The
serpent is venomous; it casts its skin and thus seems to renew its life;
it is said to fascinate its prey; it lives in the ground; it hisses or
rattles when disturbed: none of these properties is present to the mind
of the savage who scratches on the rock a zigzag line to represent the
lightning god. But after-thought brings them up, and the association of
contiguity can apply them all to the lightning, and actually has done so
over and over again; and not only to it, but also to other objects
originally represented by a broken line, for example, the river gods and
the rays of light.

This complexity is increased by the ambiguous representation of symbolic
designs. The serpent, no longer chosen for its motion alone, will be
expressed in art in that form best suited to the meaning of the symbol
present in the mind of the artist. Realism is never the aim of religious
art. The zigzag line, the coil, the spiral, the circle and the straight
line, are all geometrical radicals of various serpentine forms. Any one
of these may be displayed with fanciful embellishments and artistic
aids. Or the artist, proceeding by synecdoche, takes a part for the
whole, and instead of portraying the entire animal, contents himself
with one prominent feature or one aspect of it. A striking instance of
this has been developed by Dr. Harrison Allen, in the prevalence of what
he calls the "crotalean curve," in aboriginal American art, a line which
is the radical of the profile view of the head of the rattlesnake
(_crotalus_).[208-1] This he has detected in the architectural monuments
of Mexico and Yucatan, in the Maya phonetic scrip, and even in the rude
efforts of the savage tribes. Each of these elective methods of
representing the serpent, would itself, by independent association,
call up ideas out of all connection whatever with that which the figure
first symbolized. These, in the mind entertaining them, will supersede
and efface the primitive meaning. Thus the circle is used in
conventional symbolic art to designate the serpent; but also the eye,
the ear, the open mouth, the mamma, the sun, the moon, a wheel, the
womb, the vagina, the return of the seasons, time, continued life, hence
health, and many other things. Whichever of these ideas is easiest
recalled will first appear on looking at a circle. The error of those
who have discussed mythological symbolism has been to trace a connection
of such adventitious ideas beyond the symbol to