a difficulty which is enhanced when combined with the "Perverted Message"; the supposition of a common origin then becomes almost inevitable.
The Jehovistic story of the Garden of Eden was derived by the Hebrews from the agricultural Sumerians, although their version has not yet been discovered. The Gilgamesh story had a similar origin. Sir James Frazer suggests that the original story was of two trees in a garden, one of immortality, the other of death, and of a message to mankind from the Creator by a snake that the man was to eat of the former and live for ever, or eat of the other and die. Being mislead by the messenger, man ate of the tree of death; but the subtle snake secured immortality for himself by eating of the tree of life; thus snakes cast their skins and are immortal. If the first woman had not been deceived, we should have done likewise.
If we assume the story originated in Mesopotamia, it appears to have divaricated westwards and eastwards. To the west it was filtered through pastoral peoples and lost the garden element on its way, retaining that which had reference to the "Perverted Message," for it is not improbable that the message from the Creator was really given to our first parents by the snake. The Moon deity is a difficulty, and may retain something which has been lost in the Biblical and Gilgamesh stories; it crops up in Africa, the Far East, and in Oceania. Eastward the transmission was in the main through agriculturalists. Thus the Bahnar of Annam (whose language belongs to the Mon-Khmer group of the Austric family) tell of a tree of resurrection and a tree of permanent death, and of a lizard who persuaded the grave-diggers in future to bury people under the latter, instead of adhering to the former practice of burying under the tree of life, and so causing the earth to be too full of people. In Nias, an island west of Sumatra, immortality was lost, according to one variant, by a certain being eating bananas instead of crabs that cast their skin. The Mantra, a
