• VENERATION OF THE RATTLESNAKE. Ill 



than with birds. The entrance to his temple at Mexico represented the 

 jaws of one of these reptiles, and he finally disappeared in the province of 

 Coatzacoalco, the hiding-place of the serpent, sailing towards the east in 

 a bark of serpents' skins. All this refers to his power over the lightning 

 serpent. 



" He was also said to be the god of riches, and the patron, consequently, 

 of merchants, for with the summer lightning come the harvest and the 

 ripening fruits, come riches and traffic. Moreover, 'the golden color of 

 the liquid fire,' as Lucretius expresses it, naturally led, where this metal 

 was known, to its being deemed the product of the lightning. Thus 

 originated many of those tales of a dragon who watches a treasure in the, 

 earth, and of a serpent who is the dispenser of riches such as were found 

 among the Greeks and ancient Germans. So it was in Peru, where the 

 God of Riches was worshipped under the image of a rattlesnake, horned 

 and hairy, with a tail of gold. It was said to have descended from the 

 heavens in the sight of all the people, and to have been seen by the whole 

 army of the Inca. . . . 



"Because the rattlesnake, the lightning serpent, is thus connected 

 with the food of man, and itself seems never to die, but annually to renew 

 its youth, the Algonkins called it ' grandfather,' and ' King of Snakes.' 

 They feared to injure it ; they believed it could grant prosperous breezes, 

 or raise disastrous tempests ; crowned with the lunar crescent* it was the 

 constant symbol of life in their picture-writing; and in the meda signs 

 the mythical grandmother of mankind, Me-suck-kum-me-go-kwa, was in- 

 differently represented by an old woman or a serpent. For like reasons 

 Cihuacoatl, the Serpent Woman, in the myths of the Nahuas, was also 

 called Tonautzin, our mother. 



" The prominence of the rattlesnake as a peculiarly American symbol, 

 indicated by these references, has received most ingenious and abundant 

 illustration from indigenous art through the studies of Dr. Harrison 

 Allen. Commencing with the suggestive remark that the serpent is the 

 ' only animal facile to the purposes of the pattern-maker,' he has traced its 

 variant forms in the picture-writing, the phonetic signs, and the architec- 

 tural ornaments of the red race, and shown the remarkable preference they 

 had for the line representing the profile of the head of the rattlesnake, 

 to the radical of which he has applied the term 'the Crotalean curve.' 



" The serpent symbol in America has, however, met with frequent 



* In a Nishinam (California) myth, according to Powers, the moon created the rattle- 

 snake. — E. I. 



