Forlong - Rivers of Life

130
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
music of the gods; it can frighten away all evil demons and sceptics, and therefore was
an article very early and very persistently used as well for sacerdotal garments as church
ornation; and from it combined with other causes, did all bell-like plants or flowers, and
fruits, as pomegranates &c., become the favourites of ecclesiastics.
The Concha or Shank is still the Hindoo Church bell, though gongs and trumpets
are likewise used; it is however, still the principal bell with the strictly orthodox, and
at some very solemn rites is as indispensable as the Christian Church bell, of which it
is the prototype. What good Christian’s marriage or death would be complete without
the church bell? The Shank is more especially blown when the Sivaik priest goes
through his genuflexions before the Lingam and anoints it, whicb corresponds to the
act of the Catholic priest elevating the symbolic wafer—“the victim”—emblem of
the “God of Bethlehem.” Then, too, in addition to the blasts of the Shank, which
uniquely correspond. to the Jewish trumpetings, the inner small bell of the Sivaik
temple boldly clangs, as does the altar bell of the Roman Catholic meekly tinkle; only
the ideas in these rites have changed, not so the customs and forms, for with the
ignorant masses these are not so easily moved. The emblem in the left hand is also
the common mark, or Nishān. which we almost always see on the foreheads of every
goddeas of the Hindoo Pantheon, as a glance at Moore’s plates shews; it is, in fact,
the orifice of the shell.
The Concha is not the same shape in all countries, and is represented in Southern
Europe by the Buccina, called in Greece the Bukani, which was there also blown at great
fêtes. The Greek word is kÒggh Kongke. I give in figure 47, a Greek drawing of the ordinary
Indian shaped Bukana, where we see the unmistakable phallic
figure of a Deity blowing through the shell, which English
schoolboys are ignorantly taught to call “a Triton sound-
ing his buccina.” Smith’s Dictionary of Antiquities unwittingly
but appropriately shews the Bukani under the head
of Navis, for it is Maya’s boat, and the Concha her emblem;
yet a male in connection with it is far too prononcé an
Fig. 47.—THE PHALLIC GOD AND
SHANK
ornament even for our school-books, and the editor
has given this figure as the outer gold stamp of his
most valuable and popular “Dictionary of Antiquities”! The shell is also seen among
my other figures, and always in Indian pictures beside the other sexual energies. The
Triton, or man in this position, is a sort of pictorial pun for the phallus; and he carries
with him his rudder, or consort, for the rudder as well as the stern of every vessel usually
denotes woman as the great carrier, and hence ships as carriero have the feminine affix.
Unintentionally the learned gentleman who writes the article “Navis” in Smith’s Dict.
of Antiquities, gives us two very rudder like and feminine cuts below the phallic Buccina.
Of the one he says the rudder, “helm or tiller is crossed by a cornucopia;” and in regard
to the other, that “Venus leans with her left arm on the rudder to indicate her origin
from the sea.” This is not of course correct; according to oriental phallic lore