Forlong - Rivers of Life

156
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
east. It is, I think, a sample of one of those strange features of early religions such as
visitors to our Indian collections in museums must have. often seen, where a group of
devotees or fanatics form themselves into the shape of a god and his vehicle, as Vishnoo
riding the Eagle; the Sun-god, his chariot and horses; Kama, her love-bird, &c. The
great figure is often built up on a basement of four men or women, who form the
legs; and by extending their arms, support other upright figures, or else reclining men
or women, who again carry others, and so build up the body, head, &c. 1 In this case
we have the clear fact, that in the eyes of all Israel the three men on the mount over
the field of battle, engaged in supporting “the Rod of God,” actually represented their
Elohim or Jahveh Elohim himself, and well indeed did they call him a “God of Battles.”
He was a veritable Jupiter Victor, bound by covenant to give them victory over all their
enemies; and a generator who was “to increase them from generation to generation;”
and one especially required therefore at this time. The feud with the Amaleks had
become one of extermination, and the leader had assigned as the reason for raising an altar
to Jehovah, or rather Jahveh-nissi, that “a hand, the standard of Jah will have war
with Amalek from generation to generation” (verse 16); so that the god of greatest generative
capacity was he whom such a people joyfully looked to for victory, and Siva is
the god of the hand. Figs. 57 and 76 give this Almighty rod, and its equivalent emblem—
the Eduth, before which stood the pot of manna as the true god-idea of the tribes at this
period of their history, and it seems absurd to credit them with any higher one. It was his
holy hill, Nisiah or Sinai, that they were warring to approach to, for he, Siva, is “a mountain
god,” and on its slopes did they as it were become men, and receive his Testimony
or two Stones, and an Ark, his Sakti, for she was also the “mountain goddess,” great
Parnāsi or Parvati. Here it was then that THE SECOND ALTAR of the tribes was erected,
but not for some time after the first altar to Jhaveh Nissi in Rephidim or Sinai, had been
reached, and for an unknown period been their residence; here we learn from xxiv. 4,
that they erected their SECOND ALTAR,
which was a gilgal or stone circle, evidently
like the stone circles of klachans
of Keltic lands—a group of twelve
Fig. 59.—LOCH STENNES AND HARRAY, ORKNEY.
monoliths under the great Phallic, and I
believe, triple cone of Sinai. See Col.
Forbes Leslie’s “Early Races,” for many similar altars, and this one, Fig. 65, which I
give as the cone and stone circle of Loch Stennes and Harray, Orkney; the reader
will find it fuller in that writer’s frontispiece to vol ii., E. R.
In speaking of the first and second altars of the tribes which it is customary to
consider here erected in the last decade of the fifteenth century B.C. but which
modem orthodoxy grants as more probably in the thirteenth century B.C., I have not
counted the altars of the patriarchs (1900 B.C.), said to have been dead more than 400
1 Two very good samples of such a god-like group, forming one deity, may be seen in the Indian Museum.