in character.
The ancient Indo-Iranians worshiped a similar deity. The worship of
Coppal, both in ritual and in significance, is identical with that
of the Greek Aphrodite.

[47] Brugsch, Knight, Mueller, _et al._

Hundreds of pages have been written on snake-worship, in which a
wonderful amount of metaphysical lore has been expended. Mr. Herbert
Spencer devotes several pages to the snake, and the reason for its
appearance in the religion of primitive peoples. He ascribes to savages
a psychical acuteness that I am by no means willing to allow them,
inasmuch as he makes them give a psychical causation for their adoption
of the serpent as a deity, such as no ignorant and uncultivated savage
could have possibly evolved. I am inclined to believe that, like all
great students and thinkers, Mr. Spencer has a hobby, and that this
hobby is animism or ancestor-worship. When he gives out, as a reason for
the snake's almost universal appearance in the religions of primitive
peoples, that the latter consider it an animal which has assumed the
returning ghost, double, or soul of an ancestor,[48] I think that he is
very much in error. There are very few primitive folk, comparatively
speaking, who believe in metempsychosis. In all probability, when a
race, like the ancient Egyptians, for instance, had reached a high
degree of civilization, they idealized many of their religious beliefs
and customs; hence, the serpent probably lost its initial and simple
symbolical meaning, and stood for something higher and more ethical
during the reign of the great Pharaohs, and the Golden Age of the Greeks
and Latins. I am positive, however, that the snake's original
significance was wholly phallic in character, and that its adoption as a
symbol was simple and material, as I explain elsewhere in this essay.[Q]

[48] Spencer: _Principles of Sociology_, vol. i, p. 798.

[Q] The appearance of the erect male organ of generation is quite
sufficient to explain why the snake should be chosen as a symbol in
phallic rites.

I am forced to this conclusion by its presence among phallic symbols in
almost every race that practiced or practices a worship of the
generative principles. The Pueblo Indians, whom I have mentioned
elsewhere in this treatise, regard the snake symbol with reverence; the
Moqui Indians have their sacred snake dance, in which they worship the
reptiles, handling the most vicious and poisonous ratt