Forlong - Rivers of Life

Serpent and Phallic Worship.
colors, such as still adorn most altars, and which here marked the parentage of the
tribes, who all worshipped the Stone or Rock, Tsur. This breast-plate was called
Shiryon or Sirion, a name also applied to Mount Hermon (Deut. iii. 9), which must
have, therefore, been looked upon by those Arkites as an Omphe,
though by most Syrians as a phallus; or perhaps the idea is the same
as that of the Stole in which the Calvary or Calvaria is the head
—Hermes or Sun, and the whole mass the sexual and probably
dual energies. Dr. Inman gives us this as the female stole or
nun’s dress, remarking upon the strangeness of her who is called
a fish (nun) having a dress like a navis (Anc. Faiths, I., 165).
The Ephod of the High Priest was finished off with a sacred zone
(virgin belt?) which the writer of Ex. xxxix. always calls a
“curious girdle.” The robe had a hole in the centre for the head,
and all round the hem real bells of pure gold, alternating with
pomegranates, the bells being given to tinkle like the Sistrums
of Isis and of most churches, and so to denote the movements of
the “Man of God.”
The Ephod had all the thaumaturgic powers of the Rod
of Moses, and enabled the Priest wearing it to speak with
God (1 Sam. ii. 7, 8 ). We see that it is a female vestment from
Samuel wearing it when a child (1 Sam. ii. 18), and by David putting it on when going
before the Ark—a female deity (2 Sam. vi., 14). It was an accompaniment to all
“houses” of Elohim, as when Micah “had a house of God, (he) made an Ephod
and Teraphim” (Jud. xvii. 5), which are usually held to be Penates or Lingams; and if
so, Micah worshipped both organs. Thus then we see that the warring of the Right
and Left-hand factions among Jews or Syrians went on from the very earliest times,
just as is still the case all over the world. In India, Sivaites, Vishnooites, and
sects within these, still quarrel, and if Government did not interfere, would often kill
one another; and so it is with Christolaters and Mariolaters and sects within these, as it
was with “gods and Titans.” The dwellers on Mounts Moriah and Zion, Ebal, and
Gerizim, were never at peace, and we can trace their continual warrings in the 7th and
8th Centuries to the philosophic sects claiming Boodha and Confucius. It was clearly
this great eastern wave of thought which roused two such leaders that stirred, a
generation or two later, the little Jewish folds in their Syrian wilds. Thus
a war arose against ephods, serpents, and idolatry of most kinds in the reign
of Hezekiah, or about 700 B.C. He is said to have been a good man, and to
have done all that was “right in the sight of the Lord according to all that his father
David had done” (2 Kings xviii). Before him there had been many good men, yet
the brazen serpent that Moses had made was still a God in that land, aye, in the
temple itself, and had been most carefully preserved according to Usher, over 800
years of grievous wars and troubles. It was then (720 B.C.), we are told adored and
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Fig 89—NUN WITH STOLE.