Forlong - Rivers of Life

Serpent and Phallic Worship.
of nature which, in its more philosophical shadowing forth of the supreme powers, may
be said to have represented the male and female principles of production;” that is to say,
the worship of the sun, planets, and fire, with sacrifices human and other, such as we
see pretty clearly laid down by Jewish writers for their own illiterate race, when living
in the Arabian desert and the Syrian High-lands. Abel, and then Set or Seth, and
Shem, Sham, or Shama in later days, were their patriarchal gods. The name Shem or
Shams evidently marks a change of faith from phallic to the higher idea of Tsabeanism,
which I think, however, only dawned on the masses about the time of David, more
probably about the time of Boodha, when we know that all these countries were set
into a state of great commotion by that eastern wave of thought which swept from
the plains of the Ganges to furthest west and east. The Vedantists were scattered far
and wide, and Zoroastrians, Babylonians, Egyptians, Amites, Ethiopiams, and Arabians,
were then violently roused and began writing and sculpturing on rocks, tablets, temples,
and obelisks, &c., over all the world of man. It was a return of that wave which had
moved races in the 30th century, created Vedas about the 24th, sent these abroad in
the 18th, turned pious and deep thinkers half-mad in the 12th, and culminated in
Boodha, Confucius, Pythagoras, Thales, and others about 600 years later. These
various seasons of ferment are denoted in my Chart by broad transverse red bands. 1
What has been called Arvad Civilization, looks to me suspiciously like Ar-Vedists,
or Vedantists, worshipping Ar, or Al, the Sun; and Enhydra and Mar-tu may be
Indra and Mard, or Marduk; but enough here of these interesting races and subjects.
In what I have said I only wish to impress upon my readers, that the farther back we
trace ancient man, so much the more clearly do we see that his faiths are those of my
earliest streams, in their grossest material forms, and always I believe in the order
in which I place these. From nations let us now return to names, and in these continue
for a little our researches in that inexhaustible mine, the P’s.
We have not yet given sufficient attention to that most important old garment, the
Palla. It was in the earliest times connected with the arrival of puberty, and marked
the youthful followers of the Phallic God, whose names denote his offices, and the ideas
formed in regard to him, viz., Eleutherius, the Liberator; Colonates, theToth or
Pillar-God; Hebōn, the ever-young; Iacchus, the noisy and intoxicated one; Ignigena,
the fire-born one; Inverecundus, the shameless one; Phelon, the fruitful one; Rectus,
the upright one; Oreus, the mountain one (the favorite name of Siva); Taurokephalus,
the bull-headed, and Liber-Pater, the father of liberty and joy.
History tells ns that on the removal of the Bulla or “golden bubble”—the. aurea
bulla, Boss, or Heart, which covered the seat of passion, and which was only removed
in nature’s great season of passion—the spring solstice—and. thcn solemnly dedicated
to the Lares, the young male not only received the Toga Virilis, but had then thrown
over him, as when the Pope creates a cardinal, that much envied mantle—the Pallium;
after which he could join the phallic processions of his country. If we look further back,
1 [They looked grey in the colour scans I was working from, and have been re-set grey. — T.S.]
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