There is one more important emblem connected with the sloughing of the serpent’s skin, which, so far as we are aware, has never been heretofore noticed by our symbolists. As the reptile upon casting his coat becomes freed from a casing of gross matter, which cramped a body grown too large for it, and resumes its existence with renewed activity, so _man, by casting off the gross material body, enters upon the next stage of his existence with enlarged powers and quickened vitality_. Inversely, the Chaldean Kabalists tell us that primeval man, who, contrary to the Darwinian theory was purer, wiser, and far more spiritual, as shown by the myths of the Scandinavian Bur, the Hindu Dejotas, and the Mosaic “sons of God,“in short, of a far higher nature than the man of the present Adamic race, became _despiritualized_ or tainted with matter, and then, for the first time, was given the _fleshly body_, which is typified in _Genesis_ in that profoundly-significant verse: “Unto Adam also and to his wife did the Lord God _make coats of skin_, and clothed them.”[266] Unless the commentators would make of the First Cause a _celestial tailor_, what else can the apparently absurd words mean, but that the spiritual man had reached, through the progress of involution, to that point where matter, predominating over and conquering spirit, had transformed him into the physical man, or the second Adam, of the second chapter of _Genesis_? This kabalistical doctrine is much more elaborated in the _Book of Jasher_.[267] In chapter vii., these garments of skin are taken by Noah into the ark, he having obtained them by inheritance from Methuselah and Enoch, who had them from Adam and his wife. Ham steals them from {150} his father Noah; gives them “in secret” to Cush, who conceals them from his sons and brothers, and passes them to Nimrod.