Forlong - Rivers of Life

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Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
Greek and most Mediterranean Faiths, I may remark that the learned are slowly
giving their assent to the necessity of seeking for the roots of these faiths in India,
Bactria, and Iran.
The first discoverers of Delphi are naturally enough described to be shepherds,
who, as well as their flocks, used here to be often seized with convulsions, owing to
the fetid gases coming out of the chasm. It was then said, as in the case of poor
demented ones all over the world, that all who had the premonitory symptoms could
prophesy. Even in the palmy days of the Oracle, when the exhalations had greatly
subsided—they have now almost entirely gone—the priestesses had to be careful and
not sit too long on or near the Tripod. Instances are related of the priestess falling
off this in convulsions, and even expiring on the spot, so mephitic were the gases.
The torrent into which the waters of the sacred spring flowed was called Pleistus;
whilst towards the source or on the watersheds around we note several Phallo-Solar
and Indian names. Pausanias tells us, that here was a village of Kal-amæ—that is, of
Mother Kāli, in wbich was a temple to the Syrian goddess Kali-dia, or we would pronounce
it Kāli-Deva. The Pleistus very shortly joins the Krisa, which is then called
Kala-mata, an Indian designation, containing the meaning of blackness and fierceness,
or black-faced one, as Moore shows it is entitled to be called. The waters then fall
into the beautiful gulf of Krisa, near the town of Kirha; all of which names justly
entitle the locality to be called the Seat of Krihna, the black Apollo of India, and conqueror
of the Serpent, which the Delphic Apollo was. Mr Walpole describes all the
country as “dark and wild, broken in the extreme.” “If the founders of oracuIar
imposture,” he says. “wished to select a spot whose wild and desolate seclusion would
deter such an influx of visitors as might endanger a detection of its mechanism, they
could not have chosen a happier situation. Parnassus is for the most part a savage
moss, with scarcely any vegetation to relieve the rugged surface. The fountain of
Kastalia, stripped of its fanciful embellishments, is a small spring issuing from the chasm
which rends the cliff from its base to its summit.” “Here then,” truly adds the great
writer of the Hindoo Pantheon, are all the elements of a site of Hindoo superstituion.
. . . A savage rugged-surfaced moss; a conical mount like Parnassus; and above all, a
stream issuing, Ganges-like, from a cavernous chasm rending a cleft from base to
summit.” It is possible that the Tal of Kastalia. may be Sal, and convey the mean-
ing of a salt or bitter spring; thus we have a lake, Nyne-tal, issuing to the plains
of India thtough a sulphureous cleft; so that Kastaly may then mean a very sacred
bitter lake or fount. All the bills around Para-nasa are aacred to the sun as Kirphis
and Helikon (Heli-konda or Hill of the Sun), and Para-Nasa is sacred to Bacchus, says
Lucan, quoted by Moore—
“Mons Phœbo, Bromioque sacer.”—Phar. v. 73.
Byron, writing “from Kastri (Delphos at the foot of Parnassus)—now called Liakura,”
says: “The little village of Kastri stands partly on the site of Delphi. Along the path