Forlong - Rivers of Life

Serpent and Phallic Worship.
“soft in the head and upper portion”—the savage quaintly says, but below “hard like
a petrified stone,” and, like all civilised Greek, Indian, or Egyptian Serpents, he lives
in a cave on Mount Nava-ta, a suspicious sound like unto navis, nabhi or argha.
Let us now return to better knowu lands. In many Grecian and Egyptian
stories I have always felt a confusion in the relative positions of our Eastern idea of the
Serpent as Passion, and the Egyptian one of the dog Cerberus, which is frequently
painted as the three-headed dog of Passion. It was the dog of the Egyptian tombs, and
held to be the guardian of their loved dead; but it appears from Ovid’s “Met.” vii.
(Bohn’s Ed., Riley’s Trans., p. 246), that this was the positive and special duty of
the guardian Serpent, which Cerberus, says Ovid, robbed of his birthright, or place at
the cave’s mouth. Now the Yoni was the cave’s mouth which the Serpent especially
guarded (see figs. 39, 42) and this also was the Nanda’s, and a Herculean position; and
the dog of three heads is is shown as this strong man’s companion, and.Herakles is said by
some to be Heera Kala (Siva); so the myth is deep, and looks very phallic, and as if the
dead had also the signification of a new life. Du Riley’s commentator says that the
Serpent guarded the cavern of Tenarus in Laconia, one of the avenues to the kingdom
of Fire or Pluto, through a temple of Neptune, from which issued nauseous vapours.
He was “a devourer of flesh” and of poisoned herbs (again Sivaik), which grow about
Thessaly. Women used these herbs, and became witches, and could call down the
moon to earth, whom at night they invoked with their enchantments: all this is clear,
and sufficiently suggestive! None before this, however, says Pausanias, ever called
this guardian Serpent a dog.
Dr. Smith’s cIassical dictionary gives under the head “Peleus,” a very graphic
phallic sculpturing. showing what the Greeks understood in delineations of serpents and
dogs. Thetis is threre seen overburdened with serpents which are biting her too ardent
lover Peleus and upon whom a dog also springs from under her garments; but we must
remember what kind of creature poor Thetis is here painted, with her dog and serpent.
Cupid is seen gaily following up the lovers, and the result is the birth of the mighty
Achilles! Eris, the goddess of strife was, we are told. the one deity who gladdened not
this marriage rite with her presence; yet the offspring had strife enough in his day.
Python is destroyed by Apollo, who then becomes the oracle, yet the Virgin remains
the deliverer of that oracle, ever sitting on or under the Drako’s tripod; Drako being the
Greek word used for a large serpent in distinction. to Python, applied to a small one.
Kadmus is said “to have slain the Drako which devoured his men,” as passion still
does our people, at all events our armies; but from the dragon’s teeth, says the old
myth, arose abler Warriors. The trinitarian idea descended from the Phallic to the
Serpent faith. Thus we see the Trinity in Unity in the triple Serpent of Constantinople,
and so also in the three-headed Serpent of Agamemnon’s shield. Babylon
seems to have been content with. two serpents, though Sir H. Rawlinson puts Hea,
as “the head of the Trinity;” and we know from the writing Bel and the Dragon
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