Forlong - Rivers of Life

470
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
as “cloven tongues like as of fire.” So the Romans always “covered their heads when
they approached their deities or prayed,” and to cover the head “was an essential part
of religious worship . . . Jews to this day keep their heads covered, during the time of
public devotion, as do the Turks in their Mosks.” 1 The monk’s hood and nun’s veil
also mark the God that used to be worshipped, whether as Amon, Jove, or Jehovah.
It was common for Christians to picture the Almighty as a Hand reaching down
from the Sun, as we see in old solar pictures (pages 199, 200, ante), and with the
“phallic hand,” or two fingers extended; a lesser Sun with four rays means Christ, 2
and sometimes he is shown as an outstretched and pierced hand over the face of the
Sun, with rays issuing from the nail-hole. 3 The Holy Ghost, when descending on the
Virgin, as a Dove with outspread wings has, in the pictures referred to, three fleursde-lis
on head, within a sun emitting three fiery rays; this Dove looks as if it were
treading. Sometimes a triangle is substitude for a halo or Nimbus over all the members
of the Trinity; and on the Tapisseries de la Cahise Diue we see a Christ with
three very phallic-looking fleurs-de-lis issuing from the summit and sides of his head.
But to return to the subject of names.
Saturn, one of the earliest names for the Sun, may come nom Sat and Ur or Ar,
perhaps as “the lighter” of the Urn or Ark; for Saturn was a somewhat strange phallic
god; and very different in many respects from Janus or Siva. He might well comprise the
Lingam and Ark, for he carried a sickle, and often the Serpent with tail in mouth, as
Eternity. The old Kelts called him Sadh-arn, in which Sadh means “a long knife”
or “Divider.” Like Janus, he was “the opener and shutter” of “the Way of Life,”
and both gods have therefore come down to us as the holders of the keys of Eternity,
an office assumed in these days by him who sits as Petros, and who still rules the hopes
and fears of millions from a very priapic-looking shrine near the same old spot. He,
too, as if ambitious to be thought an after-type of “the mighty gods of old,” sits or used
to sit, key in hand, on a Solar throne emblazoned with the twelve zodiacal labours of
Hercules. 4 Saturn, like Ba-al Phegor, is the naked or “denuding” god, before whom
all must stand unveiled, which was not the case with priest or layman when adoring
any of the other deities of Rome. 5 It was one of Saturn’s stones which is indistinctly
seen in Fig. 156-I. page 357, standing in front of the Delphic Cave, where it was
daily anointed with oil and wine; 6 for these were the mild after-substitutes for human
sacrifices on that stone or altar.
In regard to Mithras, Sir William Drummond in his Œdipus Judaicus gives us
Hyde’s four beautiful pictures of his march through the Seasons, in which will be found
the whole solar history, ending with his death, as given by me on page 461. This last
scene is the favourite one under which, in 687 A.U.C., he first entered the Roman Pantheon,
and was best known by. Persia, his birthplace, knows not Mithras now in any
1
Picart’s Relig. Cer., I. 12.
2
See Didron’s Christ. Icon., p. 55.
3
Notes on the Nimbus, by Gilbert French, Bolton-
Heston 1854, p. 21.
4
Bower’s Hist. of the Popes, II. 7, tells us that
“The Chair of Peter” up to 1663 exhibited the
labours of Hercules. It was then removed, but
it does not seem very certain that it was restored
at Napoleon’s invasion of 1795.
5 Holwell, p. 368.
6 Ibid., p. 369. See Rev. R. Smiddy’s Druids,
p. 14. Kelly, Dublin, 1873.