Forlong - Rivers of Life

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Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
Faber thinks is the origin of Dagon, gives this Kaldian male god a female form, and so
in the case of Ana or Anu, as roots of Diana; but it oftener gives merely the androgyne
form which all great Deæ had. Dag, we know, has the signification of fruition; and
hence, perhaps, a fish; whist On, Om, or }wa is “power,” as in Am-on. I suspect D-elphi
unites all the male, female, serpent, and oracle or mouth-piece ideas. Jove, we are told,
created Pandora to ruin his lieutenant’s manly creation; and we thus see in woman—
the traditional tempter, the possible reason why such words as Delos, Deleastra, Deleasma,
&c., are all connected with “a bait or enticement,” and probably why Deltas or
Delta is also a “book or tablet” on which a man may write, an analogous meaning to
the woman’s mirror-symbol, in which man may mirror himself.
Although I have personally most carefully inspected the Pythian shrine, I will
here try to describe it in the words of others rather than my own.
At the foot of mount Parnassus is situated the small hut populous town of Kālamata,
and here let us spell all names with a K, rather than with that very deceiving C,
and it will make morc clear the close connection of early Greek story and geography,
with India and its Kāla, and Kāli—Siva, and Sivi or Parvati. This last lady is one
whom, I have no doubt whatever, we have; here found in Greece; and I am not the
first discoverer by a long way. Moore suspected her here forty years ago, and I can
assist his idea, by adding that Parvati, who also is Băvāni or Bămāni, is, by Jains, called
Parsva, the wife of Parsavā-Nāt, their great serpent Tetankār or Incarnation. The
birth-place of Parsvā was near Vernāsi, the old and sacred name of Kasi or Benares;
so that the early eastern wanderers to the Krissaeus Sinus, which Pococke, no doubt
correctly, shows us was Krishna’s Bay (for Delphi is his, as Apollo’s shrine), would
very naturally call their great hill, full of gaseous clefts and caverns, and of womanly
contour, Parsva’s own Vernasi or Pernasi.
I wish my reader would take the trouble, as geographical illustration is very
coastly, to here consult a good map of the province of Phokis, from the Bay of Krissa
up to the holy shrine, amidst the boisterous waters of the sacred Pleistus. and over the
great Parnassus to Opus of Lokris on the Eubean Sea. All about here is “holy soil”
and especially so easterly, over by that once so imortant capital city, Orkomenos
and its fertile plains; these rise gently out of the far-famed Kopais Lacus, fed here
by the troubled Kephissus, which drains off all the Eastern waters of Parnassus and
Mount Kerphis. To the searcher after faiths there is far more than mere classic
story mixed up with all that we have read regarding the vast basin we here see
spread out, and which stretching away down south and eaat to the great ranges of
yonder “Mountain of the Sun,” and the spurs which shut out the Theban plain, thus
embraces nearly all the once strongly pulsating heart of Beotia—the land par excellence
of all European lands, for myth and fable.
Parnassus shelters its most holy spot in a very warm angle, which it abruptly
makes here by turning nearly due north and south from a direct east and west course.