gender differ"; but this fact is thought to be of no material
importance, as "Jove, Jehova, sun, and moon have all been male
and female by turn."
No doubt many of the inconsistencies hitherto observed in the
religion of the ancients will disappear so soon as we obtain a
clearer knowledge of their chronology; and events which now seem
contradictory will be satisfactorily explained when placed in
their proper order with regard to date. Religion, like
everything else, is constantly shifting its position to
accommodate itself to the changed mental conditions of its
adherents; hence, ideas which at any given time in the past were
perfectly suited to a people, would, in the course of five
hundred or one thousand years, have become changed or greatly
modified.
During a certain stage in human history "all great women and
mythical ladies were serpents"; but when monumentally or
pictorially represented, they appeared "with the head of a woman,
while the body was that of a reptile." This figure represented
Wisdom and Passion, or the spiritual and material planes of human
existence. The mythical woman whom Hercules met in Scythia, and
who was doubtless the original eponymous leader of the Scythian
people, had the head of a woman and the body of a serpent.[73]
Even the Mexicans declare that "he, the serpent, is the sun,
Tonakatl-Koatl, who ever accompanies their first woman." Their
primitive mother, they said, was Kihua-Kohuatl, which signifies a
serpent. In referring to this Mexican tradition, Forlong
remarks: "So that the serpent here was represented as both Adam
and Adama; and their Eden, as in Jewish story, was a garden of
love and pleasure."[74]
[73] Herodotus, book iv., 9.
[74] Rivers of Life, vol. i., p. 143.
The traditions extant among all peoples seem to connect the
introduction of the serpent into religious symbolism, with a time
in the history of mankind when they first began to recognize the
fact, that through the abuse of the reproductive functions, evil,
or human wretchedness, had gained the ascendency over the higher
forces. The Deity represented by a woman and a serpent involved
the idea not alone of good, but of good and evil combined.
Together they prefigured not only Wisdom and generative power,
but evil as well. Mythologically they represented the cold of
winter and the heat of the sun's rays, both of which were
necessary reproduction. From this conception sprang the Ormuzd
