looks upon himself as betrothed to the mother of God, and dedicates CHAP.
himself to her by taking the monastic vows. In the older Saga of ' ^
the Faroese this ring appears as that of Thorgerda, who allows Earl
Hakon to draw it from her statue after he had besought her for it
with many tears. This ring Hakon gives to Sigmund Brestesson,
bidding him never to part with it. When Sigmund afterwards
refused to yield it to Olaf, the Norwegian warned him that it should
be his bane, and the prediction was fulfilled when, for the sake of
this ring, Sigmund was murdered in his sleep. ^ Finally, the symbol
of the Phallos in its physical characteristics suggested the form of
the serpent, which thus became the emblem of life and healing, and
as such appears by the side of the Hellenic Asklepios, and in the
brazen crucified serpent venerated by the Jewish people until it
was destroyed by Hezekiah.^
Here then we have the key to that tree and serpent worship Tree and serpent which has given rise to much mgenious and not altogether profitable worship, speculation. The analysis of language and all that we know of the historical growth of ideas would prepare us for the developement of such a cultus. The condition of thought which led men to use the names applied first to the visible heaven or the sun as names for the
- This ring is the "teterrima causa"
of the war of Troy (Horace, Sat. i. 3, 107), and carries with it the same doom which the marriage of Brynhild brought to Sigurd the Volsung. It reappears in the story of Amphitriyon, and again of Uther and Igraine in the Arthur myth. With these legends may be compared the story of the crown of the hero Astrabakos (Herodotos, vi. 69), the counterpart of the Scottish myth of Tamlane. Sir. W. Scott (Border Mitistrelsy, ii. 266) cites from Gervase of Tilbury an account of the Dracse, a sort of water-spirits, who inveigled women and children into the recesses which they inhabit, beneath lakes and rivers, by floating past them on the surface of the water, in the shape of gold rings or cups ; and remarks that "this story in almost all its parts is current in both the Highlands and Low- lands of Scotland, with no other varia- tion than the sulistitution of Fairies for Dracre, and the cavern of a hill [the Horsell)crg] for that of a river."
- This symbol of the serpent re-
appears in the narrative of the tempta- tion and fall of Eve, the only difference being that the writer, far from sharing the feelings of the devotees of Baal-peor, regarded their notions and their practices with the utmost horror ; and thus his narrative exhibits the animal indulgence inseparable from those idolatrous rites, as destructive alike to the body and the mind of man. The serpent is therefore doomed to perpetual contempt, and invested with some of the characteristics of Vritra, the snake-enemy of Indra. But Vritra is strictly the biting snake of darkness ; and it is scarcely necessary to say, that the Egy])tian serpent is the result of the same kind of metaphor which has given to the elephant the epithet of anguimanus. The phallic tree is also introduced into the narrative of the Book of Genesis : but it is here called a tree not of life but of the know- ledge of good and evil, that knowledge which dawns in the mind with the first consciousness of difference between man and woman. In contrast with this tree of carnal indulgence tending to death is the tree of life, denoting the higher existence for which man was designed, and which would bring with it the happiness and the freedom of the chil- dren of God. In the brazen serpent of the Pentateuch, the two emblems of the Stauros or cross and serpent, the quies- cent and energising Phallos, are united. 2 A
