Forlong - Rivers of Life

Serpent and Phallic Worship.
the Tigris, Euphrates, and Nile, that have yielded to us these Serpent coins and
seals, though it is agreed on all hands that “Serpent worshippers swarmed up the
great rivers of Europe” also: In the dark Teuton forests, the Tree and the
Grove sufficed the rude fierce tribes, but even here we read of plenty of Serpent
worship on high hill tops, in caves and watery caverns; it is probably only our want
of records and remains which prevents our tracing more fully this third great
faith of man through all our European states; for Ophiolatry is abundantly clear
amidst Skands and Kelts, as we shall by-and-by see.
Fergusson says that in Sarmatia the worship of both tree and serpent was
common, but the Samlagitæ comidered the serpent to be the God. In Lithuania the
veneration for the serpent was extreme. Prague offered sacrifices and oblations to
numerous and much revered serpents, and Livonia sacrificed the moat beautiful captives
of her wars to her serpent gods, and this down to “the middle ages.” Olus Magnus
writes, that the Poles worshipped Fire, Serpents, and Trees in deep woods, even in
1386 A.C. when, the prince and his brethren. having been won over to Christianity, the
truculent herd followed.
The ease with which real Serpent Worshippers embrace Christianity, and all
faiths dealing, like it, with mysteries and miracles, is seen in the Christian success
amidst the Serpent and Devil worshipping lower classes of Dravidian India; a striking
contrast to its utter want of success amidst the Aryans of Upper India, or any cultivated
races in India or elsewhere; to this much attention will be hereafter given.
Tree, Serpent, and Fire worship existed in Norway and Wermalandia down to
1555, and in Esthonia and Finland, down to the limits of this century, so far as
veneration for some of the characteristics of these old faiths go. In the Ammergau
Passion-play of a few years ago, I have shown the symbols of the old faiths very
unmistakably played out before great potentates of Europe. Fergusson gives us
some of the Te Deum which was offered as prasie and prayer to Trees, but which
litany is now transferred to the Virgin and Christ—rarely to God.
The great route, he says, by which these old faiths passed back and forward,
is a line connecting the north border of the Caspian Sea with the mouth of the Vistula
in the Baltic, but I give, by red pencillings across my plate II.—“The World according
to Strabo,” the more detailed general lines by which all the great faiths and heroes of
pre-historic days travelled.
Woden, as the Serpent, may have come from the sunny south, and been perhaps
of Boodhist offspring, but as a Serpent Deity, we must relegate him to a still
mightier past. Perhaps we had a sunny north, with its own Woden, of which Boodha. was
the southem type: Hercules met the Serpent maiden Ekidna, and from her sprang
the Skythian hordes with their early hero Eponymoa. Here also we must not forget
our Northern Furies, the Amazones, whose institutions and myths are so closely mixed
up with Serpent faiths. From the supposed cradles of our Caucasian race, the slopes
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