Page:The Mythology of All Races Vol 12 (Egyptian and Indo-Chinese).djvu/359

Rh with an accompaniment of gunshots to attract the attention of the spirits.

The less civilized tribes seem to have no trace of the serpent-worship which, at one time or another, was spread over so much of the earth, but it is conspicuous in the legend, emblem, and actual representation of all the more developed races of Indo-China, just as it is in the mythology of many other peoples of all the continents in the world. It is not merely that the serpent was the tempter in the Garden of Eden; that he was the guardian of the golden apples of the Hesperides, Hera's wedding gift, and was deprived of all his hundred heads by Hercules as his eleventh labour; that he was coiled under the altar of Pallas at Athens; that Aesculapius took a serpent's form during a pestilence in Rome and that the Goddess of Health bears a serpent in her hand; that Jupiter Ammon assumed the shape of a serpent and became the father of Alexander the Great by Olympias; and that cobras still haunt the precincts of Hindu shrines and are tempted out by fifes to drink the milk that is offered to them. The serpent is also taken to be the symbol of deity, because, as Plutarch tells us, it feeds on its own body; the shedding of its skin was believed to renew its life, whence it is the emblem of immortality or eternity, or, at any rate, of renovation. The sacred snake was prominent in the Greek mysteries just as he is one of the chief symbols of the religious rites of certain tribes among the North American Indians.

In most of the Indo-Chinese countries the plain snake is usually changed into the more ornate dragon, very probably through the influence of China and Japan. The Japanese formerly worshipped the water-snake as a god, and they have traditions that the Creator appeared to man in the form of a serpent; while the Chinese long ago adopted the dragon as their national emblem. This theory seems best to account for the huge serpents, with men for legs, which writhe about the streets at many Buddhistic festivals in all parts of Indo