333 
and the younger Horns, to declare their power over life and 
death, hold snakes in one hand and flowers in the other, offer- 
ing the symbols of beauty and health to the Egyptians, and 
threatening the Syrians on the left hand with the envenomed 
creatures of death.* The Greeks, who, two thousand years later, 
introduced all these theories into their own mythology, and 
interpreted the sacred figures of the Egyptians by their own 
less esoteric cnltns, have, through the mistakes of their philoso- 
phers, greatly obscured the real symbolism of the ophiolatry of 
Egypt ; and those who would unravel the mysteries of Alex- 
andrian and Theban faith, must begin by disregarding the 
Olympian Pantheon, and forgetting the perversions of Roman 
ignorance and Plinian supercilious incredulity. 
7. Further, be it remembered, the Egyptian reverence, both 
in fear and love, of the serpent, was contemporaneous with the 
lives of the oldest Biblical patriarchs ; and to one who is 
unable or unwilling to accept the sacred chronicles and the 
antiquity of their earliest chapters, it is exceedingly difficult to 
Fig. 26. Krishna entangled in the folds of the great serpent Caliya, who is biting 
his heel ; the incarnate deity is waiting for divine assistance from Indra to enable 
him to overcome the enemy. 
account for the prevalence of a serpent myth, not only in 
Egypt, but in Assyria, Etruria, and Hindustan ; f still more 
difficult is it for such a one to explain the extraordinarily 
* Sharpe, Egyptian Monuments in the British Museum , p. 70. 
t As in the myths of Ramayana and Krishna, and the serpent Caliya. 
For an exhaustive treatise on Indian ophiolatry, see Fergusson’s Tree and 
Serpent Worship. 
