The Watchtower Society and John and Morton Edgar - A2Z.org

the form GI a snake, whose head he is seen piercingwith a spear. The same fable occurs in the religionof India, where the malignant serpent Calyia is slainby Vishnu, in his avatar [incarnation] of Crishna.'1 he Scandinavian deity Thm was mid to havebruised the head of the great serpent with his mace.The origin of this may be readily traced to the Bible."The Grwlis, also, represented their god Apollo asslaying the serpent Pyt.ho ; and H~lmboldt shows thatthe Mexicans had the same belief concerning theirgod Ted1 : " The serpent crushed by the great spiritTwtl, when he takes the form of one of the subalterndeities, is the genius of evil-a real Kakodaemon( Mexican Researches, V01. i, p. 228). When examinationis made of these various myths, it is found that inalmost every case the serpent-destroying god dies asthe result of injuries received in t.he combat, thusshowing that the Pagans knew that it was by dyingthat the prornitjed Seed was to destroy the adversary.In the abowe quotation from Wilkinson, it will benoticed that he attributes to the Bible the knowledgewhich the Pagans had d destroying the serpent as theincarnation of evil ; but he no doubt means that thisknowledge may be traced to the account of the temptationin Eden, which afterwards appeared in theBible. The Bible as we have it, of course, did notbegin to be written till after the Exodus of theIsraelites from Egypt, 1615 B.C. Long before thisdate (The Exodus was 857 years alter the flood) thefalse religions of Babylonia, Egypt, and the othercountries were fully set up, originating, as we havesaid, with Semiramis and her follolwers. In the midstof all this idolatry, however, the Lord always had hisfaithful few-Noah, Shem, Abraham, and others beingspecially mentioned. It was because the worship of