Forlong - Rivers of Life

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Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
tribes. Then and there also was said of this deity what we still hear said of him
in India that “if he stings or even kills, he is also the healer of all evils.”
His was the first faith of man which produced broadly announced Incamations,
for those of my second Stream of Faith were veiled in bodily gods and came naturally.
Hundreds north and south, east a.d west, have wonbipped Serpent incamations,
and thosands have claimed him as their father, and vowed that they have been overshadowed
by him; and in true historic times—the second century A.C., Lucian, the
Syrian Greek, asserts that he was born of a Serpent. The emperor Augustus, a century
previous, said the same of his god-like origin, and the great and pious Scipio
Africanus, who daily worshipped the gods in the Capitol before beginning the duties
of the day, tells us that, in the third century B.C., his young life was nursed by a
Serpent. See also the good and learned Emperor Hadrian, in the second century A.C.,
sending away to the furthest East for a Serpent to place in the temple of Jupiter
Olympus at Athens. Philip of Macedon believed that his wife Olympia (fitting
name) conceived Alexander the Great by a Serpent, which, says the historian, “was
found in her bed!” She, if not her husband, believed she was to produoe an incarnate
god, which had probably something to do with their “initiating” them-
selves, and becoming adepts in the Samothracian mysteries. Olympia. traversed all
the wilds of Mount Hemus a Bacchante, having attendants garlanded with Serpents
and ivy, and holding Thyrsi, and was evidently a poor hysterical fanatic, who would
readily give out that she had a child from the Lord.
In the Jewish Genesis, written, some fancy, about 1000 B.C., but which, as will be
seen by-and-by, was, as we have it, only old legends furbished up by Ezra in the 5th
C.B.C., or even later, the Serpent is pictured as the real preserver of the human race, for
it is acknowledged that he was the giver of wisdom to our early parents, and taught
Eve, a form of himself, that she was naked, and the purposes of woman. Now, it is
as this imparter of sexual wisdom, that Easterns and Westerns, not excepting early
Christians, worshipped the symbolic reptile. The wisdom of Egypt and Kaldia bowed
before him, and the learned Esculapius, because the greatest benefactor of his time,
was likened to him; and a rod and serpents exhibit his fame down even to our day.
All nacions have sought him in their troubles, and imperial Rome meekly craved that
he would come, though but for a day, and stay her pestilence. The sacrigices made to
him were numerous and great, but the most favoured and that which high and low could
best yield him and his votaries, seemed to he the cock, the announcer of his prototype the
sun, and for other reasons appropriate. I show here the popular Hygia, the virgin goddess
of health, and usually called the daughter of Esculapius, feeding from a cup—her own
emblem, the loved god encircling the Phallic pole; the consequence of such love and care
stands by her side, proclaiming the emblematic deity to be in ancient days, as well as
now, the great creator, as well as the SOTER KOSMOU, and Health-giver of nations names
of Siva, and the Sun, bestowed by all who coneider population the great strength and