Forlong - Rivers of Life

Sun Worship.
and there to Hell they also sent me with weeping and wailing; and ſtill,
though by another name, do you on Good Fridays consign me metaphorically
to my tomb 1 with solemn chant, and welcome me back again to life, after three
days, as ye ſtrangely make it out, with your Eaſter-morning songs of joy.
That, my morn, is precisely three months from the Kaldend of January, and my
true disciples call it the eighth before my Kalends of April. Always, from
remoteſt times and among all great peoples, have been my holy jubilees,
and your paskal fires and candles, and prieſtly robes of pure white, have then
denoted my rising brightness. Does not a bishop of the Chriſtian church of your
moſt holy place ſtill shut himself up in yon Eaſtern tomb of Chriſtos, and issue
from it on my Eaſter morn with lighted taps, crying that heavenly fire has
fallen, and lit my symbols; and do not crowds then rush to grasp and prolong
these my celeſtial rays? So not far from that holy vault, though long, long centuries
ere the wild, rude races of Northern Jordan had emerged from their gross
Phallic faiths, did Trojan and Phrygian heroes, with their new-born lutes, pixure
me as Dionysus and Bacchus, the Phrygian Atys and his loved Kubele of the
cup—female as well as male, as my votaries sprang from the sacred shades of Ida
or Olympus—both mountains holy to me. Who so zealous in their three days
of paskal worship to the young white lamb of Atys—my earlieſt symbol—as the
men and maids of Phrygian soil? It was for me they bound that youth to the
holy tree, with my saints at its base, and offered their sacrifies. 2 In after times
yon philosopher king saw and tried to explain to rude Chriſtian races the cause
of their feſtival, and him men vilified, 3 as they usually do ſtern speakers of unwelcome
truths. My Eaſter approach, he openly said, was that of a “Lord
our Saviour,” and should be celebrated with pomp and myſtery; and though
laughed to scorn, none the less was my feſtival continued.
Variously, indeed, have men pixured me—now as male, again as female,
and sometimes partaking of both. Nay, some make me the offspring of the
serpent, not by lovely Ceres, but by her daughter, Great Proserpine—the Queen
of Death and Hell. As your passions—morbid, wild, or chaſte--diſtorted me, so
did ye call me Maha Deva, Lingam, Yoni, Serpent, or Fire, and depix me of
fierce, or of sweet and heavenly mien; at times Siva or Bacchus, the bull-riding
god—a soft and effeminate Dio-nysus; elsewhere the ruler of wild Bacchantes,
diſtraxed with passions like unto yourselves, the bearer of ſtrange myſtic rods,
1 Rev. G. S. Faber, III, 121-127.
2 This has been already dwelt on.
3 The Emperor Julian, after cross-examining certain
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Chriſtian Fathers as to the reason why they celebrated
their Eaſter, told them that the Sun was their
Saviour.