110 SYMBOLISM OF THIS SEBPENT. 



a stream in Maine, in the Algonkin means snake, and Antietam, the creek 

 in Maryland of tragic celebrity, in an Iroquois dialect has the same signifi- 

 cance." Of others it was the tribal token, an instance being the Snakes 

 of Idaho, a division of the Shoshonee family. 



The wriggling attitudes of the snake helped the strong suggestiveness 

 of its swiftly glancing forked tongue to erect it into an earthly symbol 

 of the zigzag lightning; and by the Shawnees thunder was described as 

 the hissing of a great snake. Almost all the tribes had a mythical and 

 gigantic thunder-bird (birds and serpents are closely related in the nature- 

 myths of all nations) ; and in most of the stories about it a serpent takes 

 an accessary part, as held in its claws and shown in the lightning; as rob- 

 bing its nest; as dwelling in volcanoes and other inaccessible homes of 

 the thunder-bird ; and as otherwise performing mysterious and supernat- 

 ural functions. This appears plainly, not only in their myths but in the 

 pictographs, and accords well with the fact generally accepted by compara- 

 tive mythologists, that the meaning paramonut to all others in the ser- 

 pent emblems of European mythology is the lightning. 



In that admirable book, " Myths of the New World," Dr. Daniel G. 

 Brinton has written two or three pages covering this point so well that 

 I cannot refrain from quoting a part of it, though at some length : 



"In snake-charming, as a proof of proficiency in magic, and in the 

 symbol of the lightning, which brings both fire and water, which in its 

 might controls victory in war, and in its frequency plenteous crops at 

 home, lies the secret of the serpent symbol. As the 'war-physic' among 

 the tribes of the United States was a fragment of a serpent, and as thus 

 signifying his incomparable skill in war, the Iroquois represent their 

 mythical king Atatarho clothed in nothing but blacksnakes ... so, by 

 a precisely similar mental process, the myth of the JNahnas assigns as 

 a mother to their war -god Huitzilopochtli, Coatlicue, the robe of ser- 

 pents. . . . Her son's image was surrounded by serpents, his sceptre was 

 in the shape of one, his drum was of serpent's skin, and his statue rested 

 on four vermiform caryatides. 



"As the symbol of the fertilizing showers, the god of lightning was 

 the god of frnitfulness.* Born in the atmospheric waters, it was an ap- 

 propriate attribute of the ruler of the winds. . . . Qnetzalcoatl, called also 

 Yolcuat, the rattlesnake, was no less intimately associated with serpents 



* This gives a bint of the philosophy inspiring the supposed efficacy of rattlesnake 

 amulets, ointments, and potions, savage and half-civilized, in cases of parturition, which 

 are referred to on pages 98 and 106. — E. I. 



