Forlong - Rivers of Life

152
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
the god sees “their nakedness,” shewing us that this deity was a smalling lingam
emblem, which, if a person stood beside, or on a level with, dressed only in the long loose
robes of Arabia, and not much of these in the summer season, he would probably
expose “his nakedness,” to the god. Illustrations follow shewing the kind of altar and
deity, and the probable order of advancement of such Phallic architecture.
It is not seen from the 15th verse of Exodus xvii. what kind of altar this
“Jahweh-Nissi” had, but in all probability it was a hastily-thrown-together karn of
stones with the Nissi or standard stuck in the centre, a. still common enough deity
among all rude Eastern people, and especially so from Cape Koomari to the table-lands
of high Asia. Hooker, in his Himalayan Journals, also shew us these among the
glacier torrents of the Upper Himalaya, and every picture of Tibetan and Tatarian rites
and cult gives these equally clearly. It is one we may meet with two or three times
in any morning’s march among most of the hill aborigines of India, and so also, say
traveIlers, all over Central Asia, Mongolia, China, and Japan. I may quote, in
confirmation of this assertion, the following from a paper read before the Royal Geographical
Society in February 1874 by Dr Bushell, physician to Her Britannic Majesty’s
Legation, Pekin, 1 in which we have the result of a most interesting itinernry he made
outside the Great Wall of China in September and October 1874. On visiting, he
writes, the lake of “Ichinor, some three miles in circumference,” he came upon
“TENGRI OBO, one of the most sacred hills at which the Mongols worship.” It was
only “a smooth grassy elevation raised a few hundred feet above the general level of the
plateau,” but sloping up from the south edge of the lake, a situation Phallically correct.
The Doctor continues—“It is crowned by a karn of stones heaped up AROUND A
CENTRAL POLE, and hung about with strips of silk and cotton—a relic of ancient nature
worship,” of which I give many an example, notably so from the Arablian deserts,
but which is equally applicable to this Mongolian one. In one illustration, the god is
a tree, because trees are generally to be found suitably situated; but where they are
not so found, then Phallic-worshippers merely place the stem of a tree, or, which is
the same thing, a pole, rod, or standard, all emphasizing the part of the tree which they
more especially desire to symbolise. It appears that this Mongolian karn and pole
had an ark like the Sinaitic one; not the grand and impossible ark which is described to
us by some after interpolator of the 25th and following chapters of Exodus, but a mere
box or “ark of wood,” which Deut. x. 1 says Moses was to make, as it were, on the
spur of the moment, in order to carry more carefully the two new stones which the
Deity said he would re-engrave for him. Dr Bushell writes: “On one side of the
kairn a wretched wooden box was placed enclosing a porcelain image of Boodha,”
and one no doubt as symbolic of the great prophet as the obelisk is of the creator
Osiris or Jove, and the Eduth or rod was of Yahveh or Yachveh. “It was odd to
observe,” says the Doctor, “our priests’ look of unutterable horror when one of us
1 See Jour. Royal Geo. Soc., Vol. XLIV, for 1874, pp. 78, 79.