Читать книгу From Monkey to Man, or, Society in the Tertiary Age онлайн

29 страница из 43

The long contest and great enmity engendered between the Monkeys and the Snakes, also caused in time the serpent to be taken to represent everything bad, and this conflict came in the Apian Mythology to be represented as the conflict between good and evil, in which a great serpent fought with Shoozoo and was overcome by him, but not altogether slain; so that, as in the Persian Theology, the contest between good and evil still went on, although Shoozoo was expected to come again in the great future, and put the serpent entirely under his feet.

Also, as the serpent came to represent evil, it was believed that the great winged alligator, with which Shoozoo fought, was the King of Evil, or Devil, and, that, being the chief of serpents, he led all assaults against the interests of the Apes. He was pictured with wings, tail, and great claws, and was supposed to be the power that ruled over Alligator Swamp, or the Land of the Bad. Apes frightened their children by saying that the great flying Alligator would come up out of the Swamp and devour them. Simian demonology thus had its birth. Like Juno springing from the head of Jove, it issued full grown out of the imagination of Shoozoo, with an alligator for its only foundation in fact.