Forlong - Rivers of Life

Serpent and Phallic Worship.
early great god of Kaldia, Ana or Oanes, or the later San or Sun, whose female energy
was Anat or Gool. Fanum comes from Ph’ain-on and this female font or Ain came
in time to be applied to the lord of the Ark—Bacchus, by the addition of Ak-the Sun,
for Myaians called Bacchus Phi-An-ak, which poets contracted to Phanak. My readers,
I hope, are not forgetting that P, P’, Pi, or Phi signifies a rnouth-piece, so that Phi-ain
is the mouth of a font, and Phi-el, Phi-ala, Phile, &c., are all names for the mouth-piece
of any god, and therefore an oracle. Both Bryant and Holwell justly insist on this,
instancing P-ela, a city of Palestine, as so named from its oracular fountain.
The Pelasgians, Pelishthe, or Philistines, were all the same people in the eyes of
the Greeks as well as of the Jews; see 1 Sam. xxvii. 7, and elsewhere. The Greeks
called the great portion of what we know as Syria, Tsuria, Phenicia, or Palestine;
although the Phenicians called themselves Kenaans. Both Greeks and Jews called the
original stock from which such races sprang, Ethiopians. By all they were regarded
as a powerful, learned, travelled, and energetic people, unsurpassed in the knowledge
of commerce and geography, and all that such world-wide information implies.
In the eyes of the Greeks they were palaistai, Palaistæ, or great men of war; and
hence, perhaps, their country was Pales-tine, and all valiant soldiers or wrestlers,
Palasistæ, or what we in India call Pailwans, and whom the writers of David’s
history called Pele-thites or Kere-thites, only to be found, they say, in Pelishte or
Philistina. Dr. Inman’s investigations lead him to the conclusion that the Pelashthi,
strangers or emigrants of Amos ix. 7, were Pelasgi, who came from the north and
peopled the coasts and islands of the Mediterranean long before the Trojan war, and
who fought with Karians against Egypt about twelve centuries B.C. It of considerable
importance in the study of Phallic and Solar faiths, to try and clearly understand
the position, and, as far as possible, the ancient history of the Phenicians, as the
earliest and best exponents of these faiths in the west; and therefore, as the leaders or
fathers of all Pelethites, Pelishthe, Philistines, Palestines, &c. I must here dwell for a
little on this princely people, in comparison with whom not only the Jews, but those
who enslaved them from Moab in the east to Greeks in the west, were, said even Jewish
writers (here unusually modest), in their own sight as grashoppers; see Num. xiii.
33; Joel iii 3.
According to Jewish writers, Phenicians were descendants of the brothers “Canaan,
Cush, Misraim and Phut,” and of the ANAKIMS,—so famous for strength and learning
and desccnded from Anak eldest son of ARBA of Hebron (Jos. xv, 13). The Jews
did not distinguish them from Hamites. The Greeks called them chnai and their
land XHNA, “whence cn¦—Canaan” (Gale I. 19, 22). In regard to the Greek
term fo‹n…kÒn, Phoinikon, or Phenic, some derive it from Palms; and others as Vassian,
from Red, as where he says “the Latins made Puniceus (red like a Pomegrante), and
from Phoinix, Parnus” (Gale I. 20); so that it is clear the word must have signified
their god or great patriarch—a tall, red-palm-like one. The learned and severely
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