Forlong - Rivers of Life

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Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
revelations from Apollo,” or Pytho of earlier times. I see then, in this great mountain
and its ‘Abyss’ and thermal font, our old Queen Parnasi,
or Varnasi, or Parvati. She is that great passive,
sullen-looking mass hid away in the clouds, but who
descends to earth in the two lower, full-crested Montes
(see sketch on page 360), below which comes that huge
Omphalos, ending in what has ever been called “the
Phaidriades, or Resplendent ones,” in the secrets of
which lay the sacred cleft of the Sun—the Korykian
Cave. Is not this also the idea which the races
of Greece have perpetuated in marble, as in this of
Ceres, which I take from Montfauçon’s supplement
Fig 128.—CERES AND APOLLO FERTILIZING
THE EARTH.
to his Antiquities, page 76? Here she fertilises the
earth, herself fertilised by the Sun; Love as young
Horus or Apollo carries a laurel branch by her side, whilst below is the inscription:
“CERERI, MATRI MAXIMÆ, FRUGIFERÆ, QUINTIUS GEMALLUS. V. S. L. M.”
Juno appears in a very similar marble, pictured by Montfauçon at page 64, sitting
on a Rock, possibly the Tsur or “Rock”-Jehovah of the Jews and Phenicians, with a bow
and tipped with flowers, and the peacock at her foot, brooding over the creation thus
symbolised. She is callcd “Juno de Bresse” and holds aloft in her right hand a human
heart, the Ait, or Ain, or seat of Passion, as typifying that which she reigns over; she
presses her bosoms with the other hand, and pours forth nourishment on all. Now, in
these leading Mothers of Creation, I feel aasured we see some of the ideas conceived and
worshipped by the Greeks in this mountain and cleft. I believe they saw Ceres, the
great Pythoness, as well as the Sun in that “Resplendent One,” who was undoubtedly
the chief part of the worship at this Kastali font—Ain-omphi, or Nympheum. She is
the Parnāsi, or Varnāsi in that Fons, Well, and Reservoir, as well as a Serpent facing
great Sol, whose beaming southern rays at this particular spot the fertile and imaginative
genius of the people thought from this source of bliss, permeated, and impregnated
all their country. I must here try to make this clear, although it would take a volume
to distinctly show all the phases of Mountain-worship, of which this is a part.
Orpheus and his disciples went yearly, we are told, to offer sacrifice on a high
mountain. All Persians worshipped on the top of high hill; whilst “some nations
instead of an image worshipped the hill as a deity;” see Bryant I. 293, quoting in the
original Maximus Tyrius Dissert., VIII. 79. “So worshipped all the people of Cappadocia
and Pontus. Mithradates, when at war with the Romans, chose one of the highest
mountains in his dominions, upon the top of which he reared an immense pile equal in
size to the summit on which it stood; and no sacrifices, perhaps, ever equalled in
magnificence that which was there offered. . . . The pile was raised by his vassal
princes, and the offerings, besides those customary, were wine, honey, oil and every
species of aromatics. The fire was perceived at a distance of nearly 1,000 stadia.”