CREATURES OF MYSTERY 
193 
race of serpent-worshippers, figuratively represented with 
snakes growing from their shoulders, and whose raja him¬ 
self has a five-headed snake arching hood-wise over his head. 
In different ways these Naga tribes of South Asia are on the 
one hand analogues of the Snake Indians of America, and on 
the other of the Ophiogenes or Serpent-race of the Troad, 
kindred of the vipers whose bite they could cure by touch, and 
descendants of an ancient hero transformed into a snake. 
Serpents had a prominent place in the religions of the world, 
as the incarnations, shrines, or symbols of high deities. Such 
were the rattlesnake worshipped in the Natchez temple of the 
Sun, and the snake belonging to the Aztec deity Quetzalcoatl; 
the snake as worshipped still by the Slave Coast negro, not for 
itself, but for its indwelling deity; the snake kept and fed with 
milk in the temple of the old Slavonic god Potrimpos; the 
serpent-symbol of the healing deity, Asklepios, who abode in 
or manifested himself through the huge tame snakes kept in 
his temples (it is doubtful whether this had any original con¬ 
nection with the adoption of the snake, from its renewal by 
casting its old slough, as the accepted emblem of a new life or 
immortality in later symbolism) ; and lastly, the Phoenician 
serpent with its tail in its mouth, symbol of the world and of 
the Heaven-god Taaut, in its original meaning perhaps a 
mythic world-snake like the Scandinavian Midgard-worm, but 
in the changed fancy of later ages adapted into an emblem of 
eternity. 
It scarcely seems proved that savage races, in all their 
mystic contemplations of the serpent, ever developed out of 
their own minds the idea, to us so familiar, of adopting it as 
a personification of evil. In ancient times, we may ascribe this 
character perhaps to the monster whose well-known form is 
to be seen on the mummy-cases, the Apophis-serpent of the 
Egyptian Hades; and it unequivocally belongs to the destroy¬ 
ing serpent of the Zarathustrians, Azhi Dahaka, a figure which 
bears so remarkable a relation to that of the Semitic serpent 
of Eden, which may possibly stand in historical connection 
with it. 
A wondrous blending of the ancient rites of Ophialatry with 
