194 The Religions of Ancient Egypt and Babyloniabreath. For the Western Crest is appeased when the cry is made
[211] to her;—so says Nefer-ab, the justified. He says: Behold, hear,
all ears who live on earth, beware of the Western Crest!”^168
It is clear that Nefer-ab suffered from asthma, that he believed
it had been inflicted upon him by the local goddess for some sin
he had committed against her, and that he further believed his
penitence and cry for help to have induced her to come to him and
cure him. And this goddess was a snake. Here, in the necropolis
of Thebes, therefore, the snake played the same part as a healer
that it did in the worship of Asklêpios. It will be remembered that
the first temple raised to Æsculapius at Rome was built after a
plague, from which the city was supposed to have been delivered
by a serpent hidden in the marshes of the Tiber. The serpent that
destroys also heals; by the side of Kakodæmon there is also the
good snake Agathodæmon.
Mert-seger, the serpent of the necropolis, did not wholly
escape the patronage of the State religion. Like the local cults of
aboriginal India over which Bra%manism has thrown its mantle,
the cult of Mert-seger was not left wholly unnoticed by the
organised religion of the State. A chapel was erected to her in
the orthodox form, and it is from this chapel that most of the
stelæ have come which have revealed the existence of the old
worship. In some of them Mert-seger is identified with Mut, or
even with Isis; but such an identification was never accepted or
understood by her illiterate worshippers. For them she continued
to be what she had been to their forefathers, simply a serpent and
nothing more. The old faith has survived centuries of Christianity
and Mohammedanism in a modified form. Professor Maspero
[212] discovered that the local Mohammedan saint, whose tomb is
not far from the ancient chapel of Mert-seger, is still believed to
work miracles of healing. He has taken the place of the serpent
(^168) See the very interesting study of Maspero on“La Déesse Miritskro et ses
guérisons miraculeuses”inÉtudes de Mythologie et d'Archéologie, ii. pp.
402-419;Recueil de Travaux, ii. p. 109 sqq.