Forlong - Rivers of Life

52
Rivers of Life, or Faiths of Man in all Lands.
in section. “Love apples” are a well-known offering to Venus; and we see a loving
couple presenting these to the goddess in a picture on the walls of Pompeii. A
temple was dedicated to “apples,” and Love was
“comforted with” them says Solomon in chapter ii. 5
of his Song. Canticles chapter viii. 5 is still
stronger. Properly translated, it reads: “I awakened
you under the apple tree, when your mother lost her
innocence.” I hesitate to mention this matter, but
such “inspiration” must be put down. In Smith’s
ORCHIS MASCULA-IDEA—Fig 15.
Dictionary we are told that the Mandrake is
intoxicating, of a very fetid odour; and that its
apples are always ripe after harvest is over—when it would appear the two sisterwives
of the patriarch had their highly indelicate quarrel.
It has always been the custom amongst rude races to imagine that likes cured or
induced likes. No doubt, where they observed such effects, these must have arisen
from the sympathy of the organs on the brain by sight or feeling; still it is difficult
to imagine how looking at a serpent on a pole could cure a serpent’s bite, or how the
Emerod images could have cured this disease in the Philistines. My own opinion is
that these tales of the desert wanderers, and what they relate of their enemies
the Philistines and Bet-shemites, are a form of pictorial writing, depicting Phallic
beliefs which could not be put more broadly. The serpent and pole we know; the
emerods have, it is believed, been purposely made obscure; but we can see that they
are “protruberancess” of or on “the secret parts,” and that the injury was caused by
the Ark—the female symbol. So has the word “Feet” been used as a euphemism in
Isa. vii 20, and elsewhere. The Athenians, we may remember, had to offer Phalli
for neglecting the. Phallic god Bacchus; and for a male to look into an Ark, there
was but one punishment, and that masculine.
It was not only plants which produced mysterious procreative propensities on
the females of man and beast; for we are told of the genital organs of many creatures
doing this, especially when in any respeet peculiar; nay, a creature in close resem-
blance to a man merely in the face, has, we are assured—and this is believed by
thousands—often produced fertility. The Turtle, Beaver, and Otter have always been
allied to these occult powers; and Herodotus, in IV. 109, speaks of others. The
Skythians uaed the Beaver for all diseases connected with the womb; and a friend of
mine had to give up a Turtle, nolens volens, which he caught in the holy river Sārjoo,
off the ruins of ancient Ayoodia, to the Hindoo ladies of the place, who at once took
out the genitals, which are in this creature of an extraordinary size, fried them to
ashes, and then ground them to powder for aphrodisical and other supposed properties
in connection with generation and gestation. But to retum to holy trees and shrubs.
I believe that in many cases we can discern in the prevalence of worship or
veneration, for the same tree or plant in different, and sometimes quite hostile faiths,