Forlong - Rivers of Life

274
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
lehem, and “the sacrifice was complete;” the pious might then kiss the Serpent, and the
service was concluded by singing hymns to Almighty God 1 and praying for acceptance
in and through the Serpent. Such was but the continuation of services which had been
very old when these began. The Egyptian Gnostics struck a coin representing OB
or the holy Basilisk with rays darting from his head in a grand glory; and round the
outside, Cnuphis as Jesus Christ, or the new solar deity (Jablonski, quoted by Deane,
p. 131). Bacchanals well understood the consecrated cup and hymns to the Agathodemon,
and Demosthenes severely suffered for his eloquent denunciations against
Eskines, for being the bearer of such Serpent and Bacchic mysteries. 2 Delphi strictly
kept its Sabbaths, or seventh days, by similar hymns and mysteries to Python. 3
Manes, the great Persian christian of the third century, revivified the persecuted
Christian ophiolaters, and taught that Christ was an incarnation of the great serpent
which glided over the cradle of the Virgin Mary when she was asleep at the age of a
year and a half. We are not left in the slightest doubt that a very large body of early
Christians existed for some centuries in Asia, Africa, and Europe, who merely believed
in Christ as a solar incarnation, similar to several who had for many ccnturies continued
to spring from the Ganges, Western Asia, or the Nile. The Egyptian Christian sects,
called generally by the wide term Gnostics, or “the wise ones,” said that the Almighty
was Abrasax or Abraxas, which signifies, says Mr. Sharpe, in Egyptian, “hurt me
not.” Ita great value consis.ted in the fact that this word in Greek letters makes 365,
or great Sol’s annual revolutionary time, so that Abraxas or the early
Christian God, was Sol. The Persian Gnostics here copied their Asiatic
co-religionists who honored the word Mithras or Meithras for the same
reason. The Chrisitans symbolised their God on amulets and gems
(as this one from Sharpe’s Egypt shows) bearing the above names, or
Fig 130.—SERAPIS
AS ABRAXAS.
IAO, Jehovah, Saboath, Adonai, &c., and put along with him a Serpent
“either by himself, or terminating in the legs of a god,” “with
a cock’s head; the Leonine Serpent with a circle of rays was commonly
engraved upon them . . . . . : also a Serpent biting his own tail.” (Deane,
132). The Rev. J. B. Deane adds further at p. 157: “Nor did the worship of the
Serpent in Egypt, any more than in Phenicia, fly before the face of advancing Christianity,
to return. no more;” he might have added, “nor before the greater iconoclastic
faith of Islamism;” for we learn that Bishop Pocockc, when on the Nile at
Raign, was taken by the highly “religious sheik of the famous Serpent Heredy,”
called after this pietist, to his serpent grotto, which was really “a mosk with a dome
over it built against the side of a rock, like a sheik’s burial place.” In the rock was a
cleft from which this holy reptile ever and again comes, and wanders about the Turkish
tomb, held to be that of one Heredy; the Serpent is, they now say, Heredy’s soul but,
1
Epiphanius [Panarion (Adv. Hær.)], lib. I., tom 3, p. 268. A stranger at the Christian sacrament might
see in its bits of bread a similar idea—the enticing of the Spirit. [Epiphanius was a notorious scandalmongerer
and slanderer and should not be treated as a reliable source of information. — T.S.]
2 3
“Demos.: de Coronâ.” 79. Pindar, Bryant’s Anal. II., 147.