Page:The Periplus of the Erythræan Sea.djvu/141

 And again (p.133): "In Hadramaut it is still dangerous to touch the sensitive mimosa, because the spirit that resides in the plant will avenge the injury. The same idea appears in the story of Harb b. Omayya and Mirdas b. Abi Amir, historical persons who died a generation before Mohammed. When these two men set fire to an untrodden and tangled thicket, the demons of the place flew away with doleful cries in the shape of white serpents, and the intruders died soon afterwards. The jinn it was believed slew them because they had set fire to their dwelling-place. Here the spirits of the trees take serpent form when they leave their natural seats, and similarly in Moslem superstition the jinn of the ‘oshr and hamāta are serpents which frequent trees of these species. But primarily supernatural life and power reside in the trees themselves, which are conceived as animate and even as rational.. Or again the value of the gum of the acacia as an amulet is connected with the idea that it is a clot of menstruous blood, i.e., that the tree is a woman. And similarly the old Hebrew fables of trees that speak and act like human beings (Judg. IX, 8ff., 2 Kings XIV, 9) have their original source in the savage personification of vegetable species."

The Romans and the Greeks, it is well known, believed that the souls of the dead were incarnate in the bodies of serpents and revisited the earth in that form; hence, as Frazer has shown (Golden Bough, 3rd ed. IV, 74), such practices as that described in the Bacchae of Euripides, when nursing mothers entered the Dionysiac revels clad in deer-skins and girded with serpents, which they suckled. Hence, also, the Roman custom of keeping serpents in every household, and the serpent-worship connected with their god Aesculapius, to whose shrines, as well as to those of Adonis in Syria, childless women repaired that they might be quickened by a dead saint, a jinn, o by the god himself, in serpent form. Such was the belief concerning the births of Alexander of Macedon and the Emperor Augustus.

Herodotus refers to this same belief in two passages (III, 107 and II, 75) which have been laughed at as travellers' yarns. "The Arabians gather frankincense," he says, "by burning styrax, which the Phoenicians import into Greece; for winged serpents, small in size and various in form, guard the trees that bear frankincense, a great number round each tree. These are the same serpents that invade Egypt. They are driven from the trees by nothing else but the smoke of the styrax." That is, the wrath of the incense-spirit was appeased by the perfume provided by the styrax-spirit. And every spring, he says, these winged serpents flew into Egypt through a narrow pass near Buto, where they were met by the ibis and defeated; hence the