While, therefore, Gimbo represented the Unitarians, or Mono-snakists, who claimed that there was only one great snake god—the Alligator of Shoozoo—there was a polytheistic, or poly-snake, party, which insisted on a many-snaked Pantheon, and particularly on a belief in the sun-snake and the wood-eating snake, which were thought by many to be one and the same; while still others thought that these, with the Alligator of Shoozoo, formed together a trinity of snakes which were in substance all one, but manifested themselves under the three forms of Sun-light, Wood-fire and Alligator. CHAPTER XX. [Illustration] There had up to this time been many sects in the religion of the Ammi. They all agreed simply in recognizing Shoozoo as its founder, and his fight with the Alligator as the great transaction on which it rested. There was early, however, a schism in the main body. One class had drifted away from the worship of Shoozoo to the worship of his Alligator, and in time they claimed that the Alligator was the god, instead of Shoozoo. This came from their habit of using the alligator, or figures representing it, as symbols of the Shoozoo religion, whereby the symbol became in time more important than the thing symbolized. There were, accordingly, in the Shoozoo religion, the pure Shoozoo party and the Alligator party, and for nearly a generation a fierce controversy raged between the two, resulting often in bloodshed. The Alligator party, however, triumphed in the end, and many of the pure Shoozooists were exiled, and have since lived among the Lali and other apes, where they have continued to worship Shoozoo without any mixture of the Alligator, and have converted back some of the Apes to their faith. In time, however, the Alligator party came to be divided among themselves, as the outgrowth of the same spirit. They accustomed themselves to use, as the symbol of the Alligator, a dragon-fly (for the alligator vanquished by Shoozoo was admitted to be a flying alligator which somewhat resembled a dragon-fly), and by many the dragon-fly came at length to be taken for the Alligator and to be worshipped as such. A fight accordingly arose between the pure Alligator party and the dragon-fly party that waxed more bitter than the original fight between the Alligator party and the Shoozoo party. The dragon-fly party were in the end victorious, and the Alligator party were slain or banished as heretics, just as the pure Shoozoo party had been.