Forlong - Rivers of Life

Serpent and Phallic Worship.
offerings, and make their obeisance amidst the great ones of the land. It is, of course,
correct always to act thus; but in. many instances the very poor never do so, unless very
pious and of independent spirit. My enquiries amid such worshippers occasionally elicited
the fact, that not one of a family had ever left their little encampment or its neighbourhood,
nor got within some hundreds of yards of the central shrine, one reason
perhaps being, lest the family should be robbed; and in Armorika of ancient days,
this not only of goods, but of wife or children. It seems to me very probably then
that the serpentine megalithic lines were meant to mark out by this holy symbol, and
in this sacred form, the extent of the “Holy-place;” and that each family squatted with
its tents or leafy booths, along the outer line of the stones, thus leaving a free passage
for all to the central altar of Python or Apollo.
Ovid in Met. xi. 59, and xii. 23, speaks of serpents changed into Stone, and of
Apollo petrifying the Lesbian Dragon into Stone, in. that so famous field of Ophiolatry,
Beotia; and in Sivaik parlance, a Serpent petrified into Stone means the membrum
erectum, which is caused in most of the animal creation by the action of Apollo.
Higgins mentions some curious punning propensities, and double meanings which the
Kelts affected in solar names; thus Emrys, it appears, was an ancient Welsh-British
name for Stonehenge, and for 365, and therefore for Abraxas—the Sun, as well as 365
days, and “Abury was held to have 365 stones.” Perhaps this was a mode of teaching
astrology or astronomy to the ignorant, for, as already stated, this also denoted
the Persian Mithras, Meilos, &c. See his symbol, page 27, ante.
The author of Serpent Worship heaps proof upon proof as to the enormous
Serpents—miles in length and acres in area, which ancient people spoke of, but regarding
“great earthen and stone-formed Pythons,” the curious should refer to the Rev.
Mr. Deane’s volume. Mauretania had mighty Dragon temples, avenues, and “fields”
of this faith, “over whose backs grass was most abundant.” Taxiles showed Alexander
“a Serpent of 5 acres” in the Punjab. Strabo describes two somewhat similar
Indian ones, and Posidonius saw one on the Plains of Macra, in Syria, such “that two
persons on horseback, when they rode on opposite sides, could not see one another;
each scale was as big as a shield, and a man could ride in at its mouth,” that is, I
fancy, into the Kist-vaen—Penak, or mouth of the tumuli. The position of Macra
under the shadows of Lebanon and Hermon, or Maha-Deva, that Hivte (Eva-ite) or
Serpent-land, accounts for this grand Drako.
It was clearly long before the Roman invasion that the Kelts had driven the dyingout
Kyklops into the fastnesses of Europe, which it is thought that they did on account
of their being great Serpent-worshippers, not much given to Solar matters, but very
much to Maha-Deva, and human sacrifices to him. This the very cautious author of
“Tree and Serpent Worship” states at page 29, when he describes what I call Kali-
di-onic (Kali-devi-IOnic) propensities north of the Forth, such as depicting Serpents,
Spears, and pine-headed rods, usually called “sceptres” on megalithic monuments.
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