Forlong - Rivers of Life

Serpent and Phallic Worship.
No easterly winds can thus touch its shrine, but only warm southerly and western
breezes, and this is here very necessary; for the oracle is at a considerable elevation
and embosomed amid lofty precipices, where otherwise cold biting winds would have
swept and eddied around and made the place such a home as ordinary priests would
not care to dwell in; but nestled as here in the warm bosom of the great
mountain, it is exactly the kind of spot I should have expected to find it. The chain,
on leaving Delpbi, dips, and passing away down south, rises again in grandeur to
form Mount Kerphis, and nearly land-lock the glorious bay into which so many thousands
of pious and anxious souls have sailed, and no doubt fallen on their faces before
the great goal they saw there opening in front of them, as they rounded the prettily
dented shores of Kerphis. The mountain chain, after Kerphis, again resumes its
east and west course, and with another dip rises yet again into a glorious mountain,
called Helikon after the great god of day, and then fades away into the fertile plains
of this land of myth, feeding Kopais on its left, and the garden meads of Therpis,
that brave city of the Muses, on ita right, finally expending itself under the walls of
immortal Thebes.
Strange how many names we have on and around Parnassus beginning, as Moore
would say, with Kal IOnic or Krishn-IOnic sounds. We have the towns of Krissa and
Kira, Mount Kirphis and Bay of Krissa on the south; whilst Keronia, Orkonia, and the
“lake of the Kopais, Krishna’s sweet-hearts,” says Pococke, lie along this great mountain’s
eastern base. Of old, says Bryant (iii. 329), Parnassus was actually called
Ark, or Larnassus, from Laren, which he hold to be an ark, and I hold to be still
more in regard to female symboliam. The name, he thinks, may have been Larennasos,
nesos, n¾soj, signifying of old not only an island, but a hill or promontory; in
short a Parvati—that “mountain goddess,” and ark of all mankind. The Akropolis of
Thebes lying at the base of Helikon, was called Nesos, so that Par-nesos, or Lar-nesos,
signified merely a great female hill, that is Ark-Omphe, or Caput-oline in contradistinction
to Pala-tine. This assures us that most names compounded with Lar, Larina,
or Laren, had a feminine signification, the same as Thebes or Argos. In the Akropolis
of Argos, where was the ark which Da-naus the Arkite was held to have established, we
know that “the Laris or Navis biprora was worshipped,” and watched oyer by women
styled Danaidæ, or priestesses of the Argus. Men who were great Arkites were called by
names compounded with Argos or Ark, as Arkisius or Arkasius—possibly Arkas-Ionas.
Bryant connects all with water, deriving Lares from the sea, as where Larinentis Alieus
is in Hesychius called a man of the sea (p. 332). So Larinænm signifies “fishing,”
and Lar and Larus a sea bird, of which more hereafter, for here we must continue
our topography of the shrine nestled in the high-sheltered bosom of that great Omphe,
where kings and the mighty ones of earth continued for long ages to go, and pray, and
strive longingly to know the will of their God.
Delphi has a convent and ruins situated on a rising ground, screened by high
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