There can be no question as to the antiquity or universality of Serpent-Worship, whatever may be the difference of opinion as to its origin. According to Bryant it began in Chaldea, and was “the first variation from the purer Zabaism.” But this statement requires from us a brief preliminary explanation of that ancient form of worship. Zabaism, or Zabism, has had its two sects,--first the Chaldean Zabians of the Kuran,--the “Parsified” Chaldee heathen, or non-Christian Gnostics,--the ancestors of the present Mendaites, or so-called Joannes Christians, who reside in the neighbourhood of the Persian Gulf, and speak a corrupt form of Chaldee-Aramaic. And second, the Pseudo-Zabians, or Syrian Zabians, in Harran, Edessa, Rakkah, and Bagdad. It is the latter who now chiefly represent Zabism. The first named, or Chaldean Zabians, who transferred the name to the Harranic, and greatly influenced the development of the peculiar system of the latter, are the people so designated in the Kuran, and by the Mohammedans of to-day. The Harranians, who rose about A.D. 830, profess to derive their denomination from one Zâbi, who is variously called a son of Seth, son of Adam, or a son of Enoch or Idris, or a son of Methuselah, or of some fictitious Badi or Mari, a supposed companion of Abraham; while Mohammedan writers trace it to the word _ssaba_, “to turn, to move,” because its professors turned from the path of true religion, that is, Islam, or, as the Zabians say, because they have turned _to_ the proper faith. The Zabian creed, as professed by the Harranic Zabians, would appear to resolve itself into the following elements:-- It teaches that the Creator is, in His essence, primitivity, originality, and eternity, One; but in His numerous manifestations in bodily figures, manifold. Chiefly He is personified by the seven principal planets, and by the good, knowing, excellent earthly bodies. This, however, is without any disturbance of His unity. It is, say the Zabians, as if the seven planets were His seven limbs, and as if our seven limbs were His seven spheres in which He manifests Himself,--so that He speaks with our tongues, sees with our eyes, hears with our ears, touches with our hands, comes and goes with our feet, and acts through our members.