To this ascription of this learned traveller I most fully, most heartily respond. Pagoda is a name invented by the Portuguese, from the Persian “Peutgheda,” meaning a temple of idols, in which they supposed them to abound, but which in reality were only so many figures or symbols of the “principle of truth,” the “spirit of wisdom,” the “supreme essence,” and other attributes of the Godhead, which, I believe, they in a great measure spiritually recognised. Those structures, therefore, as the very word implies, had no manner of relation to the sacred fire, but they had to the sun and moon, the supposed authors of generation and nutrition, of which fire was only the corrupt emblem; and the different forms of their constructural terminations, similar to those elsewhere described by Maundrell, some being pointed, and some being truncated, harmonises most aptly with the radial and hemispherical representations of the two celestial luminaries, as well as with that organ of human procreation which we shall hereafter more particularly identify. These are the two Baals dwelt so largely upon in the Scriptures—Baal masculine, the sun, and Baal feminine, the moon, from both of which the Hindoos derive their fabulous origin. Indeed it was from their extreme veneration for the “queen of night” that they obtained their very name; Hindoo meaning, in the Sanscrit language, the moon; and accordingly we find among them Hindoo-buns, that is, children of the moon, as we do Surage-buns, children of the sun, the other parent of their fanciful extraction.
Here then, methinks, we have at once a clue to the character of those Round Towers so frequent throughout the East, of whose history, however, the Orientals are as ignorant as we are here of our “rotundities.” Caucasus abounds in those columnar fanes, and it must not be forgotten that Caucasus has been claimed as the residence of our ancestors. On Teric banks, hard by, there is a very beautiful and lofty one as like as possible to some of ours. The door is described as twelve feet from the ground, level and rather oblong in its form. Lord Valentia was so struck with the extraordinary similitude observable between some very elegant ones which he noticed in Hindostan and those in this country, that he could not avoid at once making the comparison. The inhabitants, he observes, paid no sort of regard to those venerable remains, but pilgrims from afar, and chiefly from Jynagaur, adhering to their old religion, used annually to resort to them as the shrines of their ancient worship. Yet in the ceremonies there performed we see no evidence of their appropriation to the sacred fire—however tradition may have ascribed them as once belonging to the Ghebres! Franklin mentions some he has seen at Nandukan, as do other writers in other sites. In short, all through the East they are to be met with, and yet all about them is obscurity, doubt, and mystery, a proof at once of the antiquity of their date, and of their not being receptacles for fire, which, if the fact, could be there no secret.
Yes, I verily believe, and I will as substantially establish, that they were, what has already been affirmed, in reference to those in Ireland, viz. temples in honour of the sun and moon, the procreative causes of general fecundity, comprising in certain instances, like them, also the additional and blended purposes of funeral cemeteries and astronomical observatories. The Septuagint interpreters well understood their nature when rendering the “high place of Baal”[86] by the Greek στηλη του βααλ, or Pillar of Baal, that is, the pillar consecrated to the sun; while the ancient Irish themselves, following in the same train, designated those structures Bail-toir, that is, the tower of Baal, or the sun, and the priest who attended them, Aoi Bail-toir, or superintendent of Baal’s tower. Neither am I without apprehension but that the name “Ardmore,” which signifies “the great high place,” and where a splendid specimen of those Sabian edifices is still remaining, was in direct reference to that religious column; but this en passant.
In the sepulchral opinion I am not a little fortified by the circumstance of there being found at Benares pyramids corresponding in all respects, save that of size, to those in Egypt, having also subterranean passages beneath them, which are said to extend even for miles together. A column also, besides a sphinx’s head, which has been discovered not long since in digging amid the ruins of an ancient and unknown city, on the banks of the Hypanis, bearing an inscription which was found to differ on being compared with Arabic, Persia, Turkish, Chinese, Tartar, Greek, and Roman letters; but bore “a manifest and close similarity with the characters observed by Denon on several of the mummies of Egypt,” gives strength to the idea of the identity of the Egyptian religion with that of the Indians, as it does to the identity of destination of their respective pyramids.
CHAPTER VI.
Now if there be any one point of Irish antiquity which our historians insist upon more than another, it is that of our ancestral connection with the Egyptian kings. In all their legends Egypt is mixed up—in all their romances Egypt stands prominent, which certainly could not have been so universal without something at least like foundation, and must, therefore, remove anything like surprise at the affinity our ancient religion bore, in many respects, to theirs, since they were both derived from the same common origin.
I have already intimated my decided belief of the application of the Egyptian pyramids to the combined purposes of religion and science. The department of science to which I particularly referred was astronomy, the cultivation of which was inseparably involved in all their religious rites; for despite of the reverence which the Egyptians seemed to pay to crocodiles, bulls, and others of the brute creation, in those they only figured forth the several attributes, all infinite, in the divinity; as their worship, like that of the ancient Irish, was purely planetary, or Sabian.
The Indians too have images of the elephant, horse, and other such animals, chiselled out with the most studious care, and to all intents and purposes appear to pay them homage; but, if questioned on the subject, they will tell you that in the sagacity of the former, and the strength and swiftness of the latter, they only recognise the superior wisdom and might of the All-good and All-great One, and the rapidity with which his decrees are executed by his messengers.