Forlong - Rivers of Life

134
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
to contend in tournaments and manly exercises for the maidens whom they Ioved,
and the exploits of the gods were held up as examples to all. My illustration is from
one of a. group in the Museum Pio Clementinum, and represents, I believe, not only
the great Phallic god of war, but the sun of the vernal Equinox, who has to
resuscitate the injured powers of nature, and is therefore the personification of manly
vigor, and the favourite of Venus. The pyramid is the Fire-tower, and hence is
shewn the small but everlasting flame proceeding from it, as all obelisks should shew
this—otherwise they are devoid of half their meaning.
Rome, from the days of her mythic Romulus of Etruscan origin, to that of her
emasculation under false Christian ideas, was a firm and consistent adherent of all
forms of Phallic faiths, which she boldly depicted aloft on her standards. Let us
glance at the most prominent.
In the first here we have first a bona fide Serpent pole, such as Moses is held to have
set up, and his tribe worshipped for some seven hundred
years; then one surmounted by Siva’s special “Emblem
of Almighty power”—the open hand, along with Solar,
Lunar, and Arkite ideas sacred to that faith; and
thirdly, we have one headed by an Eagle, who is Vishnoo
or the Sun, ubiquity and power, religion and truth;
and below it, various very IOnic-looking emblems as
ovals, circles, goads or thorns, &c. It was natural
that the followers of such “Banners” should revere
all the legends of Phallic and Solar lore, and that
Fig. 53.—ROMAN STANDARDS.
their greatest leader (Cesar) should send to the great
GENETRIX of his capitol, on the occasion of his greatest
conquests, her emblematic shields embossed with
pearls—highly symbolic jewels, and in-wrought by Alban maids with the finest of
British gold. This subject of Banners is extensive, and capable of almost indefinito
expansion, because all ancient peoples often proclaimed their faith to the minutest
details on such Banners or Poles as they bore before them in procession or armed
array, and it is difficult within my allotted space to do it full justice. The Roman
standards had also the cross and circle of Venus, see Fig. 99 IX, p. 228, which Constantine,
the so-called Christian Emperor, to please the Christians whose faith the coarse and
ignorant Pagan (for he only became a Christian in name) saw to be in the ascendant,
modified, by removing it from the top of the spear to the side, which really only
changed the Kaldian symbol into the staff and crook of Osiris, and into that ever
highly Phallic letter—the Greek R. As Pindar had said that Venus brought her sign
down from Olympus with her sacred bird crucified upon it, so the Christians (probably
the often untruthful Eusebius) thought it advisable to say they too got their cross
from their heavens, or had seen it in that portion of atmosphere which was over Constantinople
for a fraction of a second in the year 311 A.C. Plato and Justin Martyr