Forlong - Rivers of Life

370
Fig. 163.—MARS ON THE CAMPUS MARTIUS.
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
Beyond the sacred limits of the Campus Vaticanus, all was darkness, barbarism,
Hades, or Hell, which may be the reason why the name “Infernal Value,” is seen here.
We may also notice another reason which would induce Phallic worshippers to
choose this Romsn site. It is at the bend of a river which near here receives the
waters of a sulphureous spring, called after the Sybil Albunea, to whom a grove and
temple were sacred at Tibur, now Tivoli. The nymph no doubt gave the old name
Albula to our present Tiber.
On the glorious plain under the soft Sabine hills, where all the youth and beauty
of Rome came for exercise and sport, were placed such statues of the gods as were
capable of being constructed from time to time. For man, manliness, power, and
light. was erected the column or obelisk; and for womanliness, the circle, oval, dome,
urn, or ark. All of these in time assumed fairer forms, which make us forget the original
idea and overlook the grossness in such combination
of the ancient and modern as that here seen, around which
all the athletic sports of the people were held, and not a few
of their sacred rites performed. This god, who was the
people personified, or father of the nation, was here supposed
to be presiding in state over all that was good and
noble in the sports and necessary exercises of his children.
We may reasonably assume that there was erected
on the opposite and adjoining bank of the sacred river, at
the earliest period of Rome’s history, some such great
tower as that we call St. Angelo, there to guard and
watch over the great plain, from which it was no unusual
thing in those days to seize the flower of a flock, as the story of the Sabines, mythical
in some degree though it be, assures us of. The situation of St. Angelo, on the bank of
a sacred river, and at the bend which it makes towards the city, shows that it was a
Torome, Beacon, Tor or Tar-ope-On, sacred to the Sun and Fire, though also fulfilling
the god-like part of watching over its children assembled here. The situation was
strategically good, nay, absolutely required on military grounds for warning the
Romans of the approach of any enemy who might try to steal around here by the base
of the Capitol and Quirinal. It was also natural that in far later days the emasculated
city should here build under the egis of this old Tor (then no inconsiderable
fortification) that horse-shoe temple with obelisk in centre, and too symbolic avenue,
which, if not copied from our ancient Druid shrines, was at least taken from the same
idea. There sits the androgyne god, female in the Dome, Argha, and Avenue,
but male in the Petros within and Obelisk without, and spiritually neither male nor
female in the strange old “Pontifex Maximus,” who sits thus a neutral as it were,
clothed in womanly garments and a “fish skin,” holding the keys of “the Gates of Life”
—at once the representative of the Queen of Heaven and Saviour of Men.