Forlong - Rivers of Life

302
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
Phoibus, the Sun, becomes clearer to us if we spill it Poibus or Pé-bus; for we then see
its apparent connection with Pe-us, the “all-seeing” Skythian god, usually called
Pa-Peus, the all-seeing Father.” Phego-neus wtas Jove presiding over his oaks and
beeches. In Pysikus, the Greek Physicus, we have him who presides over all nature
and her works, who at Pisa was called Pi-seus or Pis-eus, whence Pistor, the
baker (Clas. Man., p. 14), “Bread-Maker or Winner,”
THE LORD, THE GOD of Beth-lehem, of which
this is the practical personification in southern
Barma; and much chaff and banter have I heard
going on beside him, as the young women plied
their daily avocation, and so kept up the life of the
household. These labourers were truly “LADIES”
or “Bread-distributors,” as THE LORD signifies
“the Bread-supplier.” This grinding-column is
the sacred palm-tree, from the centre of which a
spindle projects; the grist is the result of the trituration
causes by the hard rind-wood of the
palm set in action by the young girls who insert a
cross-piece and thus form this machine into a
sacred Tau or “thing of life,” nay a “God of Life:”
for this Dei Machina is actually worshipped, especially
in India, at stated seasons as a deity, when it
Fig. 134.—THE BREAD MAKERS OF BARMA
is carefully furbished up, cleaned, and coloured.
I have even seen it clothed, but these good Bar-
mese Boddhists do not go so far as this. The usual Indian form of the Beth-lehem is
a regular Linga-in-Yoni, on which fits the upper feminine part; and as this is a most
common form of a holy hill,” it would almost seem as if rude early people had taken
the idea of their Mount Zions from it,
and seen in the creative organs the
double signification of my Lord and
my Lady. Col. Forbes Leslie gives us,
in his Early Races, this sketch of a
very sacred mount at Karnak, in
which we have a percect similitude
of “the Lord,” “the Bread-maker,”
Fig. 135.—SACRED HILL OR TUMULUS AT KARNAK.
and many similar mounts will occur
to all archeologists and be seen among my illustrations.
This following-up of the religious idea from the small sacred gem or church
relic, to its exaggeration in large natural objects, as hills and rocks, is one
universally adopted in ancient faith and not unusually in modern; so that
we are justified by practice and theory in seeing a Linga-in-Yoni in Stone-
henge; in the Tripod in the cleft or yoni of Parnassus; in the Petra of