Forlong - Rivers of Life

Fire Worship.
them as friends of their master, and fondled and followed them, 1 showing us that the God
of Passion is not the promoted by the enemy of all unchaste or unnatural desires.
As Siva has one eye in the centre of his forehead, so had an early Jupiter, and so
had all Vulcan’s great friends and followers—the Kyklops—the children of Neptune
and Amphitrite, here pictured as a muscular island race. Their eye was circular, in the
centre of the forehead, and this was also the peculiarity of Vulcan’s own son Polyphemus,
a monster who resided in Sicily, and devoured several of the companions of
Ulysses. The rest, however, managed to escape by blinding the demon, which is thus
described: 2 —
“For gorged with flesh, and drunk with human vine,
While fast asleep the giant lay supine.
. . . . . . . . .
We pray, we cast the lots; and then surround
The monstrous body, stretched along the ground.
Each, as he could approach him, lends a hand
To bore his eye-ball with a flaming brand.
Beneath his frowning forehead lay his eye,
For only one did this vast frame supply.
But that a globe so large, his front is filled,
Like the Sun’s disk, or like the Grecian shield.”
Besides his son Kakus, a “wicked monster,” Vulcan had a son Cæculus, or “he of
small eyes,” who was the founder of Preneste, and regarding whom we have many tales
of Fire, Love, and commonly of arks and Serpents, like those I have related. Now
from these tales, and especially those connected with the Kyklops, and the horror
with which the earliest Greek races held them, we can draw some conclusions pointing
to days long previous to those usually called Vedic. The Vedas say little of Siva’s
life or ways 3 yet these Kyklops—so feared and hated—were clearly Sivaites and long
before 1500 B.C.; even at this time they were great Lingam and Yoni worshippers, as
we gather from the mythologies of our Isles. They were then, as in the 24th century
B.C., a race with some degree of literature and art. Sivaik tales of all kinds were
clearly known to them when Greek story opens, as will as to all who had dealings with
them; and it must have taken several centurieg for these Indian tales to become so
familiar to the Mediterranean Islanders.
Eriktheus was the father of European Ophites by a fitting mother called Ahee, the
Sanskrit and Bactrian Serpent, whom Greeks called Athis. The young Eriktheus had
to be concealed—like Bacchus, Moses, and other great ones—in a chest, for tyrannical
Herods are always seeking out young prophem to destroy them. On this occasion some
women ventured to look into the Ark, and were immediately “seized with madness,”
although we are told that what they saw was only “something like a Serpent,” which
we know the meaning of, seeing that it was an Ark, that would of course have an
Eduth. This Arkite Deity dug serpent caves in the Akropolis; erected on its summit
1
Tooke’s Panth., p. 156.
3
The writers only know him as Roodra.
2 Ibid., p. 161, quoting Virg., En. 3.
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