Forlong - Rivers of Life

Serpent and Phallic Worship.
“touched by the god,” and these are then initiated into “the mysteries” of the Chnreh
and taught how to devote themselves to the god and his ministering servants, and
may be seen continually dancing and singing around these, as we see in the case of
certain temple-women in India. The Deity is said to “mark them with blue” which
is Siva’s special colour, and is the mark which Augustus received, says Suetonius, in
the. temple of Apollo. Siva is the Neel-a-kanta or blue-throated one, the cause, idea,
and details of which I may not here enter upon.
Everything in Africa that goes wrong in the sexual way is ascribed, says Mr.
Skertchley, to forgetfulness of Legba, and the childless especially are “under his
ban.” For him all youths are circumcised on coming of age, so that Legba is
Jehovah. Most tribes are tatooed with religious hieroglyphics, consisting of “tortoises,
lizards, stars, and concentric circles.” The male children of the great are
distinguished by “a great gash across the forehead from which the skin is drawn up in
a ridge,” reminding us of the IOni figures which the Sakties and some left-handed
sects in India place upon their foreheads; and here also we may be quite certain that
the mark is a religious symbol. The heavenly serpent of Africa is represented by the
rainbow which, curiously enough, is another sign of the Jewish and Christian God, and
signifies that man shall not again be effaceed from the earth, which all ancients were
taught could not be, so long as they remembers Python. Burton calls the Tree the
second great god of Africa, and says that he is represented chiefly in the great Cotton
Tree, which has a straight white stem, and an enormous spreading root, beginning
to branch out some feet above ground; also in the Loco, or Poison Tree, which
again represents Siva, who is a poisoning god, as I elsewhere show. The Ocean, or
third god, is Hu, and his priest Huno is one of the highest officials. The same offerings
are made to the African Hu, as are on the Indian coast, viz., cloth, rice, oil, &c., with
the addition of a human being who is taken out occasionally and thrown to the sharks.
In Africa all the gods still insist on human sacrifice. I have nothing before me as to
Ophiolatry in the most southern parts of Africa, but everywhere we hear of respect, if
not worship offered to serpents, though some writers aver it is only because the African
fancies his ancestors are in them, We know of the strong belief all these races have
in immortality, and probably of a continued state of transmigration.
It is easy to see in all these wild and barbarous peoples the genesis of Phallic
faiths, for though the “missing link” may not have been found by our Darwins and
Huxleys, common discernment shows us how little many millions of Africa are
removed from this monarch of the woods., which I here show climbing up, stick in
hand. into his sylvan home to protect his offspring. If not like him anatomically, our
early man was most eertainly, like him, a mere child of sensual passions, whose
supreme bliss and misery we can easily gauge, if we will but try to carry our mind’s
eye back through the dark vistas of time and so realise the feeble and comparatively
helpless condition of our own infant race in its primordial stage. In those early
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