Forlong - Rivers of Life

Serpent and Phallic Worship.
senting serpents; the Pen-ab, or serpent head, resting on the Morbihan Island; and
the Pen-ak of Abury, and the serpent-form on Loch Nell, and in America. I willingly
accept such shrines as Abury, &c., as places alos of sacrifice, and with altars for offerings,
and even bloody sacrifices; but these offerings would here, I believe, be to the Sun as
Nature’s Fertiliser, and rarely, if at all, to the Serpent; for the Lingam and Arga-like
forms facing, or prominently placed in regard to the Sun, denote a phase of Faith
which has passed beyond pure ophiolatry. Pure serpent-worshippers kept their serpent
ON HAY in an ark Crypt, or secret corner of the domicile, just as they did that which
he symbolised—the Lares and Penates; and there, indeed, they adored him per se, and
quietly or secretly offered sacrifies, and too commonly human ones, to him; but in
Karnak, and such like places, we have a considerable advance beyond the days of such
a worship; and I only expect to see the serpent here, because he has always appeared
in every stream of faith, aye, and down to the latest. None have existed altogether
free from him; he is verily “the prince of the powers of the air” (Eph. ii. 2), for
without him Juno (IOni), Hera, Era, or Airei, are useless; through air alone can the
fertiliser, Sol, act; so that the apostolic writer, doubtless, expressed far more than
he was aware of. In his days the serpent was indeed the prince of the air, for he filled
all the air in the eyes or fancies of nearly the whole world, save the few intellectual
ones in and about the centres of civilisation.
These Gallic coast-tribes long traded and intermarried with the Phenicians. We
have abundant evidence of their worshipping Astarte and Herakles, pillars, rings,
egg-forms, and such like; and the church has mourned over their innumerable indecent
ceremonies with pillars and stones which they continue, even up to the present century,
as we shall see in our chapter on Kelts. They were a quaint people, who clearly loved
the orientation of their shrines and also Bel, if not Phal, and had been preceded by
that wondrous race of engineers and builders who have covered the world with gigantic
public works, and who here, as in most places, were greatly their superiors as architects;
we call these Kyklops and Phallic-worshipper, in contradistinction to the Kelts with
whom the Sun principally dominated.
The building energies of the founders of Karnak and Maenak are seen by the fact,
that all the immense monoliths there must have been transported from great distances
over a sandy, inhospitable, and ever much-disturbed country; and in times when we
do not seem to be justified in giving to the region any mechanical appliances beyond
wedges, rollers of wood, and ropes of roots. I am informed that no stones, or even
chips of such stones as compose these monoliths, are to be found in Armorika, certainly
not over the vast undulating sandy expanse where miles and miles of huge monoliths
once extended; so that men deficient in that faith which can “move mountains”—and
not seldom does so in its Solo-Phallic developments—have ascribed the abundance of
huge stones here to the action of moving glaciers. He would be a rash man who
would here presume to dogmatise; but sensual faiths can, in all quarters of the world,
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