Forlong - Rivers of Life

Sun Worship.
I give here a drawing of the Phenician and Irish Lingams, with that of a Phallic
Mexican shrine, which Stephens shows us in his Yukatan (i. 135). The Innis-Murray
Stone, is fully treated of in Grose’s Antiquities, and by Vallency and Keane in their
works on Ireland. Its name—Muidhir, is sometimes translated “Sun-ray;” 1 it was clearly
a Fid-Nemad, or Lingam, for
the inside of a Tower or
Temple, of which more anon.
Mr. Stephens tells us that the
Yukatan shrines had also Phallic-like
emblems within them,
and as this form of Temple is
what we meet with daily in India,
so we find that the Mexican
485
Fig. 181—MEXICAN SHRINE Fig 182.—THE MUDROS. Fig. 183.—INNIS-MURRAY STONE
PHALLI OF MEXICO, PHENICIA, AND IRELAND
depicted his whole shrine like its most precious treasure, as men have everywhere done.
The Hebrew was in the Koothite phase when he worshipped Bethels with
Jacob; the Rod, Ark, and Serpent with Moses; Baal Phegor with Joshua; but in the
Keltic phase, when he built his oriented shrine on a mount over a cave, even though he
put a stone in it. Yet the Syrians had fallen back to nearly a pure phallic faith when
they erected, as we are told, in their holy City—Hieropolis, a temple with a tower
or Priap on it, and set thereon a man for seven days, twice a year—perfectly nude, if
some traditions and many drawings be correct. 2 This column, it is true, was called
“a Sun-tower,” and dedicated to Astarte the moon; but some figures we have of it,
or similar columns, speak more truly as to the faiths than most priests and writers;
indeed we cannot be too careful in accepting what priests afterwards wrote of their
faiths, for these are ever on the move forward, and towards that which is better; si
they naturally and with the most charitable, if not truthful of motives, gloss over, or hide
superstitions and impurities. It is our task, however, to unmask such, in order to
arrive at the roots of the faith, and the original nature of the God who may have been
thus fancifully decked out. It is of infinitely greater importance to fathom the early
secrets which gave us our Joves, Jehovahs, Manes, and Astartes, than to try to solve the
metamorphoses they passed through, or after-incrustations which adhered to them, and
are related in crudely got up “histories.” There is more to be learned by the study of the
origin of that black Helio-ga-belus, before which a Roman Emperor bowed only fourteen
hundred years ago, than by doctrines and dogmas concerning Jewish sayings and doings
though four hundred years previous to this, or the theological disputes regarding virgins
and ornate altars. Though the exponents of these mysteries laugh at the Emperor’s
superstition, yet philosophers, archeologists, and good critics, have for some time seen
that the problems of ancient faiths are more interesting, and fraught with more important
results than miraculous tales. I have elsewhere dwelt on the early so-called “wars of
1 Keane traces it to Molak, the fierce form of the Sun to whom Jews offered up their children.
2 Lucian, O’Brian, and Keane, but see Dr. Inman’s Anc. Faiths, II., Pl. V. 16.