CHAPTER VI.

THE SERPENT IN INDIA.

The Kankato na--The Vedic Serpents not worshipful--Ananta and
Sesha--The Healing Serpent--The guardian of treasures--Miss
Buckland's theory--Primitive rationalism--Underworld
plutocracy--Rain and lightning--Vritra--History of the word
'Ahi'--The Adder--Zohák--A Teutonic Laokoon.


That Serpent-worship in India was developed by euphemism seems
sufficiently shown in the famous Vedic hymn called Kankato na,
recited as an antidote against all venom, of which the following is
a translation:--

'1. Some creature of little venom; some creature of great venom;
or some venomous aquatic reptile; creatures of two kinds, both
destructive of life, or poisonous, unseen creatures, have anointed
me with their poison.

'2. The antidote coming to the bitten person destroys the unseen
venomous creatures; departing it destroys them; deprived of substance
it destroys them by its odour; being ground it pulverises them.

'3. Blades of sara grass, of kusara, of darhba, of sairya, of munja,
of virana, all the haunt of unseen venomous creatures, have together
anointed me with their venom.

'4. The cows had lain down in their stalls; the wild beasts had
retreated to their lairs; the senses of men were at rest; when the
unseen venomous creatures anointed me with their venom.

'5. Or they may be discovered in the dark, as thieves in the dusk
of evening; for although they be unseen yet all are seen by them;
therefore, men be vigilant.

'6. Heaven, serpents, is your father; Earth, your mother; Soma, your
brother; Aditi, your sister; unseen, all-seeing, abide in your holes;
enjoy your own good pleasure.

'7. Those who move with their shoulders, those who move with their
bodies, those who sting with sharp fangs, those who are virulently
venomous; what do ye here, ye unseen, depart together far from us.

'8. The all-seeing Sun rises in the East, the destroyer of the unseen,
driving away all the unseen venomous creatures, and all evil spirits.

'9. The Sun has risen on high, destroying all the many poisons;
Aditya, the all-seeing, the destroyer of the unseen, rises for the
good of living beings.

'10. I deposit the poison in the solar orb, like a leathern bottle
in the house of a vendor of spirits; verily that adorable Sun never
dies; nor through his favour shall we die of the venom; for, though
afar off, yet drawn by his coursers he will overtake the poison:
the science of antidotes converted thee, Poison, to ambrosia.

'11. That insignificant little bird has swallowed thy venom; she does
not die; nor shall we die; for although afar off, yet, drawn by his
coursers, the Sun will overtake the poison: the science of antidotes
has converted thee, Poison, to ambrosia.

'12. May the thrice-seven sparks of Agni consume the influence of
the venom; they verily do not perish; nor shall we die; for although
afar off, the Sun, drawn by his coursers, will overtake the poison:
the science of antidotes has converted thee, Poison, to ambrosia.

'13. I recite the names of ninety and nine rivers, the destroyers
of poison: although afar off, the Sun, drawn by his coursers, will
overtake the poison: the science of antidotes will convert thee,
Poison, to ambrosia.

'14. May the thrice-seven peahens, the seven-sister rivers, carry off,
O Body, thy poison, as maidens with pitchers carry away water.

'15. May the insignificant mungoose carry off thy venom, Poison: if
not, I will crush the vile creature with a stone: so may the poison
depart from my body, and go to distant regions.

'16. Hastening forth at the command of Agastya, thus spake the
mungoose: The venom of the scorpion is innocuous; Scorpion, thy venom
is innocuous.' [230]

Though, in the sixth verse of this hymn, the serpents are said to
be born of Heaven and Earth, the context does not warrant the idea
that any homage to them is intended; they are associated with the
evil Rakshasas, the Sun and Agni being represented as their haters
and destroyers. The seven-sister rivers (streams of the sacred
Ganges) supply an antidote to their venom, and certain animals,
the partridge and the mungoose, are said, though insignificant,
to be their superiors. The science of antidotes alluded to is that
which Indra taught to Dadhyanch, who lost his head for communicating
it to the Aswins. It is notable, however, that in the Vedic period
there is nothing which represents the serpent as medicinal, unless by
a roundabout process we connect the expression in the Rig-Veda that
the wrath of the Maruts, or storm-gods, is 'as the ire of serpents,'
with the fact that their chief, Rudra, is celebrated as the bestower of
'healing herbs,' and they themselves solicited for 'medicaments.' This
would be stretching the sense of the hymns too far. It is quite
possible, however, that at a later day, when serpent-worship was fully
developed in India, what is said in the sixth verse of the hymn may
have been adduced to confirm the superstition.

It seems clear, then, that at the time the Kankato na was written,
the serpent was regarded with simple abhorrence. And we may remember,
also, that even now, when the Indian cobra is revered as a Brahman
of the highest caste, there is a reminiscence of his previous ill
repute preserved in the common Hindu belief that a certain mark
on his head was left there by the heel of Vishnu, Lord of Life,
who trod on it when, in one of his avatars, he first stepped upon
the earth. Although in the later mythology we find Vishnu, in the
intervals between his avatars or incarnations, reposing on a serpent
(Sesha), this might originally have signified only his lordship over
it, though Sesha is also called Ananta, the Infinite. The idea of
the Infinite is a late one, however, and the symbolisation of it
by Sesha is consistent with a lower significance at first. In Hindu
popular fables the snake appears in its simple character. Such is the
fable of which so many variants are found, the most familiar in the
West being that of Bethgelert, and which is the thirteenth of the 4th
Hitopadesa. The Brahman having left his child alone, while he performs
a rite to his ancestors, on his return finds a pet mungoose (nakula)
smeared with blood. Supposing the mungoose has devoured his child,
he slays it, and then discovers that the poor animal had killed a
serpent which had crept upon the infant. In the Kankato na the word
interpreted by Sáyana as mungoose (Viverra Mungo, or ichneumon) is
not the same (nakula), but it evidently means some animal sufficiently
unimportant to cast contempt upon the Serpent.

The universality of the Serpent as emblem of the healing art--found
as such among the Egyptians, Greeks, Germans, Aztecs, and natives
of Brazil--suggests that its longevity and power of casting its old
skin, apparently renewing its youth, may have been the basis of this
reputation. No doubt, also, they would have been men of scientific
tendencies and of close observation who first learned the snake's
susceptibilities to music, and how its poison might be drawn, or even
its fangs, and who so gained reputation as partakers of its supposed
powers. Through such primitive rationalism the Serpent might gain an
important alliance and climb to make the asp-crown of Isis as goddess
of health (the Thermuthis), to twine round the staff of Esculapius,
to be emblem of Hippocrates, and ultimately survive to be the sign of
the European leech, twining at last as a red stripe round the barber's
pole. The primitive zoologist and snake-charmer would not only, in all
likelihood, be a man cunning in the secrets of nature, but he would
study to meet as far as he could the popular demand for palliatives
and antidotes against snake-bites; all who escaped death after such
wounds would increase his credit as a practitioner; and even were his
mitigations necessarily few, his knowledge of the Serpent's habits
and of its varieties might be the source of valuable precautions.

Such probable facts as these must, of course, be referred to a
period long anterior to the poetic serpent-symbolism of Egypt,
and the elaborate Serpent mythology of Greece and Scandinavia. How
simple ideas, having once gained popular prestige, may be caught up
by theologians, poets, metaphysicians, and quacks, and modified into
manifold forms, requires no proof in an age when we are witnessing the
rationalistic interpretations by which the cross, the sacraments, and
the other plain symbols are invested with all manner of philosophical
meanings. The Serpent having been adopted as the sign-post of Egyptian
and Assyrian doctors--and it may have been something of that kind
that was set up by Moses in the wilderness--would naturally become
the symbol of life, and after that it would do duty in any capacity
whatever.

An ingenious anthropologist, Mr. C. Staniland Wake, [231] supposes the
Serpent in India to have been there also the symbol of præternatural
and occult knowledge. Possibly this may have been so to a limited
extent, and in post-Vedic times, but to me the accent of Hindu
serpent-mythology appears to be emphatically in the homage paid to
it as the guardian of the treasures. I may mention here also the
theory propounded by Miss A. W. Buckland in a paper submitted to the
Anthropological Institute in London, March 10, 1874, on 'The Serpent in
connection with Primitive Metallurgy.' In this learned monograph the
writer maintains that a connection may be observed between the early
serpent-worship and a knowledge of metals, and indeed that the Serpent
was the sign of Turanian metallurgists in the same way as I have
suggested that in Egypt and Assyria it was the sign of physicians. She
believes that the Serpent must have played some part in the original
discovery of the metals and precious stones by man, in recognition
of which that animal was first assumed as a totem and thence became
an emblem. She states that traditional and ornamentational evidences
show that the Turanian races were the first workers in metals, and
that they migrated westward, probably from India to Egypt and Chaldæa,
and thence to Europe, and even to America, bearing their art and its
sign; and that they fled before the Aryans, who had the further art
of smelting, and that the Aryan myths of serpent-slaying record the
overthrow of the Turanian serpent-worshippers.

I cannot think that Miss Buckland has made out a case for crediting
nomadic Turanians with being the original metallurgists; though it
is not impossible that it may have been a Scythian tribe in Southern
India who gave its fame to 'the gold of Ophir,' which Max Müller has
shown to have been probably an Indian region. [232] But that these
early jewellers may have had the Serpent as their sign or emblem is
highly probable, and in explanation of it there seems little reason
to resort to the hypothesis of aid having been given by the Serpent
to man in his discovery of metals. Surely the jewelled decoration of
the serpent would in itself have been an obvious suggestion of it
as the emblem of gems. Where a reptile for some reasons associated
with the snake--the toad--had not the like bright spots, the cognate
superstition might arise that its jewel is concealed in its head. And,
finally, when these reptiles had been connected with gems, the eye
of either would easily receive added rays from manifold eye-beams
of superstition.

We might also credit the primitive people with sufficient logical power
to understand why they should infer that an animal so wonderfully
and elaborately provided with deadliness as the Serpent should have
tasks of corresponding importance. The medicine which healed man
(therefore possibly gods), the treasures valued most by men (therefore
by anthropomorphic deities), the fruit of immortality (which the gods
might wish to monopolise),--might seem the supreme things of value,
which the supreme perfection of the serpent's fang might be created
to guard. This might be so in the heavens as well as in the world
or the underworld. The rainbow was called the 'Celestial Serpent'
in Persia, and the old notion that there is a bag of gold at the end
of it is known to many an English and American child.

Whatever may have been the nature of the original suggestion, there
are definite reasons why, when the Serpent was caught up to be part
of combinations representing a Principle of Evil, his character as
guardian of treasures should become of great importance. Wealth is
the characteristic of the gods of the Hades, or unseen world beneath
the surface of the earth.

In the vast Sinhalese demonology we find the highest class of demons
(dewatawas) described as resident in golden palaces, glittering with
gems, themselves with skins of golden hue, wearing cobras as ornaments,
their king, Wessamony seated on a gem-throne and wielding a golden
sword. Pluto is from the word for wealth (ploutos), as also is his
Latin name Dis (dives). For such are lords of all beneath the sod,
or the sea's surface. Therefore, it is important to observe, they own
all the seeds in the earth so long as they remain seeds. So soon as
they spring to flower, grain, fruitage, they belong not to the gods
of Hades but to man: an idea which originated the myth of Persephone,
and seems to survive in a school of extreme vegetarians, who refuse
to eat vegetables not ripened in the sun.

These considerations may enable us the better to apprehend the
earlier characters of Ahi, the Throttler, and Vritra, the Coverer. As
guardians of such hidden treasures as metals and drugs the Serpent
might be baroneted and invoked to bestow favours; but those particular
serpents which by hiding away the cloud-cows withheld the rain,
or choked the rivers with drought, all to keep under-world garners
fat and those of the upper world lean, were to be combated. Against
them man invoked the celestial deities, reminding them that their own
altars must lack offerings if they did not vanquish these thievish
Binders and Concealers.

The Serpent with its jewelled raiment, its self-renovating power, and
its matchless accomplishments for lurking, hiding, fatally striking,
was gradually associated with undulations of rivers and sea-waves on
the earth, with the Milky-way, with 'coverers' of the sky--night and
cloud--above all, with the darting, crooked, fork-tongued lightning. It
may have been the lightning that was the Amrita churned out of the
azure sea in the myth of the 'Mahábhárata,' when the gods and demons
turned the mountain with a huge serpent for cord (p. 59), meaning
the descent of fire, or its discovery; but other fair and fruitful
things emerged also,--the goddess of wine, the cow of plenty, the
tree of heaven. The inhabitants of Burmah still have a custom of
pulling at a rope to produce rain. A rain party and a drought party
tug against each other, the rain party being allowed the victory,
which, in the popular notion is generally followed by rain. I have
often seen snakes hung up after being killed to bring rain, in the
State of Virginia. For there also rain means wealth. It is there
believed also that, however much it may be crushed, a snake will
not die entirely until it thunders. These are distant echoes of the
Vedic sentences. 'Friend Vishnu,' says Indra, 'stride vastly; sky give
room for the thunderbolt to strike; let us slay Vritra and let loose
the waters.' 'When, Thunderer, thou didst by thy might slay Vritra,
who stopped up the streams, then thy dear steeds grew.'

Vritra, though from the same root as Varuna (the sky), means at first
a coverer of the sky--cloud or darkness; hence eventually he becomes
the hider, the thief, who steals and conceals the bounties of heaven--a
rainless cloud, a suffocating night; and eventually Vritra coalesces
with the most fearful phantasm of the Aryan mind--the serpent Ahi.

The Greek word for Adder, echis, is a modification of Ahi. Perhaps
there exists no more wonderful example of the unconscious idealism of
human nature than the history of the name of the great Throttler, as it
has been traced by Professor Max Müller. The Serpent was also called
ahi in Sanskrit, in Greece echis or echidna, in Latin anguis. The
root is ah in Sanskrit, or amh, which means to press together,
to choke, to throttle. It is a curious root this amh, and it still
lives in several modern words, In Latin it appears as ango, anxi,
anctum, to strangle; in angina, quinsy; in angor, suffocation. But
angor meant not only quinsy or compression of the neck: it assumed
a moral import, and signifies anguish or anxiety. The two adjectives
angustus, narrow, and anxius, uneasy, both came from the same root. In
Greek the root retained its natural and material meaning; in eggys,
near, and echis, serpent, throttler. But in Sanskrit it was chosen
with great truth as the proper name of sin. Evil no doubt presented
itself under various aspects to the human mind, and its names are
many; but none so expressive as those derived from our root amh, to
throttle. Amhas in Sanskrit means sin, but it does so only because
it meant originally throttling--the consciousness of sin being
like the grasp of the assassin on the throat of the victim. All
who have seen and contemplated the statue of Laokoon and his sons,
with the serpent coiled around them from head to foot, may realise
what those ancients felt and saw when they called sin amhas, or the
throttler. This amhas is the same as the Greek agos, sin. In Gothic
the same root has produced agis, in the sense of fear, and from the
same source we have awe, in awful, i.e., fearful, and ug in ugly. The
English anguish is from the French angoise, a corruption of the Latin
angustitæ, a strait. [233] In this wonderful history of a word, whose
biography, as Max Müller in his Hibbert Lectures said of Deva, might
fill a volume, may also be included our ogre, and also the German unke,
which means a 'frog' or 'toad,' but originally a 'snake'--especially
the little house-snake which plays a large part in Teutonic folklore,
and was supposed to bring good luck. [234]

This euphemistic variant is, however, the only exception I can find
to the baleful branches into which the root ah has grown through
the world; one of its fearful fruits being the accompanying figure,
copied from one of the ornamental bosses of Wells Cathedral.

The Adder demon has been universal. Herodotus relates that from a
monster, half-woman, half-serpent, sprang the Scythians, and the fable
has often been remembered in the history of the Turks. The 'Zohák'
of Firdusi is the Iranian form of Ahi. The name is the Arabicised form
of the 'Azhi Daháka' of the Avesta, the 'baneful serpent' vanquished
by Thraêtaono (Traitana of the Vedas), and this Iranian name again
(Dásaka) is Ahi. The name reappears in the Median Astyages. [235] Zohák
is represented as having two serpents growing out of his shoulders,
which the late Professor Wilson supposed might have been suggested by
a phrase in the Kankato na (ye ansyá ye angyáh) which he translates,
'Those who move with their shoulders, those who move with their
bodies,' which, however, may mean 'those produced on the shoulders,
biting with them,' and 'might furnish those who seek for analogies
between Iranian and Indian legends with a parallel in the story of
Zohák.' The legend alluded to is a favourite one in Persia, where it
is used to point a moral, as in the instruction of the learned Saib to
the Prince, his pupil. Saib related to the boy the story of King Zohák,
to whom a magician came, and, breathing on him, caused two serpents to
come forth from the region of his breast, and told him they would bring
him great glory and pleasure, provided he would feed these serpents
with the poorest of his subjects. This Zohák did; and he had great
pleasure and wealth until his subjects revolted and shut the King up
in a cavern where he became himself a prey to the two serpents. The
young Prince to whom this legend was related was filled with horror,
and begged Saib to tell him a pleasanter one. The teacher then related
that a young Sultan placed his confidence in an artful courtier
who filled his mind with false notions of greatness and happiness,
and introduced into his heart Pride and Voluptuousness. To those two
passions the young Sultan sacrificed the interests of his kingdom,
until his subjects banished him; but his Pride and Voluptuousness
remained in him, and, unable to gratify them in his exile, he died
of rage and despair. The prince-pupil said, 'I like this story better
than the other.' 'And yet,' said Saib, 'it is the same.'

It is curious that this old Persian fable should have survived in
the witch-lore of America, and at last supplied Nathaniel Hawthorne
with the theme of one of his beautiful allegorical romances,--that,
namely, of the man with a snake in his bosom which ever threatened to
throttle him if he did not feed it. It came to the American fabulist
through many a mythical skin, so to say. One of the most beautiful it
has worn is a story which is still told by mothers to their children
in some districts of Germany. It relates that a little boy and girl
went into the fields to gather strawberries. After they had gathered
they met an aged woman, who asked for some of the fruit. The little
girl emptied her basket into the old woman's lap; but the boy clutched
his, and said he wanted his berries for himself. When they had passed
on the old woman called them back, and presented to each a little
box. The girl opened hers, and found in it two white caterpillars which
speedily became butterflies, then grew to be angels with golden wings,
and bore her away to Paradise. The boy opened his box, and from it
issued two tiny black worms; these swiftly swelled to huge serpents,
which, twining all about the boy's limbs, drew him away into the dark
forest; where this Teutonic Laokoon still remains to illustrate in
his helplessness the mighty power of little faults to grow into bad
habits and bind the whole man.