Forlong - Rivers of Life

Serpent and Phallic Worship.
and other wise ones of earth; but pure pietists like Rama, Sakya, Christ, and
Mahomed, rather brought in turmoil, bloodshed, and misery, than joy, peace, and
learning; nor was the misery assuaged until scared-away philooophy and science returned,
to damp the irritable and inflammatory matter which had been aroused; and it
seems as if all dogmas founded on superstitions, or the marvellous and incomprehensible,
and carrying strong cursings or anathemas against all who oppose them or
introduce learning at variance with them, must have this retarding and injurious effect
upon us. If so, it becomes our duty to repress all superstitions and “mysteries;”
assured, that when these disappear, turmoil, misery, and crime will also fly away.
Colonel Tod writes 1 that the serpent of Boodha possessed all science and pure
religion, which Krishna as an Eagle had to fly far and, wide to obtain from Boodha.
Christians say that Mahomed flung the world back many centuries, especially in
Asia; but Mahomedans rightly repel this as a slander.
Let me here make a few remarks upon that good, because necessary feature in
the Jews—common to us all, viz., the continual changing of their ideas of God as they
advanced in intelligence. Jews for ages clung to the stone which they said their
patriarch Jacob set up, and which they removed to Jerusalem. The houses of their
gods were Beth-els (literally houses of El), and all over Syria, and indeed Asia Minor,
Sivaik Shrines were known as Betuli, that is Lingams, or Maha-Devas. According
to Lewis and the learned Bochart, the Phenicians were the first worshippers and
anointers of Betyls. During this rage for Lingam-Worship, the southern tribes
oondemned Yonism, or as they called it Dove-worship, by their kinsmen the
Samaritans on Mount Gerizim. Maimonides disliked the worship of Ba-al-Peor, which
he said (but I think ignorantly) “consisted of exhibitions of the Yoni to him,” for I
find that the worship was that common in the east. St. Jerome said “it (Peor) was
principally worshipped by women.”—“Colentibus maxime fœmimis Baal Phegor ob
obsceni magnitudinem quem nos prinpum possumus appellare.” 2
We have lost much of the true worship of the Jewish tribes, from the various
destructions of their records; but above all from that weeding out of gross, dcgrading,
and objective features of their early worship; which necessitated the obscuring, if not
blotting out, not only every term or sentence which allowed the “image” of a God—a
feature forbidden in their faith. about perhaps the time of David, though little
attended to till the fifth century B.C., but also the obscuring of everything too anthropomorphic
for the advanced ideas of the third century, when their “shreds and scraps
of leather”-literature, began to be gathered together, and took a form which seemed to
consolidate the people and make them a nation.
I long since came to the opinion, to which every student of Asiatic faiths must
come, and which I am glad to say Bishop Colenso has now thoroughly established as
correct that the worship of the Jews was precisely that of the people amongst whom they
1 Rajasthan, I. 537.
2 Sellon’s “Hindoo Annotations,” p. 37.
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