Forlong - Rivers of Life

Sun Worship.
to Apollo; where masculine, the Sun was Hippos, and as the winged Serpent-horse, he was
Hippa-on, and his priests Hippeis. Sometimes Dionysus was looked upon as the
horse of the Sun, whilst the female energy of nature was pictured as Demeter or Ceres,
issuing from a cave in the olive mount of Arkadia, as I here
show her, with a dolphin in one hand and dove in the other.
She is clothed down to her ankles, and has a horse’s head;
and for ages was so worshipped by the Pi-galians together
with serpent forms. The symbols in her hand may mean
creation as Air and Water—Poseidon and Juno.
All people seem to have considered the horse as
sacred to the Sun, and a fit sacrifice to him. Hindoo sacred
books are full of this worship, which extended once
all over Europe as well as Asia. Christian ecclesiastical
councils strictly forbad the eating of horses, especially when
some Kelts in 783 A.C. sinned, or showed carelessness,
483
Fig 180.—HIPPA OF ARKADIA, IN THE DELTA
OR DOOR OF LIFE, HOLDING DOLPHIN AND
DOVE—FERTILITY AND LOVE
in this respect; church mandates gave as a reason, that horseflesh was abhorrent to,
and never eaten by, the pious Christians in the East. White horses, like white bulls,
were specially sacred to Helios. Romans offered a horse to Mars, as the Greeks did
to Poseidon, throwing the animal into a well, fully caparisoned; that is, consigned him
to his Ark, which the well ever is of all male gods. Horses, like bulls and phalli, are
frequently seem with bells round their necks, and I have noted samples of such in the
sculptures of Nismes, and the much-revered Christian bell of St Fillan. I incline to
think that the quaint Nismes object is the Hippo-campus of Keltic mythology,
which Col F.Leslie describes as a small animal abundant in the Mediterranean and
Gulf Stream, with the head of a horse and the tail of a caterpillar—none the less on
this account a valuable symbol to the imaginative votaries of this faith. Old British
and Gallic coins show us the Sun figuring as the horse with crescent and stars.
The numerous stories we possess of Mithras and his cave, of his dwelling in one, and
coming forth as the emblem of fertility—a beaming, joyous, and sovereign lord, become
clearer to us, when we see, as here, that this cave is Demeter, the abode of doves
and dolphins. Even Zoroaster—whom the learned, orhodox, and pious Dr Cudworth 1
says “acknowledged only one great God”—worshipped Mithras “in a consecrated
orbicular cave, which was kept adorned with flowers and watered by fountains,”—man’s
first church! and melancholy to think, only a Kaba, Kibla, or “the ark of generation.”
It is this he knelt before, as do Islāmis to this day, and asked that the “One Great God”
would be propitious, and grant him and his progeny, pleasure, and length of days in “this
wicked world.” “All things,” says Dr. C., “are the offspring of Fire, and so the Sun
was held as the moot likely image of the Great Creator,” both by Zoroaster and
Orpheus; but others “confounded him with Ourania and Pan-demon,” who were
1 Intellectual Species, I. 471 (written two hundred years ago), citing Eubulus.