Serpent-Worship, and Other Essays, with a Chapter on Totemism. C. Staniland Wake
as the demiurgic principle, creating the mundane egg.”153 The name of Ammon has led to the notion that he was an embodiment of the idea of wisdom. He certainly was distinguished by having the human form, but his hieroglyphical symbol of the obelisk, and his connection with Khem, show his true nature. He undoubtedly represented the primitive idea of a generative god, probably at a time when this notion of fecundity had not yet been extended to nature as distinguished from man, and thus he would form a point of contact between the later Egyptian sun-gods and the pillar gods of the Semites and Phœnicians.154 To the Egyptians, as to these other peoples, the sun became the great source of deity. His fecundating warmth or his fiery destroying heat were, however, not the only attributes deified. These were the most important, but the Egyptians, especially, made gods out of many of the solar characters,155 although the association of the idea of “intellect” with Amun-re must have been of late date, if the original nature of Amun was what has been above suggested.
As man, however, began to read nature aright, and as his moral and intellectual faculties were developed, it was necessary that the solar deities themselves should become invested with co-relative attributes, or that other gods should be formed to embody them. The perception of light, as distinguished from heat, was a fertile source of such attributes. In the Chaldean mythology, Vul, the son of Anu, was the god of the air, but his power had relation to the purely atmospheric phenomena rather than to light.156 The only reference to light found in the titles of the early deities is in the character ascribed to Va-lua, the later Bur or Nin-ip, who is said to “irradiate the nations like the sun, the light of the gods.”157 But this deity was apparently the distant planet Saturn, if not originally the moon, and the perception of light as a divine attribute must be referred to the Aryan mind.158 Thus the Hindu Dyaus (the Greek Zeus) is the shining deity, the god of the bright sky. As such the sun-gods now also become the gods of intellectual wisdom, an attribute which also appears to have originated with the Aryan peoples, among whom the Brahmans were possessors of the highest wisdom, as children of the sun, and whose Apollo and Athené were noble embodiments of this attribute. The Chaldean gods, Héa and Nebo, were undoubtedly symbolised by the wedge or arrow-head, which had especial reference to learning. In reality, however, this symbol merely shows that they were the patrons of letters or writing, and not of wisdom, in its purely intellectual aspect. If the form of the Assyrian alphabetical character was of Phallic origin,159 we may have here the source of the idea of a connection between physical and mental knowledge embodied in the legend of the “fall.” In the Persian Ahurô-mazdâo (the wise spirit) we have the purest representation of intellectual wisdom. The book of Zoroaster, the Avesta, is literally the “word,” the word or wisdom which was revealed in creation and embodied in the divine Mithra, who was himself the luminous sun-god.
The similarity between the symbols of the sun-gods of antiquity and the natural objects introduced into the Mosaic myth of the fall has been already referred to, and it is necessary now to consider shortly what influence the Phallic principle there embodied had over other portions of Hebraic theology. The inquiries of Dr. Faber have thrown great light on this question, although the explanation given by him of the myth of Osiris and of the kindred myths of antiquity is by no means the correct one. Finding a universal prevalence of Phallic ideas and symbolism, Dr. Faber refers it to the degradation of a primitive revelation of the Great Father of the Universe. The truth thus taught was lost sight of, and was replaced by the dual notion of a Great Father and a Great Mother—“the transmigrating Noah and the mundane Ark” of the universal Deluge. Noah was, however, only a reappearance of Adam, and the ark floating on the waters of the Deluge was an analogue of the earth swimming in the ocean of space.160 There is undoubtedly a parallelism between the Adam and Noah of the Hebrew legends, as there is between the analogous personages of other phases of these legends, yet it is evident that, if the Deluge never happened, a totally different origin from the one supposed by Dr. Faber must be assigned to the great Phallic myth of antiquity. It is absolutely necessary, therefore, to any explanation (other than the Phallic one) of the origin of this myth, to establish the truth of the Noahic Deluge.161 Accordingly, an American writer has framed an elaborate system of “Arkite symbolism,” founded on the supposed influence of the great Deluge over the minds of the posterity of those who survived its horrors. Mr. Lesley sees in this catastrophe the explanation of “phallism,” which, “converting all the older Arkite symbols into illustrations of its own philosophical conceptions of the mystery of generation, gave to the various parts and members of the human body those names which constitute the special vocabulary of obscenity of the present day.”162
But the priority of these symbols or conceptions is the question at issue. Did the development of “Arkism” precede or follow the superstitions referred to by Mr. Lesley as Ophism, Mithraism, and Phallism, all of which have been shown to embody analogous ideas? If the question of priority is to be determined by reference to the written tradition which furnishes the real ground of belief in a great Deluge, it must clearly be given to the Phallic superstition; for it is shown conclusively, as I think, that almost the first event in the life of man there related is purely Phallic in its symbolism. Nor is the account of the fall the only portion of the Mosaic history of primitive man which belongs to this category. The Garden of Eden, with its tree of life and the river which divided into four streams, although it may have had a secondary reference to the traditional place of Semitic origin to which the Hebrews looked back with a regretful longing, has undoubtedly a recondite Phallic meaning. It must be so, if the explanation I have given of the myth of the fall be right, since the two are intimately connected, and the Garden163 is essential to the succeeding catastrophe. That this opinion is correct can be proved moreover by reference to Hindu mythology. “The Hindu,” says Dr. Creuzer, “contemplates with love his mysterious Merou, a sacred mountain from whence the source of life spreads itself in the valleys and over the plains, which separates day from night, reunites heaven and earth, and finally on which the sun, the moon, and the stars each repose.”164 But what is this mysterious mountain, the sacred Merou? It is shown by Dr. Creuzer’s own explanation. He says: “It is on the Mount Merou, the central point of the earth (which elevates itself as an immense phallus from the centre of an immense yoni amongst the islands with which the sea is sown), that the grand popular deity who presides over the Lingam, Siva or Mahadeva, the father and master of nature, makes his cherished abode, spreading life to every part under a thousand diverse forms which he incessantly renews. Near him is Bhavani or Parvati, his sister and his wife, the Queen of the mountains, the goddess of the Yoni, who carries in her bosom the germ of all things, and brings forth the beings whom she has conceived by Mahadeva. We have here the two great principles of nature, the one male and the other female, generators and regenerators, creators and at the same time destroyers; but they destroy only to renew; they only change the forms; life and death succeed in a perfect circle, and the substance remains in the midst of all these changes.” The sacred mountain is wanting to the Mosaic legend, but Dr. Faber justly sees165 in the Mount Merou, where resides Siva and Bhavani, the Hebrew Paradise, and we find that the Hindu myth affirms that the sacred river not only sprang from the roots of Jambu, a tree of a most extravagant size, which is thought to convey knowledge and to effect the accomplishment of every human wish, but also that, after passing through “the circle of the moon,” it divides it into “four streams, flowing towards the four cardinal points.”
The priority of the Phallic superstition over “Arkism” is further proved by the undoubted fact that, even in the traditions of the race to whom we are indebted for the precise details of the incidents accompanying the Deluge, the Phallic deities of the Hamitico-Semites are genealogically placed long before the occurrence of this event. The Semitic deity Seth is, according to one fable, the semi-divine first ancestor of the Semites. Bunsen has shown clearly also that several of the antediluvian descendants of the Semitic Adam were among the Phœnician deities. Thus, the Carthaginians had a god Yubal, Jubal, who would appear to have been the sun-god Æsculapius, called “the fairest of the gods and so, we read in a Phœnician inscription Ju-Baal—i.e., beauty of Baal, which Movers ingeniously interprets Æsculapius—Asmun-Jubal.” Here, then, adds Bunsen, “is another old Semitic name attached to a descendant of Lamekh, together with Adah, Zillah, and Naamah.”166 Hadah, the wife of Lamekh, as well of Esau, the Phœnician Usov, is identified with the goddess, worshipped at Babylon as Hera (Juno), and, notwithstanding