Although at this time in their history, Apollo the sun-god was the Deity worshipped in Greece and in Ireland, still both nations honored Latona his mother. The same as in the mother country (Persia, or Phoenicia), the oracles, or sybils of Ireland, had prophesied a "Savior," and three hundred years before Greek emissaries visited that country, its people, through the preaching of Eastern missionaries, had substituted for the worship of Latona and Apollo that of the new solar incarnation—the third son of Zarathustra, whose appearance had been heralded by a star.
The identity of the symbols used by the early people of Ireland who were sun worshippers, and those employed in that country for ages after the Romish Church had usurped the ecclesiastical authority, has been a subject for much comment. After describing the peculiar form of the early Christian Churches and the attention paid to the placing of the windows which were to admit the sun's rays, Smedley says: "It is possible, in an age of allegory and figures, this combination and variety expressed some sacred meaning with which we are unacquainted at present."
The similarity observed in the sacred festivals and religious seasons of the ancient inhabitants of Ireland and those of the early Christians, the extent to which large stone crosses, lighted candles, the yule log and the various other symbols belonging to fertility, or sun worship, were retained by Christianity, furnish strong evidence of the fact that the latter system is but part and parcel of the former.
CHAPTER XVI. STONES OR COLUMNS AS THE DEITY.
"Throughout all the world, the first object of idolatry seems to have been a plain unwrought stone, placed in the ground as an emblem of the generative or procreative powers of Nature."(157)
157) Celtic Druids, ch. vi., p. 209.
In the language of symbolism the upright stone prefigures either a man, reproductive energy, or a god, all of which at a certain stage in the human career had come to mean one and the same thing; namely, the Creator.
In the earlier ages of male worship, upright stones as emblems of the Deity were plain unwrought shafts, but in process of time they began to be carved into the form of a man—a man who usually represented the ruler or chief of the people, and who, as he was the source of all power and wisdom, was supposed by the ignorant masses to be an incarnation of the sun. Thus arose the spiritual power of monarchs, or the "divine right of kings."
Wherever obelisks, columns, pillars, attenuated spires, upright stones or crosses at the intersection of roads are found, they always appear as sacred monuments, or as symbols of the Lingham god.