Forlong - Rivers of Life

Serpent and Phallic Worship.
became the favourite, and was termed the “Irritator,” the “Passionate One,” Fire, Heat,
&c. To their male idea they erected stones, pillars, cones, staffs, or banners, crosses, &c.,
and called these the Fire-God, Brightness, and Light, and in course of time the “Sunstone,”
or Sun pillar;—to the other god. was dedicated the rounded vessel, bowl, ark, and
all ovate stones, and these were termed goddesses, and held to be seen in all the fertile
powers of nature, and more especially in the fertile earth, prolific fish, and in all water.
Let us now trace this third god in Asia and eastward. The histories. of the tribes
in the mountainous portions of northern India abound with stories, denoting long and
devoted serpent worship. Hweng Sang tells us of a Boodhist missionary, and descendant
of Boodha’s, marrying the princess royal of a serpent country north of Peshāwar;
he won over the father-in-law, but killed him, and smote down the worshippers who
are pictured as excrescences which he could only remove when the queen slept. The
first result was blindness, meaning no doubt that, although power smote down the
nation’s faith, yet it could not make it adopt the new one. The same author tells us of
the still much revered spring well and sacred tree at the Husan Abdāl, near Taxila,
which shows us how closely connected Boodhism and serpent faiths were with trees. A
Boodhist priest—Bikshoo, was it is said, here turned into a snake and thrown into this
well or “lake,” or perhaps a well in a lake, which is common, because he killed the
holy Elapa tree. This Bikshoo was always appealed to in the Pilgrim’s day by the
people, when they wished a change in the weather (another .mstance of the climatic
properties attributed to the serpent); they then called up the dragon by snapping their
finger, just as snake charmers do to the present day.
lt appears that immediately after the third Boodhist Council, 253 B.C., missionaries
went forth to all the serpent-worshipping principalities in the Himalāyas, including
Kashmeer, and all eastward to Kandahār, possibly the Gandhāra of the Mahā-
Vāsno. And although we have flourishing accounts of the numbers added to the
faith. yet we have seen what the Chinese Pilgrims, in the seventh century A.C., thought
of the worship of him-of-Kashmeer, and this a thousand years nearly after the days
of the great Boodhist missionary-king Asoka. Strabo tells us, that in. Alexander’s time,
the Kashmeer king prided himself on two extraordinarily large snakes, and another
writer says that the king of Taxila, whose rule extended almost to Delhi, showed
Alexander an enormous serpent which he nourished and worshipped as the symbol of
the god Dionysus; which Greek remark may perhaps assure the sceptic, that there is
no mistake here as to the meaning of the serpent as a symbol, for Dionysus’ symbol
was the Phallus. In Akbār’s time—last half of the sixteenth century—a census of the
faiths of Kashmeer showed temples to Siva 45, to Vishnoo 64, to Brahma 3, to
Doorga 22 (Siva’s snaky consort), but to the serpent, pure and simple, 700 shrines,
which does not say much for Hindoo or Boodhist propagandism for the previous
twenty-two centuries! The sanctuary of a serpent temple is usually void. In Kashmeer,
says Fergusson, “the architecture of the valley, with very few exceptions, shows that
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