The Cult of the Serpent in the Americas: Its Asian Background [and Comments and Reply]

The origins of ophiolatry in the Western Hemisphere are obscure. It may be part of an extremely ancient, worldwide pattern of veneration of cult animals; it may have arisen independently among the Northeast Asian immigrants to the New World only after they had crossed the Bering-Chukchi land bridge between at least 15,000 and 25,000 to 45,000 years ago; or it may have been affected, if not imported, by serpent- (or dragon-) venerating societies of the Old World in relatively very recent times. Such influences could have come in the early pre- or post-Christian centuries from Indianized Asia or from China if these regions had had contacts with civilized pre-Columbian Meso- and South America as has been postulated by some diffusionists. The latter alternative is here rejected on the basis of examples which show the fundamental unity of certain features of ophidian cults among both civilized aboriginal societies and the most backward and isolated indigenes throughout the Americas. Their myths and artistic creations involving the serpent in relation to other cult animals, the sun, human and agricultural fertility, and numerology are too sharply dissimilar to Hindu-Buddhist traditions to have been influenced by them. In addition, incongruities in blood-group distribution patterns exclude the possibility of such late influences. On the other hand, these same criteria have been used with examples from archaeology and ethnography to suggest that ophiolatry is one of the very earliest of cultural imports into the Americas and that its strongest links are with northeastern Asia, particularly Siberia.

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