f divine serpents, essentially benign in character,
protective, prophetic, linked with gods of health, life, and healing, we
do find in all mythologies a gigantic serpent, who personifies a hostile
and nocturnal power, a wicked principle, material darkness, and moral
evil.

Among the Egyptians we meet with the serpent, Assap, who fights against
the sun and moon, and whom Horus pierces with his weapon. Among the
Chaldeo-Assyrians we find mention made of a great serpent called the
"enemy of the gods," _aiub-ilani_. We need not introduce here the myth
of the great cosmogonic struggle between Tiamat, the personification of
Chaos, and the god Masuduk, related in a portion of the epic fragments,
in cuneiform character, discovered by George Smith. Tiamat assumes the
form of a monster often repeated on monuments, but this form is not that
of the serpent. We are distinctly told that it was from Phenician
mythology that Pherecides of Syros borrowed his account of the Titan
Ophion, the man-serpent precipitated into Tartarus, together with his
companions, by the god Kronos (El), who triumphed over him at the
beginning of things, a story strikingly similar to that of the defeat
of the "old serpent, who is the accuser and Satan," repulsed and
imprisoned in the abyss, which story does not, indeed, occur in the Old
Testament, but existed among the oral traditions of the Hebrews, and
makes its appearance in Chapters xii. and xx. of the Apocalypse of St.
John.

Mazdeism is the only religion in whose symbolism the serpent never plays
any but an evil part, for even in that of the Bible it sometimes wears a
benign aspect, as, for instance, in the story of the brazen serpent. The
reason is, that in the dualistic conception of Zoroastrianism the animal
itself belonged to the impure and fatal creation of the evil principle.
Thus, it was under the form of a great serpent that Angromainyus, after
having tried to corrupt Heaven, leaped upon the earth; it was under this
form that Mithra, god of the pure sky, fought with him; and, finally, it
is under this form that he is eventually to be conquered and chained for
3000 years, and at the end of the world burned up with molten
metals.[75]

In these Zoroastrian records, Angromainyus, under the form of a serpent,
is the emblem of evil and personification of the wicked spirit as
definitively as is the serpent of Genesis, and this in an almost equally
spiritual sense. In the Vedas, on the contrary, th