ractive and beloved and worshipped by reason of its
many gifts to mankind--its grateful shelter, its abounding fruits, its
timber, and other invaluable products--why should it not become the
natural emblem of the female, to whom through sex man's worship is ever
drawn? If the Snake has an unmistakable resemblance to the male organ in
its active state, the foliage of the tree or bush is equally remindful
of the female. What more clear than that the conjunction of Tree and
Serpent is the fulfilment in nature of that sex-mystery which is so
potent in the life of man and the animals? and that the magic ritual
most obviously fitted to induce fertility in the tribe or the herds
(or even the crops) is to set up an image of the Tree and the Serpent
combined, and for all the tribe-folk in common to worship and pay it
reverence. In the Bible with more or less veiled sexual significance
we have this combination in the Eden-garden, and again in the brazen
Serpent and Pole which Moses set up in the wilderness (as a cure for the
fiery serpents of lust); illustrations of the same are said to be found
in the temples of Egypt and of South India, and even in the ancient
temples of Central America. (1) In the myth of Hercules the golden
apples of the Hesperides garden are guarded by a dragon. The Etruscans,
the Persians and the Babylonians had also legends of the Fall of man
through a serpent tempting him to taste of the fruit of a holy Tree. And
De Gubernatis, (2) pointing out the phallic meaning of these stories,
says "the legends concerning the tree of golden apples or figs which
yields honey or ambrosia, guarded by dragons, in which the life, the
fortune, the glory, the strength and the riches of the hero have their
beginning, are numerous among every people of Aryan origin: in India,
Persia, Russia, Poland, Sweden, Germany, Greece and Italy."

(1) See Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism, by Thomas
Inman (Trubner, 1874), p. 55.

(2) Zoological Mythology, vol. ii, pp. 410 sq.

Thus we see the natural-magic tendency of the human mind asserting
itself. To some of us indeed this tendency is even greater in the case
of the Snake than in that of the Tree. W. H. Hudson, in Far Away
and Long Ago, speaks of "that sense of something supernatural in
the serpent, which appears to have been universal among peoples in a
primitive state of culture, and still survives in some barbarous or
semi-barbarous countries." The fascination of t