Forlong - Rivers of Life

Fire Worship.
still see all over Egypt), which is but a phallus disguised. I give here the common
Islāmi tombstone and lamp-tower of India, as I sketched it near a great Hindoo city.
The grave is that of a man; the shaft on the grave contains
a niche for a lamp, and another for flowers or votive offerings.
An old retainer of the family was permanently located in a hut
on the spot, whose duty it was to light the holy fire at least
every evening in one or more niches on the tomb and tower,
and on Friday and gala days to light them all. His duty
was also constantly to pray for the living and the dead,
and not seldom have I heard such watchers pray to the
dead.
I am pretty certain I have often seen an old lingam-stone on a Mahomedan grave,
and have often heard of such—nay, of lingams in Boodhist buildings, which shows
the greater age of the former. Mr. Home, B.C.S., tells us in the Ben. As. Soc. Jour.,
I., ii. 73, that he found at Sayidpore-Birori—formerly a great Boodhist site—a lingam
at the head of a Moslem grave, with a niche cut in it for a lamp. This lingam, he
observed, had beeu cut out of a Boodhist column, which, in this instance, shows us
that the Sivaite supplanted the Boodhist. The Pillar or Toth is the most persistent
feature of the old faiths, and its presence marks the first return of Boodhism to the
faiths which the pious Ascetic thought he had expurgated.
The first Boodhist emperor—Asoka—although
a most devoted followers of his prophet,
and very different from his so-called Christian
after-type Constantine, set up pillars everywhere.
If no lingam-idea was meant be a pillar, it was
a curious and somewhat unfortunate symbol to
present to his subjects, more especially with the
Lion on its summit, like the one at Alahabad,
and this Lāt near Delhi, which, strangely enough,
the Moslem has not only preserved carefully, but
unwittingly built in front if it, with little ap-
Fig. 150.—THE DELHI LAT.
337
Fig. 149.—MOSLEM TOMBSTONE
AND LAMP TOWER.
parent object, the most appropriate possible form,
viz., an arched gateway, that very Delta or door
which many archeologists think Egyptians and some other early nations avoided,
because symbolical of woman.
General Cunningham unearthed a Boodhist Lion pillar, over forty-four feet high
at Bakra in Tirhoot, which we know to be ancient Vaisala, a place where the holy
Boodha long tarried and taught. In “the winged Lion of St Mark,” which the fartravelled
Venetians—no indifferent Phallo-Solar Worshippers—brought to Europe and
placed by their holiest shrine, we see also the Christian tendency to fall back into the