genio est, qui per anguem plerumque ostenditur);[1] the old Prussian serpent-worship and offering of food to the household snakes;[2] the golden viper adored by the Lombards, till Barbatus got it in his hands and the goldsmiths made it into paten and chalice.[3] To this day, Europe has not forgotten in nursery tales or more serious belief the snake that comes with its golden crown and drinks milk out of the child's porringer; the house-snake, tame and kindly but seldom seen, that cares for the cows and the children and gives omens of a death in the family; the pair of household snakes which have a mystic connexion of life and death with the husband and housewife themselves.[4] Serpent-worship, apparently of the directest sort, was prominent in the indigenous religions of Southern Asia. It now even appears to have maintained no mean place in early Indian Buddhism, for the sculptures of the Sanchi tope show scenes of adoration of the five-headed snake-deity in his temple, performed by a race of serpent-worshippers, figuratively represented with snakes growing from their shoulders, and whose raja himself has a five-headed snake arching hood-wise over his head. Here, moreover, the totem-theory comes into contact with ophiolatry. The Sanskrit name of the snake, 'nâga,' becomes also the accepted designation of its adorers, and thus mythological interpretation has to reduce to reasonable sense legends of serpent-races who turn out to be simply serpent-worshippers, tribes who have from the divine reptiles at once their generic name of Nâgas, and with it their imagined ancestral descent from serpents.[5] In different ways, these Nâga tribes of South Asia are on the one hand analogues of the
- ↑ Servius ad Æn. v. 95.
- ↑ Hartknoch, 'Preussen,' part i. pp. 143, 162.
- ↑ Grimm, 'D. M.' p. 648.
- ↑ Grimm, 'D. M.' p. 650. Rochholz, 'Deutscher Glaube,' &c., vol. i. p. 146. Monnier, 'Traditions Populaires,' p. 644. Grohmann, 'Aberglauben aus Böhmen,' &c., p. 78. Ralston, 'Songs of Russian People,' p. 175.
- ↑ Fergusson 'Tree and Serpent Worship,' p. 55, &c., pl. xxiv. McLennan l.c. p. 563, &c.
