THE SERPENT’S STRANGENESS 171 
bolism 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, Aphdéphis, “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.” 
