How vitally important was the place that these rites of Teitan or Satan occupied, may be judged of from the fact that Pluto, the god of Hell (who, in his ultimate character, was just the grand Adversary), was looked up to with awe and dread as the great god on whom the destinies of mankind in the eternal world did mainly depend; for it was said that to Pluto belonged "to purify souls after death." Purgatory having been in Paganism, as it is in Popery, the grand hinge of priestcraft and superstition, what a power did this opinion attribute to the "god of Hell"! No wonder that the serpent, the Devil's grand instrument in seducing mankind, was in all the earth worshipped with such extraordinary reverence, it being laid down in the Octateuch of Ostanes, that "serpents were the supreme of all gods and the princes of the Universe." No wonder that it came at last to be firmly believed that the Messiah, on whom the hopes of the world depended, was Himself the "seed of the serpent"! This was manifestly the case in Greece; for the current story there came to be, that the first Bacchus was brought forth in consequence of a connexion on the part of his mother with the father of the gods, in the form of a "speckled snake." *
* OVID, Metam. So deeply was the idea of "the seed of the serpent" being the great World-king imprinted on the Pagan mind, that when a man set up to be a god upon earth, it was held essential to establish his title to that character, that he prove himself to be the "serpent's seed." Thus, when Alexander the Great claimed divine honours, it is well known that his mother Olympias, declared that he was not sprung from King Philip, her husband, but from Jupiter, in the form of a serpent. In like manner, says the authoress of Rome in the 19th Century, the Roman emperor, "Augustus, pretended that he was the son of Apollo, and that the god had assumed the form of a serpent for the purpose of giving him birth."
That "father of the gods" was manifestly "the god of hell"; for Proserpine, the mother of Bacchus, that miraculously conceived and brought forth the wondrous child--whose rape by Pluto occupied such a place in the Mysteries--was worshipped as the wife of the god of Hell, as we have already seen, under the name of the "Holy Virgin." The story of the seduction of Eve * by the serpent is plainly imported into this legend, as Julius Firmicus and the early Christian apologists did with great force cast in the teeth of the Pagans of their day; but very different is the colouring given to it in the Pagan legend from that which it has in the Divine Word. * We find that Semele, the mother of the Grecian Bacchus, had been identified with Eve; for the name of Eve had been given to her, as Photius tells us that "Pherecydes called Semele, Hue." Hue is just the Hebrew name for Eve, without the points. Thus the grand Thimblerigger, by dexterously shifting the peas, through means of men who began with great professions of abhorrence of his character, got himself almost everywhere recognised as in very deed "the god of this world." So deep and so strong was the hold that Satan had contrived to get of the ancient world in this character, that even when Christianity had been proclaimed to man, and the true light had shone from Heaven, the very doctrine we have been considering raised its head among the professed disciples of Christ. Those who held this doctrine were called Ophiani or Ophites, that is, serpent-worshippers. "These heretics," says Tertullian, "magnify the serpent to such a degree as to prefer him even to Christ Himself; for he, say they, gave us the first knowledge of good and evil.