Forlong - Rivers of Life

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Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
has ever borne ancient and pleasant memories, and so the Phallic Deities were continued
into cultured ages and respected by cultivated minds, which would have
abhorred the faith had the truth been fully permitted to dawn upon them. To the
Fire-God were given misleading names and functions; in Spring he was Amorus, and
disguised, though faintly so, as a Ram holding a Spear; in Autumn, as the full- bearing
Ceres, and elsewhere as Fire sitting on the great Lotus-ball.
The Paters and Maters of Rome asked not, and were very ignorant as to the
meaning or origin of their faith. On week days and festivals they went through their
accustomed routine of ceremonies and adoration in connection with the Lares and Penates—social
and public, daily adored the family male and female figures which stood
in the vestibulum, and did all that their pastors and masters told them, with as much
pious care and gross ignorance as is done now all around us before the public and private
fetishes of Europe, be they books, crosses, altars, or eucharistic emblems. Nothing,
said the priests of ancient Athens and Rome, and of ancient, nay modern London, could
go wrong, if all persons but observed the rites, doctrines, and fetes, etc., of their faith, and
so says all Europe. The Hindoo is less ignorant here than most peoples; he knows well
what the vestibulum and its Deity represents, for if he breaks his caste-rules he has
to be regenerated practically by passing through a door of gold or silver, and often
through a symbolic orifice, and visit and fee certain holy shrines. He used to pass
through an artificial cow, and curious perforated rocks and clefts, as Coleman describes
to us in his Hindoo Mythology (p. 175), but civilization has now mostly confined the
penalty to rupees and some social ostracism.
I have said that the hunan head was looked upon in Egypt and by ancient
peoples as the divine part of man—the Solar orb or “Light of the body,” that which
passes through the orifice of the Crux-ansata, Catholic Albe and Chasuble, and which
this Faith marks on the summit with the sacred solar Circle, Corona, or Tonsure.
This last is no insignificant or unimportant mark, and its investiture is the first ceremony
which denotes this entire dedication of the neophyte to the service of his God and
his Church; it is one known to many faiths, besides that ruled by him who sits where
Saturn’s high priest reigned. Egypt preferred the Serpent on head to the Tonsure,
and so her devoted ones are seen with it on the forehead, where Jahveh’s “chosen people”
placed the phallic T-tau. The serpent on head denoted Holiness, Wisdom, and Power, as
it does when placed on gods and great ones of the East still; but the Hindoo and Zoroastrian
very early adopted a symbolic thread instead. of the ophite deity, and the throwing
of this over the head is also a very sacred rite, which consecrates the man-child
to his God; this I should perhaps have earlier described, and will do so now.
The adoption of the Poita or sacred thread, called also the Zenar and from the
most ancient pre-historic times by these two great Bactro-Aryan families, points to a
period when both had the same faith, and that faith the Serpent. The Investiture is the
Confirmation or second birth of the Hindoo boy; until which he cannot, of course, be