But one were an OEdipus to expound this serpent mythology; whereby is symbolized the mysteries of genesis, and of The One rejoining man's parted personality, and thus recreating mankind. Coeval with flesh, the symbol appears wherever traces of civilization exist; a remnant of it in the ancient Phallus worship having come to us disguised in our Mayday dance. Nor was it confined to carnal knowledge merely. The serpent symbolized divine wisdom, also; and it was under this acceptation that it became associated with those "traditionary teachers of mankind whose genial wisdom entitled them to divine honors." An early Christian sect, called Ophites, worshipped it as the personation of natural knowledge. So the injunction, "Be ye wise as serpents and harmless as doves," becomes the more significant when we learn that _seraph_ in the original means a serpent; _cherub_, a dove. And these again symbolize facts in osteological science as connected with the latest theories of the vertebrated cranium,[K] which view Nature as ophiomorphous--a series of spines, crowned, winged, webbed, finned, footed in structure--set erect, prone, trailing, as charged with life in higher potency or lower; man, holding the sceptre of dominion as he maintains his inborn rectitude, or losing his prerogative as lapsed from his integrity--hereby debasing his form and parcelling his gifts away in the prone shapes distributed throughout nature's kingdoms. Or, again as aspiring for lost supremacy, he uplift and crown his fallen form with forehead, countenance, speech,--thus liberating the genius from the slime of its prone periods, and restoring it to rectitude, religion, science, fellowship, the ideal arts. [Footnote K: "Spix, in his 'Cephalogenesis,' aids Oken's theory of the spinal cranium in endowing the artist's symbol of the cherub with all that it seemed to want before that discovery; namely: with a thorax, abdomen and pelvis, arms, legs, hands and feet."--OWEN.] "Unless above himself he can Erect himself, how poor a thing is man." III.--EMBRYONS. "The form is in the archetype before it appears in the work, in the divine mind before it exists in the creature."