Forlong - Rivers of Life

494
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
name) in 1699; 1 but Ebin Batoola did so two centuries earlier, and gives us the important
information, that when he reached Lohāri—the name he gives to the then chief
city—he found “near to it stones in the shape of men and beasts innumerable, and was
told that owing to the wickedness of the Di-bal people, God had transformed them, their
beasts, their herbs, even to the very seeds, into stones;” by which we may understand
that the Di-balis worshipped stones in the shape of men, and trees and Lingams.
Lingams are still very commonly in India mere natural seeds, or egg-shaped
stones, stuck into an Argha, or yoni-shaped hollow in a rock, cleft, or artificiallyformed
circular space; but these shrines are occasionally seen life-size, if I may say so,
as where the people can dance in the Argha round a column or even a rude artificial
wooden figure; the Argha being an oval or circular clearing in a forest, or among the
sedges on a sluggish delta stream where fishermen congregate. Arab sailors, finding
such shrines and objects numerous, would be very likely to write or speak as Ebin-
Batoolo did, and proceeding a. little further east along this coast into Katch, we find
some justification for their language, and fats confirmatory of the wornhip.
The present town of Narainsir (probably from this name, sacred to Vishnoo as
the sun) was Kotesár or Kot-Eswár, signifying, says General Cunningham, “ten million
Eswaras,” Lingam stones being found here in vast numbers. This was a most famous
place of pilgrimage, and when Hwen Tsang visited it, he says he found “in the middle of
the city a famous temple of Siva.” The Greeks and Romans only knew this large peninsula
—Katewesár—and the adjacent continent, by the name of “Larice,” i.e., home of the
Lares or Phallic-worshipping people; and Hwen Tsang called all Balabi and apparently
Sooráshtra, (both solar titles) by the name of Pe-lo-lo, or Northern Lara. By Ptolemy
and many pre-Christian writers it was called Soorashtra, then Soorati, and San-rajya;
but lost these purely solar titles in 319 A.C. 2 when its king was called the Raja of Láteswára
or Lar-Eswara, who was father of a perfectly historical personage, King Karka.
These kings probably ruled from Siva’s great capital, Som-Nāt or Patan Som-nat,
where the god stands with Luna on his head. Thus we see the pendulum has here
swung back from a Solo-Phallic to a Phallo-Solar faith; and the organs of creation,
rather than the source of fertility, have again become the principal cult of tbis coast.
Let us look for a moment to the trans-Indus territories, or Beloochistan, as these
are now called. This name strikes us at once as composed of Bel-ak-istan “the
place of the Sun-god,” who, by those denying him, would as usual be abhorred,
and his region called “the place of the fiend,” or Beloo; being, however, so near
to Chusistan—the land of the Kooth, Cush, or Kuthite, the name may signify
Bel-a-Kush-stan, “place of the Bel or Sun-worshipping Kuths.” The Greeks,
in the fourth century B.C., called the inhabitants to Bela—the south-east capi
tal, 3 and all along the coast—Arabii, Oritæ, Horitæ or Ori, words intimately
1 2
Cunningham’s Anc. Geog. of India, I. 301 Ibid., p. 317.
3
See my Map of India, Plate III, where I have shown all the places mentioned.