It is clear that Nefer-ab suffered from asthma, that he believed it had been inflicted upon him by the local goddess for some sin he had committed against her, and that he further believed his penitence and cry for help to have induced her to come to him and cure him. And this goddess was a snake. Here, in the necropolis of Thebes, therefore, the snake played the same part as a healer that it did in the worship of Asklêpios. It will be remembered that the first temple raised to Æsculapius at Rome was built after a plague, from which the city was supposed to have been delivered by a serpent hidden in the marshes of the Tiber. The serpent that destroys also heals; by the side of Kakodæmon there is also the good snake Agathodæmon.
Mert-seger, the serpent of the necropolis, did not wholly escape the patronage of the State religion. Like the local cults of aboriginal India over which Brahmanism has thrown its mantle, the cult of Mert-seger was not left wholly unnoticed by the organised religion of the State. A chapel was erected to her in the orthodox form, and it is from this chapel that most of the stelæ have come which have revealed the existence of the old worship. In some of them Mert-seger is identified with Mut, or even with Isis; but such an identification was never accepted or understood by her illiterate worshippers. For them she continued to be what she had been to their forefathers, simply a serpent and nothing more. The old faith has survived centuries of Christianity and Mohammedanism in a modified form. Professor Maspero discovered that the local Mohammedan saint, whose tomb is not far from the ancient chapel of Mert-seger, is still believed to work miracles of healing. He has taken the place of the serpent goddess; that is all.(169)
The serpent, however, was not always venerated because it was feared. It lived underground, and was thus, in a special sense, the oldest inhabitant of the land, and the guardian of the soil. The Telmessians told Kroesus that it was "a child of the earth."(170) The harmless snakes that frequent the village houses of modern Egypt are still regarded as the "protectors" of the household. The bowl of milk is provided for them as regularly as it once was in Wales for the fairies, and many tales are told of the punishment a neglect of the household _harrâs_ or "guardian" will entail. For its poison continues to exist, though held in reserve, and is communicable by other means than the fangs. At Helwân near Cairo, for instance, I was told of one of these guardian snakes which once missed its female mate and supposed it had been killed. Thereupon it crept into the _zîr_ or jar in which water is kept, and poisoned the water in it. But the female having soon afterwards made its appearance, it was observed to glide into a basin of milk, then to crawl along the ground so that the clotted dust might adhere to its body, and again to enter the _zîr_. As the dust fouled the water, the people of the house knew that the latter must have been poisoned, and accordingly poured it on the ground. In this case the snake provided the remedy for the mischief it had the power to cause.(171)