“The deity Harì,” says an inscription at Budda-gaya, in India, “the lord and possessor of all, appeared in this ocean of natural beings at the close of the Devapara and beginning of the Cali Yug. He who is omnipresent and everlastingly to be contemplated, the Supreme Being, the Eternal One, the Divinity worthy of mankind, appeared here, with a portion of His divine nature.”[361]
There is no term so vernacular in the Irish language as that of Budh-gaye. It is familiar to the ears of every smatterer in letters; and is in the mouth of every cowherd, from Cape Clear to the Giants’ Causeway. Neither class has, however, had so much as a glimpse of what it means: nor did they busy themselves much in the pursuit, but acquiesced in that example of commendable resignation once practised by Strabo—when he failed to ascertain anything about the Cabiri—by declaring that “the name was mysterious!”
A great personage, however, who was not only in his habits wise, but was in himself wisdom, has affirmed, that “there is nothing covered that shall not be revealed; nor hid that shall not be known.”[362] And as every sentence recorded as emanating from His lips has with me a value more than what could serve to illustrate a momentary topic, I flatter myself that the result of the confidence, thus humbly inspired, will be additionally verified in the instance before us.
Budh-gaye, then of the Irish, or Budha-gaya of the Hindoos, means Phallus[363] telluris, i.e. the generativeness of the earth, or the earth’s prolific principle. This I have before demonstrated to have been the object of adoration to the ancients; and have furthermore shown, that one of the individuals, in whom this idea was personified, had suffered crucifixion as a mediator for sin.
A new disclosure suggests itself from this. Budh and Phallus being synonymous, if you add Gaye to each, then Budh-gaye and Gaye-phallus will be identical. But as the character who embodied the abstract virtue of the former had been crucified, his name came to stand, not only for that abstract virtue, but also for a cross,[364] or a crucified man; and of course, Gaye-phallus, its equivalent, represented the same ideas.
Now, as well the primary as secondary meaning of those two words was liable to misconstruction; and they were sure to obtain such from ignorance and from depravity. The pure and the sublime emotions, which the religiousness of the prolific principle had comprehended, were perverted by malice into sensuality and debauchery; while the idea of a man crucified, however innocent of charge, could not be separated, by grovelling and servile dispositions, from the ordinary accompaniments of contempt and of crime.
Hence Budh-gaye and Gaye-phallus, after a succession of ages, when their proper acceptation was forgotten, were remembered only in their perverted sense. And accordingly we observe, that, when a Roman Emperor who had been brought up a priest in the East, assumed, on his being appointed to the Roman sceptre, the title of Helio-ga-balus, and thereby invested himself in all the attributes of Gaye-phallus, or Budh-gaye, that is, in other words, as the Vicegerent of the Sun, the licentiousness of his life, and the profligacy of his demeanour, having rendered him obnoxious to his subjects, they amputated the prefix of his Solar majesty, and branded him with the scorn of Ga-balus.
The disdain intended in this latter abbreviation is now, therefore, already solved. Gaye-phallus, for sound sake, having been made Ga-phallus, this latter was still further—by reason of the commutability of the letters ph and b—reduced into Ga-balus.
When the temple of Serapis, at Alexandria, was destroyed, we are told by Sozomen, that the monogram of Christ was discovered beneath the foundation. And, though neither party knew how to account for the sign, yet was it pleaded alike by the Gentiles as by the Christians, in support of the heavenliness of their respective religions.
The early Roman fathers, very pious but very illiterate men, unable to close their eyes against the proofs of the priority of the cross to the era of the advent, did not scruple to assign it to the malicious foreknowledge of the prince of the lower world.[365]