Forlong - Rivers of Life

Serpent and Phallic Worship.
Mexican Cathedral stands. Sometimes 20,000, he says, were butchered in a day!
—which we must doubt, seeing bow long it would take to do this, and to arrange,
not to say dispose of the bodies in any way.
This same author says that “the idea involved in communion with God is the
reception of something from Him,” and that this used to assume, in ancient days, the
gross form of sexual intercourse. Thus, on the summit of Belus’ temple was a
chamber, with only a bed and table; and a Theban temple, says Herodotus, had the
same, and to this bed every night went the proudest lady of the land; so also at
Patara in Lukia. Strabo says the noblest ladies went to the tombs of the the concubines
of Jupiter Amon. In our days Mr. Prince bestowed the favours of the god before all
his community in an English Agapemone; and Cook’s sailors say that this was also
one of the sacrificial ceremonies which they were called upon to witness. The gods
could also be found by what was called incubation. Women seeking them were
locked into the temples, lay down and slept, and were visited by dreams. It was
not uncommon apparently for men and women to make use of these customs to
obtain children or illicit intercourse. I have frequently heard of the guiltiness of both
husbands and wives at similar religious rites and fêtes, where priests have an opportunity
of seeing frail, and offspring-loving ones alone. Josephus tells us (Ant.
XVIll., iii. 4) that Decius Mundus passed himself off as the god Anubis in a temple
of Isis, and so had intecourse with a noble matron, Paulina, who imagined she thus
received the embraces of the god; and although Paulina may have been deceived, yet
my Eastern experience of many church or temple rites assures me that the priests are
not alone to blame for arranging ceremonies where childless women, with imbecile or no
husbands, can get opportunities which do not exist for them at home. I have seen
the touters, or beaters-up for a pilgrimage to Junganāt and Hărdwār, enter quiet villages
and be all very warmly received by buxom girls, childless wives, and disconsolate
widows, especially at times when their male relatives were in the fields; and I am
certain that pilgrimages are no more to be got up miraculously, or from what we call
purely spiritual and religious motives, than are European churches and so-called Revivals.
Juganāt has a regular staff who beat up Northern India, just as gangs acting
for Moody and Sankey beat up Liverpool and London. I think that priests and
women understand each other better than men in regard to all the emotional parts of
faiths, as Revivals, sacraments and such like.
The Rev. S. Baring Gould informs us, that after the grosser ideas of human
sacrifice, and of sexual or such divine bodily blessings or favours, the religious world
passed into another phase, viz., that of “eating and drinking consecrated food and
wine,” or other fluids, sometimes blood, or a mixture of which blood formed an ingredient,
as in the shocking Sivo-Sakti rites. This pious clergyman actually says that
the “eating of the body and blood of Christ” is the last development of these grosser
forms; and that the ancient priest also taught that whosoever shall in faith eat and
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