. Every one knows that the 

 snakes armed the hand of Discord, no less than the whip of 

 the Furies, and that the head of the Eumenides bristled with 

 serpents ; the two snakes twisted around the caduceus of Mer- 

 cury is the type of insinuating eloquence ; the circle formed 

 of a snake biting its own tail, without beginning and without 

 end, was the chosen symbol of eternity ; the celerity of move- 

 ments uniformly repeated to execute progressive motion, be- 

 came the emblem of the swiftness of time, and the succession 

 of the infinity of ages ; the fables, lastly, of Achelous, of Ju- 

 piter metamorphosed into a serpent to captivate the object of 

 his love, and many others, attest that the ancients attributed 

 to the serpent qualities the most opposite, and that the same 

 being, according to them, united at the same time force with 

 timidity, beauty with a shape which inspired horror, mildness 

 with cunning or deceit. 



"We ought to attribute to causes similar to those we have men- 

 tioned, to that superstition — an inheritance of human nature 

 — the innumerable errors which, even to our times, have dis- 

 figured the history of serpents. A vast number of those fables, 

 invented in the infancy of the human race, and transmitted to 

 posterity by classic authors, are spread abroad so as to acquire 

 popularity from the authority which is accorded to those 

 writers. To prove this assertion, it is sufficient to recollect 



* Mosheim, Gesch. der Schlangenbr. p. 1, 

 VOL. XXXVI. NO. LXXI. JAN. 1844. B 



