Forlong - Rivers of Life

94
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
Egypt, nay Mexico in the Far West, vied with China. and Japan in the Far East, and
from unknown ages, to do him honour. They
called him the Spirit of the Sun—the holy
Osiris—OB or AB, the FATHER OF ALL, and
surrounded him with winged glories, and to
Fig. 32—SUN OF THEBES
him, say the Chinese to the present hour,
do their mighty dead go. 1 He was as sacred
as fue and water, in almost every nation, when we first hear of it; save with Zoroastrians,
the teachers of the Jewish cosmogony, and they called him in their early writings the
first creation of their Satan, Ahriman, but this was, I suspect, a heresy from an older
faith which loved him. The wildest as well as most civilised nations alike revere this
svmbolic reptile: the Dahomeys of this day have a grand palace for their holy serpent, as
Egypt had for Apis, which is a later god than Op-is, the serpent deity; he who kills a
snake in Dahomey can only be purified through fire and water.
The universality of Serpent Worship has long been acknowledged by the
learned, though rarely of late in Europe has the real cause or symbolism been understood.
It is called Ophiolatry, or Ophiolatreia, and thereupon put aside as quite understood,
but “a mere superstition,” not even so good as Mary-olatry, and nothing to
compare to Bibli-olatry, or Christ-olatry, &c. I suspect we migbt count upon our
fingers the number even of learned men who in Europe see through the real meaning
of the Serpent. Even the Bible story so familiar to all Europe regarding woman
bruising its bead, and it her “heel,” or rather Akab bqu, which Dr Donaldson tells us “is
the pudenda muliebria,” is a matter which is quite da.rk to Europe though when repeated
to an intelligent Sivaite makes him merely smile. It is fraught with meaning and
truth, and, properly viewed, is history. It is not all Asiatics who comprehend the
Serpent; the far back writer of mythic Sankoniathon failed to do so, or else he satirized
mankind, for he makes Sankoninthon speak as if both he and the Egyptian Obelisk-
God-King, Toth or Tauthus, did not see the significance of their faith. In Cory’s
Ancient Fragments, it is said that Sankoniathon attributed to Toth the first adoration
of the Serpent, and taught this to the Egyptians, “because the Serpent is the most
inspirited of all reptiles, and of a fiery nature, swift, moving without hand, assumes
a variety of forms, and darts with swiftness, is long-lived, renews its youth, and
enlarges its size and strength.” Yet the writer knew, and so do we know, that mankind
do not woxahip strange creatures, per se, but only as bringing before them godlike
attributes or features, mysterious and divine. It is not as the insignificant though
death-dealing little reptile, that man has worshipped him, as we shall see before I have
rehearsed even the little I know of his ways and of this faith; this would never have
crowned him the Basileus of so many great nations and made so many monarchs,
1
The official edict of this year, announcing the death of their late young king, says “he has gone to the
great Dragon.”