Forlong - Rivers of Life

260
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
cliffs to the north. The fountain of Kastalia, that is Kāsi-Tāl, the “sacred” or “preeminent
Lake,” is excavated in a rock of marble and still exist, though choked up
with weeds and thorns. Behind it were the remains of an arched passage hollowed
out in the rock: the cleft on the east aide of which was the fountain, widens at its
mouth, and rises to a considerable height ending in two points; see Walpole’s Turkey,
p. 31. I give here a general view of the natural
features outside and around the shrine, embodying
not so much of the artists view of hill and
cleft, as the idea which seem to have seized
the imaginative religious mind of the first
founders and supports of this oracle. It is
cleary akin to that wild worship of caves and
clefts, of which Bryant gives us a plate—the
first of his first volume, showing how fully impressed
this deeply read author was with the
fact, that man’s first worship was the cave or
ark; nor is it yet dead: do we not see it in
Fig 125.—THE PARNASSUS IDEA.
the holy “Cave of the Rock” at Jerusalem, the
holy caverns of Bamian, Elephanta, Elora, and
a thousand such shrines, nay, also in the dark Adytum of the Al-Kaba, as well as
the richly dimmed altars and crypts of Christian shrines? Pausanias assures us that
the “Cavern in Phocis was particularly sacred to Aphrodite, and that here she always
received divie honours.” The very “word Caverna, a cavern, was denominated
originally Ca-Ouran, Domus Celestis vel Domus Dei, from the supposed sanctity of
such places” (Bryant, i. 271). Parnassus. itself, this author adds, quoting numerous
ancient writers, was rendered holy by this “mighty chasm in the hill, Ôutok c£smatos „n
tù tÒpJ, and Apollo is said to have chosen it . . . . on account of the effluvia which
from thence proceeded.” Bryant, in his Plate I., gives us “Mons Argæus ex Numism
Tyanorum et Cæsariensum,” very quaint looking holes indeed, and which I do not
think he sees the full significance of; these I give the reader in Plate XIII., V. VI.
The Greeks knew the Delphic Cavern in their earliest advent, as puqè, Pytho, which
might signify merely the mouth of a god or goddess, or come from Pur-ain, the
mouth of a fire fount. At this early period a very nauseous and intoxicating vapour
used to issue from the cleft, and spread up the whole mountain gorge; but this
has long since ceased.
The earlier Grecian story of the Shrine seems to be connected with a fire which
is said, in 548 B.C., to have destroyed the very ancient temple which had been built
by Princes “Trophonius and Agamedes, sons of king Erginus, who ruled over the
Minyean Empire,” from the adjoining capital of Orkomenos. The princes and their
names are mythical, but full of religious ideas which I shall have to dwell upon hereafter;
for Trophonius was apparently the first Basileus, a name very early given to the