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peculiarity would cause the serpent to be tenfold more sacred 
in Egypt than elsewhere, as it would identify it with the 
renewal of the very life of Egypt itself in the annual revivifica- 
tion by the Nile, which, casting its heavy slough of mud, gave 
new earth and new water to its worshippers. It was the 
sacredness of the Nile that made sacred every animal and 
plant that lived in or emerged from it. 
9. There is something very curious also in this symbol as used 
for the Nile. I admit the evidences are startlingly remote, but 
that makes it the more curious. In Scotland,* Ireland, and 
America is a serpent symbol, as shown on my diagrams 
(figs. 1, 2, compare these with fig. 21), which in each case has a 
triangular head or mouth, exactly corresponding to the delta of 
the Nile; and in the case of the great American serpent mound 
in Ohio, the effigy appears to be presiding over three mouths of 
rivers. This, however, I merely mention incidentally, though 
the details are so exact that it gives evidence of a common 
symbolism ; the orb, a characteristic feature in the Egyptian 
representations, being also in each case found with this delta- 
mouthed serpent form. It is very remarkable that the honey 
cakes carried in golden baskets by noble virgins for the purpose 
of an offering to, and at the same time the food for, deified 
serpents, were ornamented with the sacred Omphalos ; that is, 
a boss, on which was described a spiral line, which some think 
was itself a representation of a serpent (figs. 3, 3 a). A 
glance at the diagrams from Dowth, and that marked with the 
letter I, will show at once that it would hardly have been 
possible to design the Omphalos and the serpent more clearly ; 
and the ceremonies of the Omphalos can be distinctly traced to 
Egypt. 
10. To return to the subject. We have traced the supposed 
wanderer to his distant retreat, and followed his institution of 
new gods, the sun and the serpent; for his first god — the 
earth — would soon sink into insignificance in comparison with 
the powers that made the earth fertile, and as his knowledge of 
them increased. 
11 . Man, new from intercourse with the Supreme, was not yet 
sunk to the level of being satisfied with a passive deity ; such, 
and grossly sensual divinities, were reserved for still greater 
degradation, or atheistical distance. We have an example 
in the case of the Greeks, who, while the philosophers and 
higher classes worshipped the gods of government, war, speed, 
music, poetry, sculpture, love, and wisdom, appropriated to 
* The first I assume from Dr. James Fergusson. 
