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Index
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Tree and Serpent worship carried by the Phenicians
everywhere—The religion of the Indian jungle—Baal in
Palestine—The "Star of Chiun" (S’iva)—The Mahâdeos
and Masseboth—Special blood-thirstiness of the Phenician
Divinity—"Holy of Holies" of Jewish Temple, and
"Sanctuary of the S’iva-Linga" in India.
Colonel Tod tells us that somewhere near Baroda he came across some
followers of Durgâ living in caves in abject poverty. They were
called Aghoras, or Murdi Chors (man-eaters), and fed on human flesh of
the most putrid description, sometimes coming down and begging the
body at a funeral. Their goddess they called Aghora Îswarî Mata
(Lean Famine), and they pictured her as hungry and as insatiate as
themselves.
This spectacle is immensely interesting.
We see the religion of Durgâ in its earliest form.
Early man had three stages of progress:—
(1) The cave man, whose sole food came to him by hunting and
battle.
(2) The shepherd, who by the invention of tents could move about
from place to place seeking new pastures for his flocks and herds.
(3) In the third stage man had learnt to till the ground and build
houses.
The Egyptians and Babylonians, when they emerge in real history,
had selected vast plains watered by great rivers as sites for their
cities. In a word, they had reached the third stage of progress, the
agricultural. Between them and the starving Indian Aghora in his
dripping cave there might be hundreds, possibly thousands, of years.
And yet their religion was the religion of the Indian Aghora.
Let us try and picture to ourselves the condition of the earliest
cave man in an Indian jungle. When we remember that man's first idea
of a god is that of a malignant and hurtful being, we cannot be
surprised that two special divinities soon suggested themselves.
(1) At the period when the rainy season is over and the burning sun
strikes upon the rotten vegetation, Indian jungles are ravaged by a
terrible fever called the jungle fever. It is almost certain death to
expose oneself to it.
(2) The second danger comes from the cobra (Naja Tripudians), a
snake whose poison mingling with the blood kills the victim in a few
hours. In civilised modern India something like 24,000 Hindus perish
every year from this snake. India is a vast triangular plain. In these
days it was choked with jungles. The poor Aghora had to hunt for his
food, bare-footed, in unhealthy seasons as well as healthy seasons.
Soon came to him his first idea of a god, a cannibal witch, symbolised
in the form of a tree. She was Nirriti, of the Rig Veda, the
fever-breath of the Indian forest.
But the deadly snake likewise did not escape observation. He became
at once a male god, the Seshanâg, S’iva the husband of Durgâ; the
two seemed to work together. Both were propitiated with the gift that
the starved and hungry Aghora most valued—raw meat, the warm blood
of beasts and babies.
A third divinity very soon suggested itself: a stone; and at this
point all that we shall say of it is that it was utilitarian. It was
not carved or fashioned in any way; man did not know how to carve or
fashion anything. In his cave dwelling it was a lump of the bed rock,
and on this he poured the warm blood of the victim. The stone
represented Durgâ as well as S’iva. These three objects of worship
were started many thousand years ago.
What was the date of the early Indian cave men? How can we fix
that? Cave dwellers before they could become shepherds had to invent
the tent.
One fact suggests an enormous gap between the Aghora and the
builder of cities. When the great Âryan shell burst in Bactria the
fragments, the separate Âryan clans, must have been in a pastoral
state of development at most. One fragment, Greece, as we see, learnt
agriculture from the wife of S’iva or Kronos; one fragment, the
Italian, learnt it from S’iva's son Janus, or Ganeśa; one, the
Babylonian, learnt it from Rhea, or S’iva's wife Durgâ.
But Professor Max Müller
tells us that thousands of years must have elapsed before the ancient
Bactrian language could have changed to pure Greek or pure Latin; and
Janus, let us say, and Ceres, must have given their instructions in
some more modern tongue than the Bactrian, or they would not have been
understood.
Of only one thing we can he quite certain, and that is that the
epoch of the cave-dweller must be judged by the figures, almost of
geological computation.
Kronos, or S’iva, taught Thebes, Babylon, Tyre, Jerusalem,
agriculture. Another lesson he taught them: the religion of the Aghora.
That consisted, as we have seen, of three special points:—
(1) The worship of a cannibal witch in the form of a tree.
(2) The worship of a snake, the Naja Tripudians.
(3) The worship of a rough unhewn stone.
Now this in a word was the exact religion of Thebes, Babylon,
Athens, Tyre; and the cannibalism of the witch survived everywhere in
vast human sacrifices.
THE TREE.
The following legend comes from the Skanda Purâna:—
Durgâ was once very angry with S’iva, accusing him of dalliance
with the Apsaras. Refusing to be pacified she fled to the jungles, and
seating herself in the hollow trunk of a Sami tree, she performed Tâpasya,
or ascetic practices, for nine years. Immense magical powers came to
her in her wrath, and flames burst forth which scattered all the
animals and shepherds living near the place, and threatened ruin far
and near. Sacrifices were made to her and, pacified by these, she
determined to restrict this combustion to the Sami tree. She lives in
it as Samirama, the goddess of the Sami tree. It was settled that the
Araṇî, the wooden drill that lights the sacred fire, should
always be from this tree, and that her festival as the Tree goddess
should take place once a year, on which occasion she would bestow
abundant wealth and corn to all her worshippers. *
This legend is plainly written to account for Indian tree worship
to appease the goddess of Indian fire and Indian fever.
This festival of Durgâ is still the leading festival of India.
Let us now consider Tree-worship in Palestine.
"In early times," says Robertson Smith, "tree
worship had such a vogue in Canaan that the sacred tree, or the pole
its surrogate, had come to be viewed as a general symbol of
Deity."
Mrs. Philpot, in her work on Tree-worship, says the same thing.
"There is no country in the world where the tree was more
ardently worshipped than it was in ancient Palestine. Amongst the
Canaanites every altar to the god had its sacred tree beside it, and
when the Israelites established local sanctuaries under their
influence, they set up their altar under a green tree, and planted
beside it, as its indispensable accompaniment, an Ashęra, which was
either a living tree or a tree-like post, and not a 'grove,' as
rendered in the Authorised Version."
But in some texts the Ashęra is confused with the goddess
Ashtoreth in person, as the Sami Tree in India and Durgâ are deemed
one.
Another point of contact between Israel and India is remarkable,
namely, the reaping festival. The Jews are commanded to go out for
nine days into the woods "when they have gathered the fruit of
the land," and to "cut down the boughs of goodly trees,
branches of palm trees, and boughs of thick trees, and willows of the
brook," and to live in booths of trees seven days.
In India, in the Deccan, during the festival of the tree, the
Peishwa and all his followers move out into camp. The whole population
marches in solemn procession towards the Holy Tree. Elephants and
camels, Sepoys and noblemen, are all dressed out in gorgeous array.
The Peishwa in person plucks a few leaves from the tree after the
prescribed sacrifices are completed. Cannon and muskets are discharged
and all decorate themselves with stalks of the jowri or rice plant.
Mrs. Philpot holds that the Israelites got this Tree worship from
the followers of the Assyrian Astarte, but why go so far afield?
Ezekiel (xx. 8, 13.) tells us that the Israelites were thoroughly
imbued with the religion of Egypt, and that they "rebelled"
against Jehovah in the wilderness, which phrase means, no doubt, that
they still preserved Egyptian rites and Egyptian ideas. Lower Egypt,
where they had been confined, worshipped Bal, or Typhon, with its
serpent worship and tree worship. "Trees," says Maspero,
"were the homes of the various divinities."
Says Jeremiah:—
"They have built also their high places to Baal to burn their
sons with fire for burnt offerings to Baal, which I commanded not, nor
spake it, nor came it into my mind."
Many critics hold that the earliest god of the Israelites was
really this Baal, the chief point of discussion now being, When did
Jehovah worship come in.
"Amos," says Professor Dozy, "tells us that the
so-called Tabernacle, the Mosaic Sanctuary, was dedicated to Saturn (Chiun
or Chievan, i.e., Baal), so that a sanctuary of Baal stood at Shiloh
just as a feast of Baal took place at the Gilgal.
"The same is shown by the fact that the place where the ark
stood in Samuel's days, known afterwards as Kirjath Jearim was
formerly called Kirjath Baal or simply Baal (1 Chron. xiii. 6).
"The strongest proof, however, that the worship of Baal went
hand in hand with that of J.H.V.H. and existed as lawful worship till
David's time is the fact that the name Baal occurs in several proper
names. Among others in those of the sons of Saul and David, viz.,
Eshbaal, Meribaal, Baalyahad. The Compiler o f the Books of Samuel,
who disliked this, changed these names into Ishbosheth, Mephiboseth,
Elyadah, but in parallel passages of the Chronicles the original names
are preserved." *
Dr. Oort attacks this as "extravagant." He points out
that the passage in Amos mentions not one but three objects of
worship, a tent, a Chiun, and a star. He concludes that there is no
proof at all that Chiun had anything to do with the planet Saturn. In
writing thus confidently he little expected a bolt from the blue.
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"Bhavânî
(Durgâ) now demands our attention, and in this character I suppose
the wife of Mahâdeva to be as well the Juno Cinxia or Lucina of the
Romans(called also by them Diana Solvizona, and by the Greeks Ilithyia),
as Venus herself, not the Idalian queen of laughter and jollity . . .
but Venus Urania, so luxuriantly painted by Lucretius, and so properly
invoked by him at the opening of a poem on nature; Venus presiding
over generation, and on this account exhibited sometimes of both sexes
(an union very common in the Indian sculptures), as in her bearded
statue at Rome, in the images perhaps called Mermathena, and of those
figures of her which had the form of a conical marble "for the
reason of which figure we are left," says Tacitus, "in the
dark." The reason appears too clearly in the temples and
paintings of Hindustan, where it never seems to have entered into the
heads of the legislators or people that anything natural could be
offensively obscene, a singularity which pervades all their writings
and conversation, but is no proof of depravity in their morals. Both
Plato and Cicero speak of Eros or the Heavenly Cupid as the son of
Venus and Jupiter, which proves that the monarch of Olympus and the
goddess of Fecundity were connected as Mahâdeva and Bhavânî. (Works
Vol. III., p. 367). 
