Forlong - Rivers of Life

278
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
I must now say something regarding our ancient British shrines, although at the
certain risk of incurring severe criticism. Nevertheless it seems a duty here to give
my views for what they may be worth, and as I fust approached the study with a very
poor knowledge of the fierce wars which European writers have here waged, so, as being
perhaps in this respect unbiassed, and with my own mind filled with facts culled amid
Eastern faiths, my opinions may be worth contributing; anyhow, I will try that
they may be brief, and being now very decided and clear to myself, they may well
be so.
I began my study of British ruins about eight years ago (1866)—during a two-year
furlough, attracted to it at first by my friend the late Sir James Simpson—President of
the Society of Antiquaries, Edinburgh—at that time writing and debating much on
these matters; and I came then to the same conclusion as I hold to-day; viz., that
the ruins of Armorika, those of Stonehenge, Abury, and various others, known popularly
as “Druid circles,” are, or originally were Phallo-Pythic-Solar shrines, or places
where all the first five elemental faiths seen in this chart more or less flourished; the
first (Tree) very little, and the last (Sun) very abundantly; and if so, then we see the
cause why European writers so pugnaciously hold out, some for Sun, some for Fire; one
that they are mere places for sacrifice or burial, or for assembly of rulers, clans, &c.
whilst a few outlying writers hint that the large stones are Lingams, or mere groups of
such stones as that of Kerloaz—the Newton stone, &c., see my Plate IX. Colonel
Forbes Leslie, in his Ancient Races of Scotland, has very nearly told us the whole
truth, his long residence and travels in Asia having enabled him almost to pierce the
cloud, though he seems at first not to have fully appreciated the ever very close connection
between Sun, Fire, Serpent, and Lingam faiths, which I believe he does now.
The European mind having once lost the old ideas of what these words meant, and
from having still such objects as Sun, Fire, and Serpent before them, are always
thinking of these visible objects, which I might almost say a true Sivaite never
recognises per se; for in fire the true Phallic-worshipper sees no flame, and in the Sun
no far-out resplendent orb as we know, standing apart, as it were, in space, and to
which we all gravitate; he sees simply a source of fertility, without which the Serpent
has no power or passion, and in whose absence the animal and vegetable world must
cease to exist. The fire here, then, is not that which the real Sivaite sees or cooks by,
but Hot or “Holy Fire,” or the “Holy Spirit,” or the fire of passion,. which to a
certain small extent, and in certain symbolic forms and positions, he recognises in
flame, as when raised on a tower, coming out of an obelisk, or rising in a column
or pillar over an ark, or smouldering in the secret adytum; for the first impresses
him with the Arkite, the second with the Phallic and Arkite, and the third with
the purely feminine idea; in all, he merely sees representative male and female
energies which are excited and fructified by the Sun, Apollo, or the Sun-Serpent, as in
his old coin, Fig. 131, where fertility fed by fire, feeds the shell. In a column be it