On Tree And Serpent Worship, As Exemplified By Some Recently Discovered Indian Monuments.

Having established these points in so far as India was concerned , the speaker then turned to the forms which this worship had assumed among the Turanian races in other parts of the world .

The earliest written notice of the worship of Trees and Serpents is that contained in the 2 nd and 3 rd chapters of Genesis . With the knowledge we now possess on this subject , it appears reasonable to assume that the curse therein recorded on

the Serpent was not against the reptile as such , but the expression of a Semitic people of their abhorrence of Avhat they considered a degrading superstition , which it was necessary should be anathematized and swept away in order to make

Avay for the purer and higher worship of Jehovah , which it Avas the great object of the writers of the Pentateuch to introduce . In so far as the Jews

were concerned the abolition seems to have been successful ; but when they come in contact with the Canaanites it again crops up occasionally . As , for instance , when the Lord is said to have appeared to Moses in a flame , issuing from a sacred

tree , on which occasion the prophet's rod was turned into a Serpent . A still more remarkable instance was that of the brazen Serpent , which Moses erected in the desert to cure the Israelites from the bites they were suffering from . Though

we lose sight of this image for a while , it appears that the Jews burnt incense and made offerings to it down to the time of Hezekiah , and that it was during these 600 years kept in the

temple with the Asherahs or Groves , which were the symbolical trees of this form of worship . It reappeared after the time of Christ in the form of the sects of Ophites ; and , in so far as we can trust coins , prevailed in all the cities of Asia

Minor in which the seven churches were first established . Both forms apparently prevailed in Babylon , but only Tree Avorship has been found in Assyria ; while in ancient Egypt the adoration of the

Serpent apparently only formed one item , _ in that wonderful pantheon of animal worship which formed so singular and so marked a part of their mythology .

In Greece we find a history and mythology precisely analogous to what we find in India . An old Turanian race of Pelasgi with ancestral , and Tree and Serpent worship , superseded by an Aryan race symbolized by the return of the Heracleidae , and all whose earlier myths represent either

ihe prevalence of this form of woi'ship or the straggles of the immigrant Aryan races to suppress it . When once they had attained the political supremacy hoAvever , the Hellenes seem to have become more tolerant .

The Pythonic oracle at Delphi was adopted conjointly with the Druidic oracle of Dodona , as the principal sanctuary of the country . The oldest temple of the Acropolis at Athens was erected to enshrine the tree of Minerva , Avhich Avas given in

charge to the serpent Erecthonios . But still more remarkable than these was the worship of Esculapius in the form of a serpent in the grove at Epidaurus , which prevailed till after the Christian era . Among the demigods and heroes of the

Serpent , association Avas as frequent as with the greater cities , as is exemplified by the stories of Cecrops , Jason , Theseus , Hercules , Agamemnon and generally with the Homeric fables .

Rome borrowed her Esculapian serpent-worship apparently from Epidaurus , though Italy had a centre of that faith at Lanuvium , and it afterwards became so favourite a form under the Empire that the number of tame Serpents became a

positive nuisance . The Germans appparently Avorshipped Trees , but never Serpents ; but in Scandinavia , the Finns and Lapps and other Turanian tribes brought with them both Tree and Serpent worship to such an

extent , that notwithstanding the long supremacy of Northmen of a different race , both Trees and Serpents were worshipped in Esthonia as in Scandinavia in the last century , and the faith as exhibited in the Edda is as near a counterpart of

what is found further East , as could well be expected considering the distances of the places and the very different channels through which the description reaches us .

From Scandinavia the faith seems to have reached the north-east coast of Scotland , but not to have penetrated south of the Forth in that . direction . Its traces are very few and indistinct south of the Tweed , and Avhat are found seem

to have come by a more southern route from some other source . Both the Welsh and the Irish , however , have many traditions of Serpent-worship , which , if treated reasonably , might throw some light on the subject ; but except the legend of the

Virgin Keyna , at Stanton Drew , they are at present all of the vaguest form . Leaving these indistinct traces to fade into the western ocean , the speaker next pointed to Africa