The totem cult may explain why with most races the serpent has been regarded as a protecting deity, an agathos demon, and would also explain the claims made by races and individuals to be of snake or naga descent.
. Scipio Africanus is said to have believed him self the son of a snake ; and Augustus allowed it to be understood that\ki,; mother Atia had received him from a serpent. lexander the Great, before he undertook to prove himself the son of Jupiter - Ammon, was supposed Japparently by Philip himself) to be the son of a serpent, who actually appeared to him in a dream in later years to save the life of his general Ptolemy. In the Turanian form of Buddhism, Sakya and Buddhist lungs are invariablyrepresented under the protection of the hooded snake, or of three or mOre—anakes, which are figured as rising behimi, and with the hood sha. dowing the seated image.- This form 7:kf protection has been transferred to the ling_a.m (phallus, priapus), the emblem of modern Saiva Brahmanism ; and everywhere are to be seen, throughout all the south of India, the sculptured figures of one, three, or nine naga heads, over shadovving this symbol of reproduction.
In the earliest records of the Semitic thought, the serpent and the tree take a prominent position. Adam and Eve are taught by the serpent more subtile than any beast of the field, and the tree of knowledge supplies the fi uit to enlighten them. Moses' rod was turned into a serpent, but pressure by the thumb on the back of a serpent's neck produces temporary catalepsy, and Moses and Aaron, and afterwards the Egyptian magician:, imitated this. An image of a snake was made for the Jews, and snake - worship continued amongst that race for seven hundred years ; and in the days of Hezekiali the children of Israel did burn incense ' to the self-same brazen serpent, which was actually preserved in the very temple (2 Kings xviii. 4). The reformer king at the same titne cut down the groves, and brake in pieces the serpent,' thus combining in common ruin the two ever-parallel idolatries.
The serpent was worshipped in Chaldma, where, as in Egypt, it was called Oub, hence the Greek ocpq. This word, as Oboth, is translated familar spirit in Leviticus xx. 6, 27. (See also 1 Samuel xxviii. 3, 7, 9 ; 2 Kings xxi. 6, xxiii. 24 ; 2 Chron. xxxiii. 6.) The woman of Endor is called a mis tress of Ob ; and Jothain, king of Israel, built much on the wall of Ophiel, i.e. the serpent-god, for the worship of snakes. Obi men and Obi women, the designation of the pretended diviners amongst the negroes of the West India colonies, is the same word, and probably brought with them from Africa. The pethen of the Hebrews,
the python of the Greeks, and beaten of the Arabs, from which we have the words python and python ess, is that form alluded to in Acts xvi. 16, as the damsel with the spirit of divination. In the theology of Zoroaster, Dahaka or Zohak was an evil being created by Ahrirnanes. In Persian mythology, Zoliak is a king who reigned at Babel for 1000 years, having two serpents growing between his shoulders, and daily devouring men, until his own destruction by Faridun, the servant of Hormazd.
Persius speaks of the custom of painting certain conventional figures of serpents on walls, to indi cate the sanctity of the spot, a practice of which there are several examples at Herculaneum and Pompeii. The serpent is seen as genius loci ' upon the coins of many of the towns of Asia Minor,— Cyzicum, Pergarnos, Marcianapolis, in Mysia, Aboniteichos and Amastris in Paphla gonia, Nice and Nicomedia in Bithynia, Tomos in Pontus, and Mindus in Criaa, all exhibit the serpent as their ensign. In Epidaurus, down to the time of Pausanias, serpents were kept and fed in the grove attached to the temple of Esculapius. The Greeks had myths regarding the python and hydra, the echidna. and the dragon of the garden of the Hesperides ; but in historic times the Athenians kept a serpent in the Erec theum, and its escape warned them to fly from the Persians ; and Pausanians tells us that the Epidaurian serpents held their place amongst the gods of Greece till long after the age of Christ. Livy (x. 47), Valerius Maximus (i. 8, 2), Aurelius Victor (xxii. 1), and Ovid (Met. xv. 5) mention the serpente of Esculapiuti kept at Epidatirile, which the Ronuni Senate sent an embassy to obtain. A plague ravaged Rome in the year of the city 462; living serpent was solemnly fetched from Greece to Italy, and received with divine honours, on the banks of the Tiber, by the Senate and people of Rome, and Esculapius received honours ennilar to those alluded to in Numbers (xxi. 8, 9) as occurring in the Arabian desert. After that occasion a serpent, in a conventional attitude, was, in the Roman world, the recognised typo of a sacred place. In India, in the centuries preceding and following, the Christian era, serpen t worship and tree - worship seem to have had repeated revivals, and the serpent - emblazoned topes of Sanchi and Anuavati are the existing monuments of the fact.