In India, the great deluge, which occupies so conspicuous a place in its mythology, evidently has the same symbolical meaning, although the story of Noah is mixed up with it; for it was during that deluge that "the lost Vedas," or sacred books, were recovered, by means of the great god, under the form of a FISH. The "loss of the Vedas" had evidently taken place at that very time of terrible disaster to the gods, when, according to the Purans, a great enemy of these gods, called Durgu, "abolished all religious ceremonies, the Brahmins, through fear, forsook the reading of the Veda,...fire lost its energy, and the terrified stars retired from sight"; in other words, when idolatry, fire-worship, and the worship of the host of heaven had been suppressed. When we turn to Babylon itself, we find there also substantially the same account. In Berosus, the deluge is represented as coming after the time of Alorus, or the "god of fire," that is, Nimrod, which shows that there, too, this deluge was symbolical. Now, out of this deluge emerged Dagon, the fish-god, or god of the sea. The origin of the worship of Dagon, as shown by Berosus, was founded upon a legend, that, at a remote period of the past, when men were sunk in barbarism, there came up a BEAST CALLED OANNES FROM THE RED SEA, or Persian Gulf--half-man, half-fish--that civilised the Babylonians, taught them arts and sciences, and instructed them in politics and religion. The worship of Dagon was introduced by the very parties--Nimrod, of course, excepted--who had previously seduced the world into the worship of fire. In the secret Mysteries that were then set up, while in the first instance, no doubt, professing the greatest antipathy to the prescribed worship of fire, they sought to regain their influence and power by scenic representations of the awful scenes of the Flood, in which Noah was introduced under the name of Dagon, or the Fish-god--scenes in which the whole family of man, both from the nature of the event and their common connection with the second father of the human race, could not fail to feel a deep interest. The concocters of these Mysteries saw that if they could only bring men back again to idolatry in any shape, they could soon work that idolatry so as substantially to re-establish the very system that had been put down. Thus it was, that, as soon as the way was prepared for it, Tammuz was introduced as one who had allowed himself to be slain for the good of mankind. A distinction was made between good serpents and bad serpents, one kind being represented as the serpent of Agathodaemon, or the good divinity, another as the serpent of Cacodaemon, or the evil one. *
* WILKINSON. In Egypt, the Uraeus, or the Cerastes, was the good serpent, the Apophis the evil one.