Forlong - Rivers of Life

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Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
of a speckled serpent. (Ovid’s Met. VI. 114.) Deo was Ceres, and we have in The
or De the root from whence comes Delphos, our female oracle of the Kastalian spring,
in which was erected the Serpent oracle, but whose Guardian was ever a woman.
Ovid mentions the tree of Pallas in connection with a palm as causing Latona to
bring forth twins (Met. VI. 335), which I am induced to think merely means the
Lingam, or “tree of life,” in connection with the Palm, as a very fruitful and upright
tree; we may read r for t.
I will here condense what Fergusson tells us in his beautiful book on “Tree and
Serpent Worship,” regarding the worship of “the Tree of Life.” Adam, says a poet,
had three seeds put into his mouth (very allegoricaI poetry indeed), and they produced
a cedar, a cypress, and a pine, all trees sacred in phallic lore: these three
united and formed one tree, which then possessed the power of multiplying itself.
Solomon (gravely say these pious writers) cut it down to support his house, but to this
it disdained to confine its powers, so he cast it into the brook Kedron, in which the
Queen of Sheba discovered it, owing to its many virtues; these she was no doubt a
competent judge of, having come to Solomon to learn of his wisdom, and having gone
back, say the Abysinians, to give to them a race of stalwart Solomons. 1 This Queen it
appears buried the tree of life in the pool of Bethesda, and here the very christian
Empress Helena “recognised it owing to its miraculous powers.” She, we know,
was then divorced from her husband; but after her return with this “tree of life”
(the fourth century A.C.) owing to a new and dominant faith, it turned into “the
true cross,” and the pious Empress was restored to her husband. The history is here,
as elsewhere, rather disconnected, like all religious tales, but we learn that one Chosroes
took the true cross into Persia, and one Heraclius brought it back, when it appears to
have got cut up into the numerous fragments, which pious Christian kings, priest,
and laities, fought and wrangled over for many centuries. It evidently had then great
powers of multiplying itself, though it does not seem to have exercised these from
Adam to the time of the first Christian Empress; we find the “pious king” Philip
Augustus building a Sainte Chapelle over one of its fragments—a temple, to use Fergusson’s
words. “probably among the moot beautiful ever erected to Tree worship.”
Fergusson thinks Tree worship the most common in Asyrian history; and adds,
that although the Serpent was the Father oracle, yet Aryans, as a rule, destroyed.
Serpents and Serpent-worshipping races. In Greece he sees abundance of both Tree
and Serpent Faiths, though both became less prominent as Grecian civilization
advanced. How could such stand amidst the Abundance of learning and plain good
moral sense, which was starting up in the fifth century B.C., and daily increasing in
vigor, till it probably gave birth to Christianity?
1 Early Arabian tales of Islam tell us that the Queen of Sheba worshipped the Sun, and that
Solomon was an Islamite! and married her after her conversion. (See Mrs. Godfrey Clerk’s “His.
Tales of Early Kalifas.”)