12 TRANSACTIONS OF THE CANADIAN INSTITUTE. | [Vow Ve

fact with momentous consequences, since it has left its impress on peoples
so utterly devoid of all kinds of literature as the American aborigines.
always of a lascivious character—are three

Woman, serpent and guilt
points which seem inseparably connected. In a few cases, it is true,
woman and man-serpent may be replaced by man and woman-serpent
but the nature of the relations between the couple remains identical.
People will talk of ophiolatry ; they will discourse on the Ophites and
their unnatural cult of the matter, the serpent, as opposed to the spirit
personified by their so-called Demiurgos, the Jehovah of the Bible; they
will write learned dissertations on the serpent mounds of the old world
and of the new; but if they cared to go to the root of the question, I
think they would infallibly find guilty relations, either by word or by
deed, between a representative of the human species and a serpent as the

ultimate source of such monuments or religious systems.

In the case of the Ophites, it is a matter of notoriety, that they
worshipped the serpent because, by tempting Eve, he had introduced
“knowledge "—zntelligenté pauca—into the world. That the serpent
effizies of America had a cognate origin can be proved by the relics a
few of them have been found to contain; but more especially by the
prevalence among the aborigines of the tradition of immoral commerce,
in times remote, of a woman with a serpent.

Thus in Adams county, Illinois, a serpent effigy has been discovered
with fire-beds and evidences of cremation of bodies in the bottom of the
mound. Now, the phallic symbol was found there. Nay more, “the
skeletons of two snakes were found coiled up between the hands near the
secret parts” of some of the bodies!. The connection between the ser-
pent and the woman, at least by implication, is here evident. In the
first case, we have the ophidian mound and the phallic symbol, and in
the second, serpent and lasciviousness are associated in a still more
suggestive manner.

No less suggestive are the following facts gleaned from the mytho-
logies and the archeological remains of the most important American
nations.

As is gathered from the Codex Vaticanus, corporal ills were supposed
among the early Mexicans to be produced by as many causes corres-
ponding to the different parts of the body. Their therapeutics must
have had something of a homceopathic character, since their doctors
cured, for instance, the diseases of the tongue by the earthquake, those of
the breath by the air, those of the teeth bya flint, etc. A coloured plate

1 American Antiquarian, Vol. XVI., p. 17.