SNAKE CULTS AND SERPENT WORSHIP 
It would be necessary—if such be possible—to peer behind 
the veil of antiquity to behold an era so remote from the 
present that serpent worship was not the accepted form of 
adoration of many peoples the world over. No culture, no 
people, at any time in the past, has escaped its influence. Such 
is in itself a rational and instructive subject of inquiry, espe¬ 
cially notable for its width of range in mythology and religion. 
We may begin with the lower races, with such accounts of 
those of the American Indian’s reverence for the rattlesnake 
as grandfather and king of snakes, as a divine protector, able 
to give fair winds or cause tempests; or of the worship of great 
snakes among the tribes of Peru before they received the re¬ 
ligion of the Incas, as to whom an old writer says: “They 
adore the demon when he presents himself to them in the figure 
of some beast or serpent, and talks with them.” 
Later on, examples of serpent worship may be traced into 
classic and barbaric Europe; the great serpent which defended 
the citadel of Athens and enjoyed its monthly honey-cakes 
(Herodotus, VIII, 41) ; the Roman genus loci appearing in 
the form of a snake; the old Prussian serpent worship and 
offering of food to the household snakes; the golden viper 
adorned by the Lombards, till Barbatus got it into his hands 
and the goldsmiths made it into paten and chalice. 
To this day Europe has not forgotten in the nursery tales 
or more serious belief the snake that comes with its golden 
crown and drinks milk out of the child’s porringer; the house 
snake, tame and kindly but seldom seen that cares for the cows 
and the children and gives omens of a death in the family; the 
pair of household snakes which have a mystic connection of 
life and death with the husband and housewife themselves. 
Serpent-worship, apparently of the directest sort, was prom¬ 
inent in the indigenous religions of Southern Asia. It appears 
to have maintained no mean place in early Indian Buddhism, 
for the sculptures of the Sanchi tope show scenes of adoration 
of the five-headed snake-deity in his temple, performed by a 
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