Moon, the sacred cow, and the ship Argha which bore Siva or Iswara in CHAP. III. safety over the deluge: Isis is at once the Moon, the sacred cow, and the ship Argo into which Osiris was compelled to enter by Typhon or the diluvian ocean. In both cases the great mother is a ship: and that ship is circumstantially determined to be the Ark. 13. The ship-goddess was equally worshipped among the ancient Germans: for Tacitus informs us, that part of the Suevi sacrificed to Isis, and that her symbol was a galley. His language seems to imply, that she was venerated by that tribe under the very name of Isis; a circumstance, which might easily be accounted for, though certainly not in the manner suggested by the historian. He pronounces the worship to be manifestly of foreign origin but strangely conjectures such to be the case, because the figure of the galley proves it to have been brought from another coun try; just as if the worship of Isis could have been imported from Egypt into the heart of Germany by water. He is right no doubt in supposing that it was not the growth of this latter country: but the galley does not indicate the mode of its introduction; it was the symbol of the goddess herself. This was equally the case with the Indian Isi and with the Egyptian Isis: and, as for the ship-worship of Germany, instead of being brought by sea from Egypt, it was really brought by land from the mountains of upper India. The Suevi, like the other Teutonic tribes, were of Gothic or Scythic origin. Now the Goths or (as the Hindoos call them) Chasas migrated westward from the high land of Cashgar and Bokhara, that is to say, from the region of the sacred mount Meru; where the veneration of the ship Isi or Argha has long been firmly established. Hence, I think, there can be little doubt, but that the apparently Egyptian superstition, which attracted the notice of Tacitus, was really brought by the Gothic colonists from the Indo-Scythic mountains of Cashgar. He is not indeed mistaken in declaring that the Suevi worshipped Isis; for Isi and Isis are clearly the very same goddess: but the Germans, as must necessarily be inferred from their oriental origin, received the rites of the mystic ship not from Egypt, but from the east'. Pag. Idol. Tacit. de mor. Germ. c. 9. VOL. III. D BOOK V. The Isiac galley of the Suevi is introduced into the Edda under the name of the ship of the hero-gods. In this vessel they are described as sailing together upon the ocean, precisely in the same manner as the Egyptians and Hindoos set their deities afloat in a ship: and we are told, that, although it was so large that all the gods might sit in it at their ease, yet they could at any time reduce it to so small a size that it might be carried in the pocket'. The origin of such a fable may perhaps be conjectured without much difficulty. The literal ship of the hero-gods or deified patriarchs was indeed of an immense size: but the model of it, which was used in the Mysteries and which often in form resembled the lunar crescent, was not unfrequently so diminutive as to be a mere toy. Thus, in the Druidical superstition, the sacred boat, as we learn from Taliesin and the Autun monument, was a small lunette made of glass, which an attendant priest bore in his hand: yet in this very boat of glass the primeval Arthur and his seven companions are feigned to have been preserved, when all the rest of mankind perished by the waters of the deluge. 4. Precisely the same mode of symbolizing the great mother prevailed among the Celtic tribes. As the galley was the hieroglyphic of Isis among the Suevi; so the glass boat, in which eight persons were saved at the time of the flood, represented the goddess Ked or Ceridwen or Sidee among the ancient Britons, Thus Taliesin, describing his initiation into the Mysteries which scenically exhibited the several events connected with the deluge, tells us, that Ceridwen, within whose womb he had been inclosed, and from whom as an imitative aspirant he had been born again, swelled out like a ship upon the waters, received him into a dark receptacle, set sail with him, and carried him back into the sea of Dylan. If we inquire who this Dylan was, we are informed, that he was the son of the ocean: and that, when the floods. came forth from heaven, and when the fountains of the great deep were broken up, he floated securely upon the surface of the waters in the very Edda Fab. xxii. Talies. Preidden-Annwn apud Davies's Mythol. p. 522. ship, within which, as a form of the goddess Ceridwen, the bard repre- CHAP. III. sents himself as having been mystically enclosed. Dylan therefore is manifestly Noah: whence his ship must be the Ark. But the ship of Dylan is a form of the goddess Ceridwen: consequently, Ceridwen or the great mother must inevitably be viewed as a personification of the ship of Noah. 1 Agreeably to this conclusion, we are told, that Ked or Ceridwen was the daughter of Menwyd, the Menu of Hindostan and the Menes of Egypt: but at the same time we are taught very unequivocally, that her birth from that ancient personage, who is the same as the oceanic Dylan, was a figurative, not a literal, one. He was her father only in the sense, in which an artist is the father of the work produced by him; he was her father, at the period of a great effusion or deluge; because he formed the curvatures or ribs of the ship named Ked, which then, bounding over the waves, passed in safety through the dale of the grievous waters*. 5. The Ceridwen of the Celts was the same character as the Ceres or Demeter of the classical mythologists: for we are assured by Artemidorus, that, in an island close to Britain, Ceres and Proserpine were venerated with rites similar to the Orgies of Samothrace3. But this ancient testimony exactly agrees with such remains of Celtic theology as have been handed down to us: for the Britons, as we learn from the writings of the bards, worshipped two goddesses, who had the same attributes, and who stood in the same degree of relationship to each other, as Ceres and Proserpine. Hence the Celtic Ceridwen is doubly identified with the classical Ceres and this identification, united with the peculiarity of her own character as a ship-goddess, further proves, that she is the same also as the navicular Isis or Isi of Egypt and Hindostan. Ceridwen, Isis, and Isi, then being each the same as Ceres, and each moreover being literally the Ship of the deluge, we shall naturally be led to expect, that either directly or indirectly the mystic navicular character is also sustained by the classical goddess. Such, accordingly, we shall find to be the case. 'Talies. Cad Godden apud Davies's Mythol. p. 100. ⚫ Davies's Mythol. p. 176, 568, 571. Comp. Asiat. Res. vol. i. p. 232, Strab. Geog. lib. iv. p. 198. BOOK V. By the Greek mythologists Ceres or Hippa is said to have received Bacchus into her womb and afterwards to have produced him again by a new and ineffable birth. But this god is also feigned: to have been exposed in an ark at sea and to have been wonderfully born out of a floating Moon. His quitting the ark therefore is the same as his being born out of the floating Moon: and, since Ceres or Hippa is declared to be the Moon, his birth from the Moon is the same as his birth from Ceres. But the floating Moon is the ark, within which he was inclosed. Therefore Ceres or Hippa must likewise be the ark or ship of Bacchus'. Agreeably to this conclusion, we find her worshipped by the Phigalensians of Arcadia on a sacred hill, which they denominated the mountain of the olive. Her appearance was that of a woman with the head of a horse: and in the one hand she held a dolphin, and in the other a dove'. It is almost superfluous to remark, that, in the worship of the diluvian shipgoddess, the mountain of the olive is a transcript of mount Ararat, and that the dove is the dove of Noah. But we have a yet more direct testimony, that Ceres, like Isis and Isi and Ceridwen, was a personification of a ship. Pausanias mentions a picture, in which a priestess of Ceres was represented holding a boat upon her knees: and he explains the circumstance by observing, that it resembled those sacred boats which it was customary to make in honour of the goddess'. Now, since this custom prevailed among the Greeks, since Ceres is determined to be the same as Isis, and since a ship was a special symbol of the Egyptian divinity; it can scarcely be doubted, that the boat of Ceres and the ship of Isis were one and the same hieroglyphic, each being designed to represent the ark or floating Moon Theba or Argo, into which Osiris was compelled to enter by the fury of Typhon. 6. The Phrygian rites of Attis and Cybelè were of precisely the same description as those of Osiris and Isis: and no reasonable doubt can be entertained of the identity of the two goddesses. We find accordingly, that the mystic boat is equally characteristic of the Asiatic and of the Egyptian deity. Orph. Hymn. xlviii. Proc. in Plat. Tim. apud Orph. Fragm. p. 401. Julius Firmicus tells us, that, during the annual celebration of the Phry- CHAP. 11. gian Orgies, a pine-tree was cut down, and that the image of a young man was bound fast in the middle of it. The tree, it seems, was hollowed out, so as to resemble a boat: for he adds, that in the Mysteries of Isis a similar ceremony was observed; the trunk of a pine, during their celebration also, being dexterously excavated, and an image of Osiris made from the cuttings of the wood being inserted'. Now we know, that the image of Osiris was inclosed within an ark which exhibited the figure of a lunette. But Firmicus assures us, that the statue of Attis was similarly inclosed within the excavated trunk of a pine; and he represents the two ceremonies as being palpably the same. Hence it is manifest, that the excavated pine of the Phrygian goddess was a boat; and that in fact it was no other than the Argo or Theba or sacred ship of Isis. The fictitious parentage of Cybelè exactly accords with her navicular character. As the British Ceridwen is allegorically said to be the daughter of Menwyd, and as the Indian Ila or Ida or Isi is described as being the daughter of Menu who was preserved with seven companions in an ark: so the Phrygian Cybelè is feigned to be the offspring of a very ancient king of Lydia, whom Diodorus calls Meon, but whom Xanthus denominates Manes or Menes assigning to him for a consort one of the daughters of the Ocean. This Meon or Menes, the fabled husband of the seanymph, is the same as the Baal-Meon of Palestine, and as the Menes, Menu, and Menwyd, of Egypt, Hindostan, and Britain: while his oceanic wife is one character with his fabled daughter Cybelè, whom Macrobius and Firmicus rightly style the mother of the gods3. Cybelè in short stands to him in the very same double relationship of wife and daughter, that Ida does to Menu-Satyavrata: and in both cases the reason is still the same. Noah was the father of the diluvian Ship, because he built it: and he was its husband, because it was the mother of his children the younger Baalim or hero-gods. |