Forlong - Rivers of Life

138
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
two processions in which the standard and the dmgon precede. Holy water and a censer
without fire, a cross and dragon on a pole, are borne in procession. One of the boys
carries a lighted candle in a lantern that fire may be at hand in case the light which
is in the dragon’s mouth should be extinguished.” Truly does the Rev. J. B. Deane
add “The whole ceremony may be considered
as a lively representation of an
ophite procession as it advanced through
the sinuous paralleleiths of Karnak” (p.
238). So that no wonder the illiterate
races were deceived into thinking that
there was no harm in calling themselves
Fig. 55.—CHIEF OBJECTS OF PALM-DAY PROCESSIONS, ROME.
Christians, for all their dear old faiths
are here—fire, arks, poles, and fire in an
ark. My readers will see from this illustration of the above description, that nothing
is awanting in the Sivaite procession; there is a Phallic pole and Phallic cross, two
cists or female emblems, one of water and one of fire, and then the male within the
ark vessel. We Europeans are very apt to read the details of such matters without
ever realising the significance which my Sivaite friends would readily apprehend; and I
require, therefore, to be lavish in illustration, though at a cost I should have wished to
restrain. Note, that one of the feminine emblems here is Fire, though the Church
probably dare not now put the god in his place; another is Salacia or Water, that
is Fire-Water. All seems uncommonly like the Jewish Phallic Faith of the days of
Moses—the Fiery Serpent on the Phallus—the pot of manna, the feminine casket of
incense which the “Jav Nissi” delighted in, the Tau or holy symbol with which
he had peculiarly marked all his males, and the symbol of himself as the everburning
fire in the ark of his own choice.
It is difficult to guess the land and age to which we should assign the origin of
Serpent-Standards or “Banners.” These waved triumphantly over the whole world
of man, from the remotest pre-historic times to the dark ages of Christianity, and
only then, in our own little continent, did they begin to full into disuse. Ethiopia or
the Phenician tribes of most ancient Arabia (even in the widest sense in which Mr.
Baldwin 1 would ask us to accord the sway of this people), all the eastern and
western empires, Skythians and Bactrians of every hue and kind, most ancient
Teutons, Saci, and Saxons, the moat primitive and most modern of the hordes of
China and all insular peoples in every corner af the earth—the Nomads of the Ural and
Central Asian steppes, and wandering tribes of Jews and other Arabs of Arabian
deserts—all and each boldly claimed and proudly bore aloft their BASILEUS as a king
and god, or demi-god, and meekly bowed before him as the symbol of health and
generative power. I shall by-and-bye shew that this Greek term Basileus is no empty
1 Baldwin’s Pre-historic Nations.