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The god Pan was depicted with goat's feet and goat's head by classical artists. That, too, upset Herodotus (II, 46): 'But that is how they paint him, why, I should prefer not to mention.’ The Jewish Talmud recounts that Eve coupled with a snake. This idea inspired many artists. A woman with well-developed breasts and a snake's tail is depicted on potsherds found at Nippur—a representation, incidentally, that is not unlike those of the sirens who covet handsome young men. Distressing as it is, the sinful side of our past cannot be wiped out. Pornography has been a sought after stimulant in all ages. Prehistoric pictures of sexual excesses on clay tablets, rock faces and animal bones speak for themselves. Strange half human, half animal beings can be made out on the reliefs on the black obelisk of Salmanasar II in the British Museum. In the Louvre, the Museum of Baghdad and elsewhere there are pictures of remarkable couplings between animals and humans. Large stone figures with an extraordinary anatomy exist on the Island of Malta. They have globular thighs and pointed feet; they cannot be defined sexually at all. Pictures of demi-men on Assyrian works of art are no rarity. The accompanying texts tell of ‘captured men-animals', who were chained, carried off and given as tribute from the land of Musri to the great king. An early stone-age bone from Le Mas d'Azil (France) shows a hybrid—half man, half ape—whose phallus must have been particularly attractive. According to present-day biological knowledge a cross between man and animals is impossible, because the chromosome count of the partners does not tally. Such mating has never produced a viable being. But do we know the genetic code according to which the chromosome count of the mixed beings was put together? The sexual human-animal cult which was practised with gusto and enjoyment by the people of antiquity seems to me to have been celebrated against their better judgment. Cannot the ‘better judgment’ of coupling with one's own kind have come only from unknown intelligences? Did they perhaps fear the day when the 'gods' would return because of their backsliding? The factor that impeded evolution in primitive times was probably interbreeding with animals. From this point of view the Fall was simply arrested or recessive evolution owing to admixture with bestial blood. ‘Original sin' only becomes logical if at each birth something of the former animal side is inherited : the bestial in man. The Sumerians had one single concept for the universe: an-ki, which can be roughly translated by ‘heaven and earth’. Their myths tell of 'gods' who drove through the sky in barks and fireships, descended from the stars, fertilised their ancestors and then returned to the stars again. The Sumerian Did the earth's inhabitants lapse after the 'gods' had left? And was this lapse the same thing as original sin? What other kind of 'sin' was there to inherit, for heaven's sake?