12 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. [VoL. Y. 



fact with momentous consequences, since it has left its impress on peoples 

 so utterly devoid of all kinds of literature as the American aborigines. 

 Woman, serpent and guilt — always of a lascivious character — are three 

 points which seem inseparably connected. In a few cases, it is true, 

 woman and man-serpent may be replaced by man and woman-serpent ; 

 but the nature of the relations between the couple remains identical. 

 People will talk of ophiolatry ; they will discourse on the Ophites and 

 their unnatural cult of the matter, the serpent, as opposed to the spirit 

 personified by their so-called Demiurges, the Jehovah of the Bible ; they 

 will write learned dissertations on the serpent mounds of the old world 

 and of the new ; but if they cared to go to the root of the question, I 

 think they would infallibly find guilty relations, either by word or by 

 deed, between a representative of the human species and a serpent as the 

 ultimate source of such monuments or religious systems. 



In the case of the Ophites, it is a matter of notoriety that they 

 worshipped the serpent because, by tempting Eve, he had introduced 

 "knowledge" — mtelligenti pauca — into the world. That the serpent 

 effigies of America had a cognate origin can be proved by the relics a 

 few of them have been found to contain ; but more especially by the 

 prevalence among tlie aborigines of the tradition of immoral commerce, 

 in times remote, of a woman with a serpent. 



Thus in Adams county, Illinois, a serpent effigy has been discovered 

 with fire-beds and evidences of cremation of bodies in the bottom of the 

 mound. Now, the phallic symbol was found there. Nay more, "the 

 skeletons of two snakes were found coiled up between the hands near the 

 secret parts " of some of the bodies^ The connection between the ser- 

 pent and the woman, at least by implication, is here evident. In the 

 first case, we have the ophidian mound and the phallic symbol, and in 

 the second, serpent and lasciviousness are associated in a still more 

 suggestive manner. 



No less suggestive are the following facts gleaned from the mytho- 

 logies and the archaeological remains of the most important American 

 nations. 



As is gathered from the Codex Vaticanus, corporal ills were supposed 

 among the early Mexicans to be produced by as many causes corres- 

 ponding to the different parts of the body. Their therapeutics must 

 have had something of a homoeopathic character, since their doctors 

 cured, for instance, the diseases of the tongue by the earthquake, those of 

 the breath by the air, those of the teeth by a flint, etc. A coloured plate 



1 American Antiquarian, Vol. XVI., p. 17. 



