Fables and prejudices regarding Serpents. By Dr H. SCHLEGEL.* The serpent performed a grand part in antiquity, and still plays it among most barbarous or demi-civilized nations. Numerous causes have been assigned for this phenomenon. Man, intimidated by his aversion for these animals, which is in him in some degree innate, has only learnt from experience, how small a number of these reptiles are formidable by their poisonous qualities, while others conceal, under the same delusive appearances, a mild and inoffensive character. A thousand different properties, which are successively detected in serpents, have opened to man a vast field of meditation, and, in furnishing ample materials to dress out his religious ideas, have presented him with an infinite number of mythic allegories. He has drawn from them symbols, and has ended in offering to those dreaded animals a worship founded on the most diverse and conflicting motives. It would seem to be natural to man to avail himself even of the animals which are noxious, for procuring the means of preservation from the evils which they cause: hence the practice, established from the most remote times, of extracting from serpents remedies against their bites; while, on the other hand, man sought to appease their fury by revering them as divinities. The ancients, employing often the most prominent characteristics of animals in their allegories, discovered, in the habits of serpents, in their qualities, or even in their form, an inexhaustible fund for setting to work their own fertile imagination, which heated itself invariably in embellishing the observations they had made from nature. It is to these various causes, and to circumstances perhaps little known at this time, that we should attribute the fear, mingled with hatred and veneration, with which the serpent has inspired the human race. In the mythology of most ancient nations, there are traces From Dr Traill's excellent translation of Dr Schlegel's valuable "Essay on the Physiognomy of Serpents," about to be published. This work we recommend to the student of Ophiology. which attest that the idea of the serpent as the evil principle prevailed from the most remote antiquity. The serpent is represented as the cause of the first transgression and fall of man; and Arimanes, assuming the form of a serpent, seeks in vain to overcome his antagonist Orosmandes, who represents the good principle in the idealism of the ancient Persians. It is believed that the ancient Greeks made choice of the allegory of the great serpent killed by the arrows of Apollo to represent the pestilential vapours, emanating from the marshy slime which covered the earth after the deluge, or after annual inundations, and which could only be dissipated by the rays of the sun; afterwards, this Python became the attribute of Apollo and his priestesses at Delphi, and it subsequently served for the emblem of Foretelling and Divination. Analogous circumstances probably gave rise to the fable of the Lernæan Hydra, exterminated by the labours of Hercules and his companion Iolas. Among the ancient Egyptians, the serpent was the symbol of fertility. They represented, under the form of a serpent, inclosed by a circle, or entwined around a globe, the Cneph of their cosmogony, who is the same as Ammon, or the Agathodemon, the spirit or soul of creation, the principle of all that 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 superstition.† As an emblem of Prudence and of Circumspection, the serpent was the constant attribute of Esculapius, and the same veneration was paid to those reptiles, as to the father or the God of medicine and magic.‡ 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 Wisdom, and of * Eusebii, Pred. Evang., 33; Horopollo, ap. i. 2; Creutzer, Symb. L. i. 507 and 824. Elian, xvii. 5; Herodotus, ii. 74. 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 celerity of movements uniformly repeated to execute progressive motion, became the emblem of the swiftness of time, and the succession of the infinity of ages; the fables, lastly, of Achelous, of Jupiter metamorphosed into a serpent to captivate the object of his love, and many others, attest that the ancients attributed to the serpent qualities the most opposite, and that the same being, according to them, united at the same time force with timidity, beauty with a shape which inspired horror, mildness with cunning or deceit. We ought to attribute to causes similar to those we have mentioned, to that superstition-an inheritance of human nature -the innumerable errors which, even to our times, have disfigured the history of serpents. A vast number of those fables, invented in the infancy of the human race, and transmitted to posterity by classic authors, are spread abroad so as to acquire popularity from the authority which is accorded to those writers. To prove this assertion, it is sufficient to recollect *Mosheim, Gesch. der Schlangenbr. p. 1. VOL. XXXVI. NO. LXXI.—JAN. 1844. E what several modern authors have repeated in their works, that hogs kill snakes to feed upon them, and that serpents find in milk a great dainty; errors which date from the times of Aristotle* and Pliny, but propagated in Europe, in America, and other parts of the world. We read in the same authors,‡ that the ichneumon, to defend itself against the bites of snakes, bedaubs itself with mud, and that it eats a certain herb which those reptiles hold in aversion. This prejudice, which rests on the simple fact that the little mammiferæ we speak of, as well as many others, are the natural enemies of serpents, is preserved in various parts of the East Indies. The plant which possesses the virtue of repelling snakes, according to Kaemfer,§ is the Ophiorhiza Mungos, according to others, the Aristolochia indica, which the jugglers of those countries pretend to use with success; but the experiments of Russell || have demonstrated that all these qualities repose only on popular prejudices. The same holds good with regard to the employment of the Polygala Senega¶, a plant celebrated among many tribes of North America; while other nations reject it, to make use of plants of the genera Prenanthes, Lactuca, Helianthus, Spiræa, &c., the efficacy of which, as antidotes against the poison, are as little proved as that of the former. Modern travellers of great name have furnished some curious facts relating to a plant,** to which the inhabitants of Colombia attribute the same qualities as those ascribed to the Aristolochia in India; but it is much to be desired that these experiments were repeated by persons familiar with the nature of serpents. It will be superfluous to repeat all that the ancients have invented concerning the innumerable antidotes of which *Hist. Anim., ix. 2. Aristotelis, ix. 7. Plin., viii. 36. § Amœnitates Exoticæ, i. p. 305. || Indian Serpents, i. p. 86. ¶ Palisot Bauvais, Ap. Latreille, iii. p. 90. ** Plantæ Equinox. ii. pl. 105. t Hist. Natur. viii. 14. tt [The author perhaps is not aware of the curious experiments on the rattlesnake with the leaves of the Fraxinus Americana, by Judge Woodruffe, published in Silliman's Journal for 1833.-Tr.] they vaunt the efficacy. On consulting the passages of Pliny* to which we refer, it will be seen that the ancients recommend indiscriminately, for this purpose, the most heterogeneous substances; but that the attempts which they made were the result of the grossest empiricism. Deceptions of this nature are practised in India and Ceylon, where they sell pastilles and pills of different kinds, arbitrarily composed of substances frou the vegetable, animal, and mineral kingdoms, and which merely act on the imagination of the sufferer.† We have stated above, that the practice of extracting from serpents the remedies against their bite, dates from remote antiquity: Antonius, physician to Augustus, employed vipers in several diseases; but it was not until the time of Nero, when the physician Andromachus of Crete,§ invented the theriaca, that the practice became general. The theriac was an arbitrary compound of heterogeneous medicaments, and was afterwards employed in maladies of the most opposite nature: it was compounded in the middle ages in almost all the cities of Europe, particularly in its southern parts: at this day, the practice of including the snake in the composition of this medicament is only retained in Italy, where the theriac is still made in various places. In Sicily it is prepared at Palermo. That of Venice is very celebrated: there they use millions of the Vipera aspis, which is common in the vicinity of that city. The great manufacture of theriac which exists at Naples, under the protection of the government, is a private speculation, at the head of which stands the learned Professor Delle Chiaje; there they use indiscriminately every species of serpent, although they prefer the vipers named viperiere by the peasants, who bring them alive in baskets. M. Siebold assures me that they frequently employ a species of theriac in China and Japan; the inhabitants of the Lioukiou Isles extract medicaments from the Hydrophis colubrina ; and * Hist. Natur., 28, 42, 29, 15, 17, 20, 21, 22, 25, 26, 32, 17, 19, &c. † Russell, i. p. 74; Davy, Ceylon, p. 100. Plin. 30, 39. § Galen, de Antidotis, lib. i. cap. 6. MS. note communicated by the late Dr Michahelles. |