Forlong - Rivers of Life

Fire Worship.
The Rev. Mr Barker remarks that human souls rendered divine in death, were by the
Greeks termed Demons or Heroes; by the Latins, Lares, Manes, and Genii; that
hero properly means a dead man! and that the Manes, if benevolent, were called Lares,
if ill-disposed, Larvæ; all of which information is nothing to the point, nothing new,
but half the truth, and a long way from the real pith of the matter, which is briefly this:
that Penates are Lingams or male organs; and Lares, Yonis, or female organs.
These symbols often doubtless represented ancestry, but rathcr grossly so before
the days of statuary and painting, and were placed over the family hearth just as we
still place there the pictures or forms of our reat dead ones. So in family niches near
the sacred fire we see, as I have often done in secret nooks of Indian domiciles, small
rudely formed figures in stone or baked clay, elongated when these were Penates and
represented Males, but ovate when Lares, or the female dead of the tribe or family.
I would not, however, call these “household gods,” except in the same somewhat
jocular sense that we call the treasures of art in our homes “our gods.” It is quite correct,
however, to call them the Manes or “Good Ones.” Italy claimed a good Goddess
as Mana, and called a god-less or cruel one—lm-manis.
As the cremated dead, and those whose bodies bleached on a foreign shore, had
no tombstones, it was necessary, in order to have them in remembrance, to place
some fitting symhol or relic of them near the god of the household—the sacred
hearth. This was not Phallic Worship exactly, yet Lares and Penates are Phalli,
and when not sufficiently demonstrated by general shape, it was usual to place the
attributes of Priapus or Venus on the blocks; 1 and as the male and female organs, sun,
fire, and fertility were objects of popular worship, these Phalli came to be adored
with the other Maha-devas of the race. The Lares and Penates represented the past
vital fire or energy of the tribe, as the patriarch, his stalwart sons and daughters did
that of the present living fire on the sacred hearth; and it is this identity of.fire with
living man and woman, and with the Lares and Penates, that seems to stagger Europeans
who have not fully grasped the significant symbolism of the faiths, especially when
they read in Servius that “by hearth-fire, the ancients meant the gods, the Lares;”
so Virgil calls Fire, Penates, and Penates, Fire, in an apparently very indifferent
manner. Hector says to Eneas that he is about to commit to him the Trojan Penates,
while it is but the fire of the hearth which he hands him. 2 We have another proof
that the sacred Fire-god was the greatest ancestor, in the acknowledged custom of calling
the Fire after the greatest Patriarch of the family. Englishmen as well as Easterns
similarly speak as in the phrases, “scion of the house of the Sun,” or of Orleans, Plantagenet,
&c., and so we hear Orestes bid his sister “come and stand by the fire of
Pelops” and Eneas says that he carries over tha sea “the Lar of Asaracus.”
As none but a blood relation could worship the Hearth-fire, or touch a tomb, so there
was in this worship a certain amount of secrecy, which has perhaps led to our “secret
1 This was also placed on Litui, the Caduceus, &c. 2 Ser. in En. III. 134; Barker, II. & III.
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