CHAPTER III.

THE SERPENT.

The beauty of the Serpent--Emerson on ideal forms--Michelet's
thoughts on the viper's head--Unique characters of the
Serpent--The monkey's horror of Snakes--The Serpent protected
by superstition--Human defencelessness against its subtle
powers--Dubufe's picture of the Fall of Man.


In the accompanying picture, a medal of the ancient city of Tyre,
two of the most beautiful forms of nature are brought together,--the
Serpent and the Egg. Mr. D. R. Hay has shown the endless extent to
which the oval arches have been reproduced in the ceramic arts of
antiquity; and the same sense of symmetry which made the Greek vase
a combination of Eggs prevails in the charm which the same graceful
outline possesses wherever suggested,--as in curves of the swan,
crescent of the moon, the elongated shell,--on which Aphrodite may well
be poised, since the same contours find their consummate expression
in the flowing lines attaining their repose in the perfect form of
woman. The Serpent--model of the 'line of grace and beauty'--has had
an even larger fascination for the eye of the artist and the poet. It
is the one active form in nature which cannot be ungraceful, and to
estimate the extent of its use in decoration is impossible, because
all undulating and coiling lines are necessarily serpent forms. But
in addition to the perfections of this form--which fulfil all the
ascent of forms in Swedenborg's mystical morphology, circular, spiral,
perpetual-circular, vortical, celestial--the Serpent bears on it, as
it were, gems of the underworld that seem to find their counterpart
in galaxies.

One must conclude that Serpent-worship is mainly founded in fear. The
sacrifices offered to that animal are alone sufficient to prove
this. But as it is certain that the Serpent appears in symbolism
and poetry in many ways which have little or no relation to its
terrors, we may well doubt whether it may not have had a career in the
human imagination previous to either of the results of its reign of
terror,--worship and execration. It is the theory of Pestalozzi that
every child is born an artist, and through its pictorial sense must be
led on its first steps of education. The infant world displayed also
in its selection of sacred trees and animals a profound appreciation
of beauty. The myths in which the Serpent is represented as kakodemon
refer rather to its natural history than to its appearance; and even
when its natural history came to be observed, there was--there now
is--such a wide discrepancy between its physiology and its functions,
also between its intrinsic characters and their relation to man,
that we can only accept its various aspects in mythology without
attempting to trace their relative precedence in time.

The past may in this case be best interpreted by the present. How
different now to wise and observant men are the suggestions of this
exceptional form in nature!

Let us read a passage concerning it from Ralph Waldo Emerson:--

'In the old aphorism, nature is always self-similar. In the plant,
the eye or germinative point opens to a leaf, then to another leaf,
with a power of transforming the leaf into radicle, stamen, pistil,
petal, bract, sepal, or seed. The whole art of the plant is still to
repeat leaf on leaf without end, the more or less of heat, light,
moisture, and food, determining the form it shall assume. In the
animal, nature makes a vertebra, or a spine of vertebræ, and helps
herself still by a new spine, with a limited power of modifying its
form,--spine on spine, to the end of the world. A poetic anatomist,
in our own day, teaches that a snake being a horizontal line, and man
being an erect line, constitute a right angle; and between the lines
of this mystical quadrant, all animated beings find their place:
and he assumes the hair-worm, the span-worm, or the snake, as the
type or prediction of the spine. Manifestly, at the end of the spine,
nature puts out smaller spines, as arms; at the end of the arms, new
spines, as hands; at the other end she repeats the process, as legs
and feet. At the top of the column she puts out another spine, which
doubles or loops itself over, as a span-worm, into a ball, and forms
the skull, with extremities again: the hands being now the upper jaw,
the feet the lower jaw, the fingers and toes being represented this
time by upper and lower teeth. This new spine is destined to high
uses. It is a new man on the shoulders of the last.' [221]

As one reads this it might be asked, How could its idealism be more
profoundly pictured for the eye than in the Serpent coiled round
the egg,--the seed out of which all these spines must branch out for
their protean variations? What refrains of ancient themes subtly sound
between the lines,--from the Serpent doomed to crawl on its belly in
the dust, to the Serpent that is lifted up!

Now let us turn to the page of Jules Michelet, and read what the
Serpent signified to one mood of his sympathetic nature.

'It was one of my saddest hours when, seeking in nature a refuge from
thoughts of the age, I for the first time encountered the head of
the viper. This occurred in a valuable museum of anatomical imitations.

The head marvellously imitated and enormously enlarged, so as to
remind one of the tiger's and the jaguar's, exposed in its horrible
form a something still more horrible. You seized at once the delicate,
infinite, fearfully prescient precautions by which the deadly machine
is so potently armed. Not only is it provided with numerous keen-edged
teeth, not only are these teeth supplied with an ingenious reservoir
of poison which slays immediately, but their extreme fineness which
renders them liable to fracture is compensated by an advantage that
perhaps no other animal possesses, namely, a magazine of supernumerary
teeth, to supply at need the place of any accidentally broken. Oh,
what provisions for killing! What precautions that the victim shall
not escape! What love for this horrible creature! I stood by it
scandalised, if I may so speak, and with a sick soul. Nature, the great
mother, by whose side I had taken refuge, shocked me with a maternity
so cruelly impartial. Gloomily I walked away, bearing on my heart a
darker shadow than rested on the day itself, one of the sternest in
winter. I had come forth like a child; I returned home like an orphan,
feeling the notion of a Providence dying away within me.' [222]

Many have so gone forth and so returned; some to say, 'There is no
God;' a few to say (as is reported of a living poet), 'I believe in
God, but am against him;' but some also to discern in the viper's
head Nature's ironclad, armed with her best science to defend the
advance of form to humanity along narrow passes.

The primitive man was the child that went forth when his world was also
a child, and when the Serpent was still doing its part towards making
him and it a man. It was a long way from him to the dragon-slayer; but
it is much that he did not merely cower; he watched and observed, and
there is not one trait belonging to his deadly crawling contemporaries
that he did not note and spiritualise in such science as was possible
to him.

The last-discovered of the topes in India represents
Serpent-worshippers gathered around their deity, holding their tongues
with finger and thumb. No living form in nature could be so fitly
regarded in that attitude. Not only is the Serpent normally silent,
but in its action it has 'the quiet of perfect motion.' The maximum of
force is shown in it, relatively to its size, along with the minimum
of friction and visible effort. Footless, wingless, as a star, its
swift gliding and darting is sometimes like the lightning whose forked
tongue it seemed to incarnate. The least touch of its ingenious tooth
is more destructive than the lion's jaw. What mystery in its longevity,
in its self-subsistence, in its self-renovation! Out of the dark it
comes arrayed in jewels, a crawling magazine of death in its ire,
in its unknown purposes able to renew its youth, and fable for man
imperishable life! Wonderful also are its mimicries. It sometimes
borrows colours of the earth on which it reposes, the trees on which it
hangs, now seems covered with eyes, and the 'spectacled snake' appeared
to have artificially added to its vision. Altogether it is unique
among natural forms, and its vast history in religious speculation
and mythology does credit to the observation of primitive man.

Recent experiments have shown the monkeys stand in the greatest terror
of snakes. Such terror is more and more recognised as a survival in
the European man. The Serpent is almost the only animal which can
follow a monkey up a tree and there attack its young. Our arboreal
anthropoid progenitors could best have been developed in some place
naturally enclosed and fortified, as by precipices which quadrupeds
could not scale, but which apes might reach by swinging and leaping
from trees. But there could be no seclusion where the Serpent could
not follow. I am informed by the King of Bonny that in his region
of Africa the only serpent whose worship is fully maintained is the
Nomboh (Leaper), a small snake, white and glistening, whose bite is
fatal, and which, climbing into trees, springs thence upon its prey
beneath, and can travel far by leaping from branch to branch. The
first arboreal man who added a little to the natural defences of any
situation might stand in tradition as a god planting a garden; but even
he would not be supposed able to devise any absolute means of defence
against the subtlest of all the beasts. Among the three things Solomon
found too wonderful for him was 'the way of a serpent upon a rock'
(Prov. xxx. 19). This comparative superiority of the Serpent to any and
all devices and contrivances known to primitive men--whose proverbs
must have made most of Solomon's wisdom--would necessarily have its
effect upon the animal and mental nerves of our race in early times,
and the Serpent would find in his sanctity a condition favourable to
survival and multiplication. It is this fatal power of superstition
to change fancies into realities which we find still protecting the
Serpent in various countries. From being venerated as the arbiter of
life and death, it might thus actually become such in large districts
of country. In Dubufe's picture of the Fall of Man, the wrath of
Jehovah is represented by the lightning, which has shattered the tree
beneath which the offending pair are now crouching; beyond it Satan
is seen in human shape raising his arm in proud defiance against the
blackened sky. So would the Serpent appear. His victims were counted
by many thousands where the lightning laid low one. Transmitted along
the shuddering nerves of many generations came the confession of the
Son of Sirach, 'There is no head above the head of a serpent.'