Forlong - Rivers of Life

338
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
old loved groove; but Southern Europe liked the feminine god-idea best, and therefore
pillars did not prosper much in this soil; nevertheless the Obelisk—as the Pur-tor,
or fire-tower—was always more or less welcome, and the Christians were always as
ready to display, at least on their catacombs, what they termed the “Tree of Knowledge
in the midst of the Garden,” or Gan-Eden, with the serpent coiled around it, as
was the Boddhist to pourtray his sacred tree and dragon, and the Arabian Mahomedan
his forms of the same. From being loved the serpent came to be hated, and poor
Woman, as the exciter of passion, got conjoined in this hatred. Austere hermits and
Saniyásis (men under a vow) pictured women as the demons with darts and stings,
who tempted their passions in their state of violation of the laws of nature; her
presence they taught and felt was a burning fire, and her sacred touch contamination.
Lecky tells us (II. 36) of a Christian man who shrank from touching his mother, and
wrapped up his hands in cloths when required in an extremity to do so, exclaiming
“sic corpus mulieris ignis est,” a remark which shows how closely Phallic
worship is connected with Fire or Sun, and Serpent-worship. In Boodha’s case, the
error was all the other way, and Python took his old place as the teacher of wisdom, for
Boodha is never more the wise moralist, than when sitting under the Boodha-deram—
tree of all knowledge, surrounded by the great Langabeer, or seven-headed Snake.
In the Christian Catacombs of Italy we find more than snakes and trees; indeed
we have every symbol of the old faiths, although it is taught that all these come from
Bible story. On walls as well as tomb-stones, we find the Fish, Phenix, Anchor, Ship,
Olive, and Palm, all of which are sacred to the God of Fertility, or the procreative
energies. The Fish, we are told, was adopted by those Christians because of the alphabetic
rebus—the Greek word I. K. Th. U. S. containing the initial letters of the words
forming this title in Greek, “Jesus Christ, Son of God, Saviour;” but Ikthus was a
holy name in Egypt and the East, long ere Greece had adopted her varied faiths, and
ages before the good Nazarene had preached his holy gospel in the wilds of Judea.
The Hebrew for Fish is gd, Dg, Dag, or De-ag, which some think may be connected
with the Sanskrit, De-Dev, and Ag or Ab, and be allied to the solar Ak, and Aqua, water.
Dagon was the fish-god (Aleim) of the Philestines, and spelling Dag backwards 1 as
was so common and natural, seeing some peoples read from right to left, and others left
to right, we get Gad, the good one, that is, God or Goddess of Day (see German Tag),
as in Is. lxv. 11, where, in connection with Meni the moon, 2 we read: “Ye are they
that prepare a table for Gad, and that furnish the offering unto Meni;” which Bagster’s
Comprehensive Bible admits to be stars or such objects. Dag, says Calmet, signifies
Preserver, and so Saviour, which has many ancient connections with fish and water,
as we see in the case of Dagon. St. Augustine said of Christ: “He is the great Fish
1 It is and was considered pious to spell holy names both back and forward, and this was also done
lately in honour of the Zanzibar ruler. See p. 335, ante.
2 Diod. S.; Dr. Jamieson’s Dic., Art. Moon.