Forlong - Rivers of Life

Tree Worship.
with the sun, after which the cleft of the tree must be bound up carefully. Here we
see the Tree as a thing of life and forming the very IOni-ish, door of life, and in the
presence of Siva or the Sun, without whom regeneration of old, or giving of new life,
is known by all to be impossible.
I attach a good deal of significance to the following remarks of the author
of the Hindoo Pantheon, for rude races I have always found to be very keen
observers of such peculiarities. He says, “a longitudinal wound in the bark of
a tree will primarily assume the Sivaik form—the erect, obeliscal—like the tree
itself, symbolic of the Linga; expanded for a mysterious purpose—and it is curious
what a number of mysterious purposes seem to have. occurred to prurient eyes—
it is IOnic. Duplicated, when healed, and healed, we find it still of like allusion.”
All the forms which this learned Orientalist alludes to, are spells, and highly mystical,
and are worn on the foreheads of millions as charms; just as Europe puts a cross or
Tau—equally Phallic, on her churches, tombs, and all sacred things. Now the Cross
or Tau was the ancient clavis or key, by which it was said trees were propagated,
especially the holy Ash and Sycamore; the cutting or graft was in fact a clavis, and
in Christian times our ancestors transferred their love for Tau or Thor to the church
door key, for this was the “portal of bliss,” the “gate of heaven;” their church key
and Bible (of this they knew little) became fetish charms, which together could unfold
matters, especially matrimonial. The key was in this case laid in the fetish volume
and certain words were then repeated, as to the wish of the searchers, and the verse on
or over which it was found, was the god’s answer; witches much feared tbis fetish,
and no wonder, for they poor ill-used wretches, were weighed against the church
Bible! The “thread-needle fetes,” elsewhere mentioned in Cornwall, are of the same
significance as passing through tree or rock clefts, indeed passing through the Killarney
tree cleft is called “threading the needle” and as Cicerones there tell one, are specially
fertilizing and “saving of pains your honor, to your lady, if in a certain way.”
Oxford exhibits the same phase in her “groaning cheeses,” the cut of which in a
circular or oval form, must be kept ready at a birth to pass the new-born babe
through; afterwards, like wedding cakes, it is cut up and given to maidens to sleep
upon, “to excite pleasant and expressive dreams.”
The Dodona of history was not purely grove or tree worship; that faith had, I think
much faded before these days; a close scrutiny of all the most ancient records I can get
regarding this celebrated oracle, seems to place the matter, to be brief, somewhat thus:
The Peliades, of whom much will be hereafter said, were, says Pausanias, “the most
ancient prophetesses of Dodona in Ka-onia. (query Kal-IOnia?) even antecedent to the
celebrated Phemonoe;” 1 their first oracle was Zeuth-Zeus, the Lingam god, who stands
through mythology variously as Prometheus, Noah, or Deukalion—Deva Kala or Devi
Kali, for sexes are here of no account, Jupiter being frequently styled the mother of
1 Holwell’s Myth. Dic., Dodona.
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