Public feasts were the scene for the delivery of those discourses. They found their way also to Rome, but the spirituality of Redemption not going hand-in-hand with its doctrine, or not duly comprehended, if accompanying, the joyousness of hope, was there sunk into the licentiousness of enjoyment, and the innocence of mirth and of moral hilarity was superseded by the uproar of riot and of vice! Such were the Saturnalia.
How different was their celebration in our “Sacred Ireland!” The very letters of the epithet, by which our forefathers had solemnised them, show the spirituality of purpose which actuated their zeal. Nullog was that epithet—it is compounded of nua, new; and log (for bullog), a belly, meaning regeneration, or the putting aside of the old leaven of sin, and the assumption of the new investiture of righteousness, by justification.
As everything, however, in their religious procedure was transacted by symbols, so, in this instance, they did not content themselves with the inner consciousness of a new birth,[400] but the most go through the outer form of it by typification; and for this end it was that they excavated those apertures in the bodies of rocks, which I have noticed in [page 314], as calling forth, from ignorance, the animadversion of the devil’s yonies, in order that, by passing themselves through them, they might represent the condition of one issuing, through the womb, to a new scope of life.[401]
A nobler method of symbolisation, and confined solely to the initiated, was that which characterised the construction of their subterranean temples. Here the sublimity of their worship breaks out in all the grandeur and the majesty of awe.[402] The narrowness of the entrance, never larger than the girth of the ordinary human body, pourtrayed, as well the circular passage in their regenerating type,[403] as the circumvention of temptation by which the faithful are ever beset;[404] while the model of the cross, which regulates their architecture withinside, attests the mystery and the form of their master’s death.
The Mithratic temple, at New Grange, is exactly so constructed. After squeezing yourself, with much labour, through a long emblematic gallery, you arrive at a circular room, or rather an irregular polygon or octagon;[405] whence, at measured intervals, three other apartments diverge, forming, with the inleading gut, a perfect cross; and presenting, altogether, to a susceptible mind, the most solemn combination of symbolical mysteries![406]
I wonder why do not our moderns confer these subterraneous cruciform edifices upon the industry of the early Christians, as they have striven to claim for them the corresponding structures above ground! and without half the probability of success! For if it may be stated, that the crucifixions upon the towers were an interpolation, with a view to Christianise what before was devoted to Paganism, no one, at all events, would maintain that the monks had gone down into the bowels of the earth, and after ejecting the inmates of old Alma Mater, converted their tabernacles into a magical cross!
Nay, a greater difficulty would still attach to this adventure. The Pagodas[407] of Benares and Mathura, the two principal ones in all India, are cruciformly built! and, in order to make both worlds harmonise, the advocates for the monks, or rather their beliers, would have to transport their mechanics to those regions also, and turn upside down, and sideways, and every way, whatever was the shape of the original structures, until they moulded them at last into this mysterious cross!
Some blame, however, would seem attachable to the superintendents of this vision: and it is that, while imprinting this mark over the head of the principal figure in the cave, or Mithratic temple, at Elephanta,[408] they neglected to demolish the Lingam, appertaining to the previous worship; and which actually presents itself but a little from it in the front!
To be grave. There was nothing more natural than that those different symbols should be thus united. I have shown that in the various copies of our annals, the Round Towers, or overground temples, are designated by the name of Fidh-nemead, the meaning of which I have elucidated to be, the consecrated Lingams: the Mithratic caves, or underground temples, their correspondents, it was to be expected, should be known by a suitable denomination; and, accordingly, you will find this very one at New Grange mentioned in the Chronicon Scotorum by the title of Fiodh Aongusa; that is, the Mysterious Cavern of Buddh; while the crucifixions upon the former, and the cruciform shape of the latter, are the reverential memorials of his atoning dissolution.
The mysteries celebrated within the recesses of those caverns were precisely of that character which are called Freemasonic, or Cabiric. The signification of this latter epithet is, as to written letters, a desideratum. Selden has missed it; so has Origen and Sophocles. Strabo, too, and Montfaucon, have been equally astray. Hyde was the only one who had any idea of its composition, when he declared “it was a Persian word somewhat altered from Gabri, or Guebri, and signifying fire-worshippers.”