Forlong - Rivers of Life

132
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
The goddess of the Concha or vase is shewn in a very striking way in Plate vii.
fig. 20, of the Bilder Atlas, as rising vigorously out of the ocean, riding the vernal bull;
it has a fish’s tail, in the folds. of which children are gambolling, whilst winged cherubim
are urging the hull upwards in his fiery path, in a way which reminds us of that
whipping of the altar of Apollo by impetaous creation.; the riding deity here representing
woman. Elsewhere may be seen the same goddess riding a fiery horse, which
has a fish’s tail but no legs; it carries with it a picture of all animate creation, shewing
us that the worship is intensely solo-phallic, and that these phases of faith must
never be entirely separated if we would understand aright the ideas of the Greeks
and Romans, even up to the last century or so.
Where could we find a fitter queen of these faiths than she, Sophia, Wisdom and
Power, portrayed in that magnificent statue of the
Akropolis, the Athena-Parthenon, Athena, Minerva,
Pallas-Athena, or Athena-Polias? for all of which grand
titles my eastern friends would be inclined to substitute
Sri-linga-Jee, Adāma, or Yeva, according as they were
expressing themselves from a Hindoo or Mahomedan
point of view. She was no doubt Palla or Phalla the
great father, and Athena the great mother, an androgynous
deity, such as Zeus and Wisdom always were. Pallas
Athena commonly bore the shaft of Zeus, the trident of
Neptune, or the Tri-Sool of India—the three-thorned
“Enlivener” of Gē in one hand, a globe in the other, on
which a new world arises, and so on ad infinitum.
The wild. and impetuous paaaions of the goddess
are usually indicated by writhing snakes over her
Fig. 49.—PALLAS-ATHENA, OR WISDOM
AND POWER
head and breasts, and issuing from her garments
at foot, here only partially shown. Sometimes she
seems to rise above passion and trample it under
foot, as we observe in an illustration of the Denkmaler der Alten Kunst
collection; whilst elsewhere she is the patroness of passion, herself unmoved, but
moving all creation, as in the Bilder Atlas (Leipsic, 1860),
where she leans against her representation the shield (not
the rudder here), at the foot of which is coiled a serpent
looking up to her, and a winged lioness with very full
breasts, as if imploring her to exercise her potent energies.
In Latona’s story we have a similar idea; and in this
scultpure of her, where we see a serpent tempting a coy or
backward woman, we have a a sort of pictorial pun in
the upright column which she and her young ones are made
to form between two rocks or cliffs—always male symbols.
Fig. 50.—LATONA.