nor in any world but this, though at different epochs of existence. Hence, our
present happiness is a reward for the good deeds done by us in an earlier stage of
existence; and our present suffering the just chastisement for evil actions
committed in the past. In its nature they hold that the soul is primitive, because
otherwise it must be material, and a material soul is an impossibility.
“The soul,” says Kathibi, one of the Zabian teachers, “is thus immaterial, and
exists from eternity; is the involuntary reason of the first types, as GOD is the
First Cause of the Intelligences. Once on a time the soul beheld matter and loved
it. Glowing with the desire of assuming a bodily shape, it would not again
separate itself from that matter of which the world was created. Since that time,
the soul forgot itself, its everlasting existence, its original abode, and knew
nothing more of what it had formerly known. But GOD, who converts all things
to the best, united it to matter, which it loved, and out of this union the heavens,
the elements, and other composite things arose. In order that the soul might not
wholly perish within matter, He endowed it with intelligence, whereby it
conceived its high origin, the spiritual world, and itself. It further conceived
through it that it was but a stranger in this world, in which it was subject to many
sufferings, and that even the joys of this world are but the sources of new
sufferings. As soon as the soul had perceived all this, it began to yearn again for
its spiritual home, as a man who is away from his birthplace pines for his
homestead. It then also learned, that, in order to return to its primitive state, it
had to shake off the fetters of sensuous desires, and liberate itself from all
materialistic tendencies. Far from them all, it would once more regain its
heavenly sphere, and enjoy the bliss of the spiritual world.”[44]
Such is an outline of the religious system which flourished from the middle of
the ninth to the middle of the eleventh century, under the name of Zabism.
Evidently, out of this Zabaism Serpent-worship could not spring, because it is of
much greater antiquity. What then is the Zabism to which Bryant alludes? A
purely imaginary creed, which the mediæval, Jewish, Arabic, and Persian writers
identified with star-worship. The Mohammedan and other writers of the twelfth
century bestowed the name of Zabians indifferently upon the ancient Chaldeans,
the Buddhists, even the ante-Zoroastrian Persians; and Bryant has followed their
mistaken example. As a matter of fact, Serpent-worship is a relic of nature-
worship,—more particularly of the old solar worship,—and the Serpent at first
was unquestionably an emblem of the Sun.
In Babylon large serpents of silver supported the image of the goddess Rhea, in