Part 3

“Mother Earth” is a legitimate expression, only of the most general type. Religious genius gave the female quality to the earth with a special meaning. When once the idea obtained that our world was _feminine_, it was easy to induce the faithful to believe that natural chasms were typical of that part which characterises woman. As at birth the new being emerges from the mother, so it was supposed that emergence from a terrestrial cleft was equivalent to a new birth. In direct proportion to the resemblance between the sign and the thing signified was the sacredness of the chink, and the amount of virtue which was imparted by passing through it. From natural caverns being considered holy, the veneration for apertures in stones, as being equally symbolical, was a natural transition. Holes, such as we refer to, are still to be seen in those structures which are called Druidical, both in the British Isles and in India. It is impossible to say when these first arose; it is certain that they survive in India to this day. We recognise the existence of the emblem among the Jews in Isaiah li. 1, in the charge to look “to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged.” We have also an indication that chasms were symbolical among the same people in Isaiah lvii. 5, where the wicked among the Jews were described as “inflaming themselves with idols under every green tree, and slaying the children in the valleys under the clefts of the rocks.” It is possible that the “hole in the wall” (Ezek. viii. 7) had a similar signification. In modern Rome, in the vestibule of the church close to the Temple of Vesta, I have seen a large _perforated stone_, in the hole of which the ancient Romans are said to have placed their hands when they swore a solemn oath, in imitation, or, rather, a counterpart, of Abraham swearing his servant upon his thigh—that is the male organ. Higgins dwells upon these holes, and says: “These stones are so placed as to have a hole under them, through which devotees passed for religious purposes. There is one of the same kind in Ireland, called St. Declau’s stone. In the mass of rocks at Bramham Crags there is a place made for the devotees to pass through.” We read in the accounts of Hindostan that there is a very celebrated place in Upper India, to which immense numbers of pilgrims go, to pass through a place in the mountains called “The Cow’s Belly.” In the Island of Bombay, at Malabar Hill, there is a rock upon the surface of which there is a natural crevice, which communicates with a cavity opening below. This place is used by the Gentoos as a purification of their sins, which they say is effected by their going in at the opening below, and emerging at the cavity above—“born again.” The ceremony is in such high repute in the neighbouring countries that the famous Conajee Angria ventured by stealth, one night, upon the Island, on purpose to perform the ceremony, and got off undiscovered. The early Christians gave them a bad name, as if from envy; they called these holes “Cunni Diaboli.” (_Anacalypsis_, p. 346)

BACCHANALIA AND LIBERALIA FESTIVALS

The Romans called the feasts of Bacchus, Bacchanalia and Liberalia, because Bacchus and Liber were the names for the same god, although the festivals were celebrated at different times and in a somewhat different manner. The latter, according to Payne Knight, was celebrated on the 17th of March, with the most licentious gaiety, when an image of the Phallus was carried openly in triumph. These festivities were more

## particularly celebrated among the rural or agricultural population, who,

when the preparatory labour of the agriculturist was over, celebrated with joyful activity Nature’s reproductive powers, which in due time was to bring forth the fruits. During the festival a car containing a huge Phallus was drawn along accompanied by its worshippers, who indulged in obscene songs and dances of wild and extravagant character. The gravest and proudest matrons suddenly laid aside their decency and ran screaming among the woods and hills half-naked, with dishevelled hair, interwoven with which were pieces of ivy or vine. The Bacchanalian feasts were celebrated in the latter part of October when the harvest was completed. Wine and figs were carried in the procession of the Bacchants, and lastly came the Phalli, followed by honourable virgins, called _canephorœ_, who carried baskets of fruit. These were followed by a company of men who carried poles, at the end of which were figures representing the organ of generation. The men sung the Phallica and were crowned with violets and ivy, and had their faces covered with other kinds of herbs. These were followed by some dressed in women’s apparel, striped with white, reaching to their ancles, with garlands on their heads, and wreaths of flowers in their hands, imitating by their gestures the state of inebriety. The priestesses ran in every direction shouting and screaming, each with a thyrsus in their hands. Men and women all intermingled, dancing and frolicking with suggestive gesticulations. Deodorus says the festivals were carried into the night, and it was then frenzy reached its height. He says, “In performing the solemnity virgins carry the thyrsus, and run about frantic, halloing ‘Evoe’ in honour of the god; then the women in a body offer the sacrifices, and roar out the praises of Bacchus in song as if he were present, in imitation of the ancient Mænades, who accompanied him.” These festivities were carried into the night, and as the celebrators became heated with wine, they degenerated into extreme licentiousness.

Similar enthusiastic frenzy was exhibited at the Lupercalian Feasts instituted in honour of the god Pan (under the shape of a Goat) whose priests, according to Owen in his _Worship of Serpents_, on the morning of the Feast ran naked through the streets, striking the married women they met on the hands and belly, which was held as an omen promising fruitfulness. The nymphs performing the same ostentatious display as the Bacchants at the festival of Bacchanalia.

The festival of Venus was celebrated towards the beginning of April, and the Phallus was again drawn in a car, followed by a procession of Roman women to the temple of Venus. Says a writer, “The loose women of the town and its neighbourhood, called together by the sounding of horns, mixed with the multitude in perfect nakedness, and excited their passions with obscene motions and language until the festival ended in a scene of mad revelry, in which all restraint was laid aside.”

It is said that these festivals took their rise from Egypt, from whence they were brought into Greece by Metampus, where the triumph of Osiris was celebrated with secret rites, and from thence the Bacchanals drew their original; and from the feasts instituted by Isis came the orgies of Bacchus.

DRUID AND HEBREW FAITHS

It seems not at all improbable that the deities worshipped by the ancient Britons and the Irish, were no other then the Phallic deities of the ancient Syrians and Greeks, and also the Baal of the Hebrews. Dionysius Periegites, who lived in the time of Augustus Cæsar, states that the rites of Bacchus were celebrated in the British Isles; while Strabo, who lived in the time of Augustus and Tiberius, asserts that a much earlier writer described the worship of the Cabiri to have come originally from Phœnicia. Higgins, in his History of the Druids, says, the supreme god above the rest was called _Seodhoc_ and _Baal_. The name of Baal is found both in Wales, Gaul, and Germany, and is the same as the Hebrew Baal.

The same god, according to O’Brien, was the chief deity of the Irish, in whose honour the round towers were erected, which structures the ancient Irish themselves designated Bail-toir, or the towers of Baal. In Numbers, xxii., will be found a mention of a similar pillar consecrated to Baal. Many of the same customs and superstitions that existed among the Druids and ancient Irish, will likewise be found among the Israelites. On the first day of May, the Irish made great fires in honour of Baal, likewise offering him sacrifices. A similar account is given of a custom of the Druids by Toland, in an account of the festival of the fires; he says:—“on May-day eve the Druids made prodigious fires on these cairns, which being everyone in sight of some other, could not but afford a glorious show over a whole nation.” These fires are said to be lit even to the present day by the Aboriginal Irish, on the first of May, called by them Bealtine, or the day of Belan’s fire, the same name as given them in the Highlands of Scotland.

A similar practice to this will be noticed as mentioned in the II Book of Kings, where the Canaanites in their worship of Baal, are said to have passed their children through the fire of Baal, which seems to have been a common practice, as Ahaz, King of Israel, is blamed for having done the same thing. Higgins in his _Anacalypsis_, says this superstitious custom still continues, and that on “particular days great fires are lighted, and the fathers taking the children in their arms, jump or run through them, and thus pass their children through them; they also light two fires at a little distance from each other, and drive their cattle between them.” It will be found on reference to Deuteronomy, that this very practice is specially forbidden. In the rites of Numa, we have also the sacred fire of the Irish; of St. Bridget, of Moses, of Mithra, and of India, accompanied with an establishment of nuns or vestal virgins. A sacred fire is said to have been kept burning by the nuns of Kildare, which was established by St. Bridget. This fire was never blown with the mouth, that it might not be polluted, but only with bellows; this fire was similar to that of the Jews, kept burning only with peeled wood, and never blown with the mouth. Hyde describes a similar fire which was kept burning in the same way by the ancient Persians, who kept their sacred fire fed with a certain tree called Hawm Mogorum; and Colonel Vallancey says the sacred fire of the Irish was fed with the wood of the tree called Hawm. Ware, the Romish priest, relates that at Kildare, the glorious Bridget was rendered illustrious by many miracles, amongst which was the sacred fire, which had been kept burning by nuns ever since the time of the Virgin.

The earliest sacred places of the Jews were evidently sacred stones, or stone circles, succeeded in time by temples. These early rude stones, emblems of the Creator, were erected by the Israelites, which in no way differed from the erections of the Gentiles. It will be found that the Jews to commemorate a great victory, or to bear witness of the Lord, were all signified by stones: thus, Joshua erected a stone to bear witness; Jacob put up a stone to make a place sacred; Abel set up the same for a place of worship; Samuel erected a stone as a boundary, which was to be the token of an agreement made in the name of God. Even Maundrel in his travels names several that he saw in Palestine. It is curious that where a pillar was erected there, sometime after, a temple was put up in the same manner that the Round Towers of Ireland were,—always near a church, but never formed part of it. We find many instances in the Scriptures of the erection of a number of stones among the early Israelites, which would lead us to conclude that it was not at all unlikely that the early places of worship among them, were similar to the temples found in various parts of Great Britain and Ireland. It is written in Exodus xxiv. 4, that Moses rose up early in the morning, and builded an altar under the hill, and twelve pillars, according to the twelve tribes of Israel, were erected. It is also given out that when the children of Israel should pass over the Jordan, unto the land which the Lord giveth them, they should set up great stones, and plaster them with plaster, and also the words of the law were to be written thereon. In many other places stones were ordered to be set up in the name of the Lord, and repeated instances are given that the stones should be twelve in number and unhewn.

Stone temples seem to have been erected in all countries of the world, and even in America, where, among the early American races are to be found customs, superstitions, and religious objects of veneration, similar to the Phœnicians. An American writer says:—“There is sufficient evidence that the religious customs of the Mexicans, Peruvians and other American races, are nearly identical with those of the ancient Phœnicians.... We moreover discover that many of their religious terms have, etymologically, the same origin.” Payne Knight, in his Worship of Priapus, devotes much of his work to show that the temples erected at Stonehenge and other places, were of a Phœnician origin, which was simply a temple of the god Bacchus.

STONEHENGE A TEMPLE OF BACCHUS

Of all the nations of antiquity the Persians were the most simple and direct in the worship of the Creator. They were the puritans of the heathen world, and not only rejected all images of God and his agents, but also temples and altars, according to Herodotus, whose authority we prefer to any other, because he had an opportunity of conversing with them before they had adopted any foreign superstitions. As they worshipped the ethereal fire without any medium of personification or allegory, they thought it unworthy of the dignity of the god to be represented by any definite form, or circumscribed to any particular place. The universe was his temple, and the all-pervading element of fire his only symbol. The Greeks appear originally to have held similar opinions, for they were long without statues and Pausanias speaks of a temple at Siciyon, built by Adrastus—who lived in an age before the Trojan war—which consisted of columns only, without wall or roof, like the Celtic temples of our northern ancestors, or the Phyrœtheia of the Persians, which were circles of stones in the centre of which was kindled the sacred fire, the symbol of the god. Homer frequently speaks of places of worship consisting of an area and altar only, which were probably enclosures like those of the Persians, with an altar in the centre. The temples dedicated to the creator Bacchus, which the Greek architects called _hypœthral_, seem to have been anciently of this kind, whence probably came the title (“surround with columns”) attributed to that god in the Orphic litanies. The remains of one of these are still extant at Puzznoli, near Naples, which the inhabitants call the temple of Serapis; but the ornaments of grapes, vases, etc., found among the ruins, prove it to have been of Bacchus. Serapis was indeed the same deity worshipped under another form, being usually a personification of the sun. The architecture is of the Roman times; but the ground plan is probably that of a very ancient one, which this was made to replace—for it exactly resembles that of a Celtic temple in Zeeland, published in Stukeley’s _Itinerary_. The ranges of square buildings which enclose it are not properly parts of the temple, but apartments of the priests, places for victims and sacred utensils, and chapels dedicated to the subordinate deities, introduced by a more complicated and corrupt worship and probably unknown to the founder of the original edifice. The portico, which runs parallel with these buildings, encloses the _temenos_, or area of sacred ground, which in the _pyrœtheia_ of the Persians was circular, but is here quadrangular, as in the Celtic temple in Zeeland, and the Indian pagoda before described. In the centre was the holy of holies, the seat of the god, consisting of a circle of columns raised upon a basement, without roof or walls, in the middle of which was probably the sacred fire or some other symbol of the deity. The square area in which it stood was sunk below the natural level of the ground, and, like that of the Indian pagoda, appears to have been occasionally floated with water; the drains and conduits being still to be seen, as also several fragments of sculpture representing waves, serpents, and various aquatic animals, which once adorned the basement. The Bacchus here worshipped, was, as we learn from the Orphic hymn above cited, the sun in his character of extinguisher of the fires which once pervaded the earth. He is supposed to have done this by exhaling the waters of the ocean and scattering them over the land, which was thus supposed to have acquired its proper temperature and fertility. For this reason the sacred fire, the essential image of the god, was surrounded by the element which was principally employed in giving effect to the beneficial exertions of the great attribute.

From a passage of Hecatæus, preserved by Deodorus Siculus, it seems evident that Stonehenge and all the monuments of the same kind found in the north, belong to the same religion which appears at some remote period to have prevailed over the whole northern hemisphere. According to that ancient historian, _the Hyperboreans inhabited an island beyond Gaul, as large as Sicily, in which Apollo was worshipped in a circular temple considerable for its size and riches_. Apollo, we know, in the language of the Greeks of that age, can mean no other than the sun, which according to Cæsar was worshipped by the Germans, when they knew of no other deities except fire and the moon. The island can evidently be no other than Britain, which at that time was only known to the Greeks by the vague reports of the Phœnician mariners; and so uncertain and obscure that Herodotus, the most inquisitive and credulous of historians, doubts of its existence. The circular temple of the sun being noticed in such slight and imperfect accounts, proves that it must have been something singular and important; for if it had been an inconsiderable structure, it would not have been mentioned at all; and if there had been many such in the country, the historian would not have employed the singular number.

Stonehenge has certainly been a circular temple, nearly the same as that already described of the Bacchus at Puzznoli, except that in the latter the nice execution and beautiful symmetry of the parts are in every respect the reverse of the rude but majestic simplicity of the former. In the original design they differ but in the form of the area. It may therefore be reasonably supposed that we have still the ruins of the identical temple described by Hecatæus, who, being an Asiatic Greek, might have received his information from Phœnician merchants, who had visited the interior parts of Britain when trading there for tin. Anacrobius mentions a temple of the same kind and form, upon Mount Zilmissus, in Thrace, dedicated to the sun under the title of Bacchus Sebrazius. The large obelisks of stone found in many parts of the north, such as those at Rudstone, and near Boroughbridge, in Yorkshire, belong to the same religion; obelisks being, as Pliny observes, sacred to the sun, whose rays they represented both by their form and name.—_Payne Knight’s Worship of Priapus._

BUNS AND RELIGIOUS CAKES

Says Hyslop:—“The hot cross-buns of Good Friday, and the dyed eggs of Pasch or Easter Sunday, figured in the Chaldean rites just as they do now. The buns known, too, by that identical name, were used in the worship of the Queen of Heaven, the goddess Easter (Ishtar or Astarte), as early as the days of Cecrops, the founder of Athens, 1,500 years before the Christian era.” “One species of bread,” says Bryant, “‘which used to be offered to the gods, was of great antiquity, and called _Boun_.’ Diogenes mentioned ‘they were made of flour and honey.’” It appears that Jeremiah the Prophet was familiar with this lecherous worship. He says:—“The children gather wood, the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead the dough to make cakes to the Queen of Heaven (Jer. vii., 18)”. Hyslop does not add that the “buns” offered to the Queen of Heaven, and in sacrifices to other deities, were framed in the shape of the sexual organs, but that they were so in ancient times we have abundance of evidence.

Martial distinctly speaks of such things in two epigrams, first, wherein the male organ is spoken of, second, wherein the female part is commemorated; the cakes being made of the finest flour, and kept especially for the palate of the fair one.

Captain Wilford (“Asiatic Researches,” viii., p. 365) says:—“When the people of Syracuse were sacrificing to goddesses, they offered cakes called _mulloi_, shaped like the female organ, and in some temples where the priestesses were probably ventriloquists, they so far imposed on the credulous multitude who came to adore the Vulva as to make them believe that it spoke and gave oracles.”

We can understand how such things were allowed in licentious Rome, but we can scarcely comprehend how they were tolerated in Christian Europe, as, to all innocent surprise we find they were, from the second part of the “Remains of the Worship of Priapus”: that in Saintonge, in the neighbourhood of La Rochelle, small cakes baked in the form of the Phallus are made as offerings at Easter, carried and presented from house to house. Dulare states that in his time the festival of Palm Sunday, in the town of Saintes, was called _le fete des pinnes_—feast of the privy members—and that during its continuance the women and children carried in the procession a Phallus made of bread, which they called a _pinne_, at the end of their palm branches; these _pinnes_ were subsequently blessed by priests, and carefully preserved by the women during the year. Palm Sunday! Palm, it is to be remembered, is a euphemism of the male organ, and it is curious to see it united with the Phallus in Christendom. Dulare also says that, in some of the earlier inedited French books on cookery, receipts are given for making cakes of the salacious form in question, which are broadly named. He further tells us those cakes symbolized the male, in Lower Limousin, and especially at Brives; while the female emblem was adopted at Clermont, in Auvergne, and other places.

THE ARK AND GOOD FRIDAY

The ark of the covenant was a most sacred symbol in the worship of the Jews, and like the sacred boat, or ark of Osiris, contained the symbol of the principle of life, or creative power. The symbol was preserved with great veneration in a miniature tabernacle, which was considered the special and sanctified abode of the god. In size and manner of construction the ark of the Jews and the sacred chest of Osiris of the Egyptians were exactly alike, and were carried in processions in a similar manner.