Forlong - Rivers of Life

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Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
our rural Maha-Deva was and is the original. See also the vase-worship of Egypt in
the Ark of Phile, which I give at page 190.
The Serpent-column—so felicitously placeci in this oval pit—seems to be the highly
Sivo-tri-pythic column, which we observe in Smith’s Dictionary of Antiquities, as the tripod
seen by Spon and Wheeler in 1675, and which they said was 14 to 15 feet high. I
think they have mistaken or manufactured the third head; for when I visited the Hippodrome
or āt Meidān of Constantinople in 1857, I did not see it, but my attention in those
days was not so minute as since. I believe the heads were only perfect up to near the
end of the seventh century A.C. One head is said to be carefully preserved in a Christian
shrine, “the armoury of the Church of St. Jerome.” A writer in the Dark Blue
of, I think, 1872, says that De Quincy carefully describes the column, calling it “the
greatest talisman of Constantinope, having its original in the Mosaic serpent which
healed the diseased if merely looked at.” “This consecrated talisman,” he says truly, “was
venerated alike by Christian, Pagan, and Mahomedan;” and, writes the Rev. Mr. Deane,
Fig 127.—THE AT-MEIDAN OR HIPPODROME, CONSTANTINOPLE—SKETCH BY THE AUTHOR IN 1857.
“so superstitious are even the present Turks concerning it that they say: ‘Although,
in consequence of the lower jaw of this brazen serpent having been struck off some
serpents do come into the city, yet they do no harm to any one.’” (Annals Tur. 213).
De Quincey says that the column was struck on the head by the last great iconoclast
race, in the person of Mahomed II., on 29th May 1453, when he conquered Constantinople,
then the glorious bulwark of Eastern Christianity. Even he, however, the mighty
conqueror in his hour of triumph, feared attempting to crush the symbol of a mighty