Forlong - Rivers of Life

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Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
they showed up to this date, was a tendency to worship their own ancestors or “Peers,” and
to indulge occasionally in some spiritual songs and prayers to Jehovah, Adonis, and Aleim.
Let this suffice for the present as to the faiths prevalent on the hills and in the valleys
of Syria and Phenicia, up to the brighter dats of the brave Maccabees.
The French have hitherto always been foremost in Europe in understanding the
early faiths of the world. A small volume by various writers—printed by Nichols—
Lond., 1785, called “A Comparative View of the Ancient Monuments of India”—thus
boldly opens its preface:—“Those who have penetrated into the abstrusenesses (sic) of
Indian mythology, find that in these temples was practised a worship similar to that
practised by all the several nations of the world, in their earliest as well as their most
enlightened periods. It was paid to the Phallus by the Asiatics, to Priapus by the
Egyptians, Greeks, and Romans, to Baal-Peor by the Canaanites and idolatrous Jews.
The figure is seen on the fascia which runs round the circus of Nismes, and over the
portal of the Cathedral of Toulouse, and several churches of Bordeaux. . . . .
M. D’Ancarville has written two large quarto volumes to prove it (Phallic-Worship)
to be the most ancient idea of the deity.” So one hundred years ago we see these old
writers calling male and female, the bull and cow, Liber and Libra. Bacchus is
pointed out as the “mitre-bearer,” and in his processions he is shown as “the carirer of
a Bason and a Bell,” the Womb and Sri-linga. He carries a veil as night, and a
serpent, and “sword as the enlivener.” These French writers seem mostly agreed that
Bacchus was Brahma, whose Indian visit, Bailly says, took place in 3605 B.C., when it
is thought “Brahma or Bacchus became mythological.” His death and deification,
the French savants fix at 3553 B.C. calling him “Darma-devé Chiven, or Mahodys,”
meaning “The Gracious One” or “Prince of Peace,” i.e., Siva or Maha-deva. In Elephanta
they describe to us a distinct specimen of the Indian Ardha-Nara, though not
so clearly depicted as that in my plate XIV., taken from “Anc. Faiths,” vol. II. The
Elephanti-androgyne, says M. D’Ancarville, holds a shield and something like a sheaf of
corn in the two left hands, and a serpent and elephant trunk like Ganesha in the upper
right; the deity “rests his hands on a Priapus,” represented by a bull, and leans
mostly on the lower right arm. These early explorers had also discovered in
Indian shrines the symbolism of “great seas,” like that which Solomon made.
Anquetil de Perronmentioned them one hundred and twenty years ago, and also found
fault with the Popish Portuguese, for adapting many of the Indian holy places in
caves, rocks, temples, sculptures, pictures and all, to the religion of the Virgin
and her Son. Montfauçon also was fully alive to the symbolism of shields, Indian
and Asiatic, for in Tom. IV., 1., pl. xxii., he exhibits a very feminine one, such as
Solomon would have delighted in, calling it “un bouclier extraordinaire à plusieurs
bosses qui resemblent à des mamelles.”
In most ancient languages, probably in all, the name for the serpent also signifies
Life, and the roots of these words generally also signify the male and female organs,
and sometimes these conjoined. In low French the words for Phallus and Life have