FABLES AIs^D PKEJUDICES. 
103 
lives, who governs and enlightens the world.^ The priests 
of that people kept in the temples living serpents ; and 
when dead, interred them in those sanctuaries of supersti- 
tion.t 
As an emblem of Prudence and of Circumspection, the 
serpent was the constant attribute of ^sculapius, and the 
same veneration was paid to those reptiles, as to the father 
or the God of medicine and magic. I The Ophites were 
Christian sectaries, who, towards the second century of our 
era, established a worship which was particularly distinguished 
from that of the Gnostics in this, that they adored a living 
serpent ; conforming themselves to the ancient traditions of 
their race, they regarded that animal as the image of Wis- 
dom, and of the sensual emotions which it awakens. § The 
monuments of the Mexicans, of the Japanese, and of many 
other nations who owe the foundation of their civilization 
to the ancient inhabitants of Asia, attest that the serpent 
played also a part more or less important in their religious 
mysteries ; but time and the relations which exist between 
those nations and Europeans, have partly abolished these 
usages ; and at this day it is only among negro tribes, and 
on the west coast of Africa, that the serpent figures among 
divinities of the first rank.|| ^ 
It does not enter into the plan of my work to explain or 
even to allude to the numerous allegories which the serpent 
represented among the ancients. Every one knows that 
the snakes armed the hand of Discord, no less than the whip 
of the Furies, and that the head of the Eumenides bristled 
with serpents ; the two snakes twisted around the caduceus 
of Mercury is the type of insinuating eloquence ; the circle 
formed of a snake biting its own tail, without beginning and 
without end, was the chosen symbol of eternity ; the cele- 
rity of movements uniformly repeated to execute progres- 
sive motion, became the emblem of the swiftness of time, 
Etjsebii, Pred. Evang.y 33 ; Horopollo, ap. i. 2 ; CreutzeR, 
L. i. 507 and 824. 
t ^LiAN., xvii. 5 ; Herodotus, ii. 74. 
i Pausanius, ii. 26-28. 
§ Mosiieim, Gesch, der Schlangenbr. p. 1. 
I) See our article on the Python bivittatus^ 
