The sun and moon were the great objects of religious veneration to fallen man in the ancient world. Each country assumed a suitable form to their propensities and peculiarities; but all agreed in centering the essence of their zeal upon those resplendent orbs to whom they were indebted for so many common benefits. Those mysteries of faith to which the “initiated” alone had access, and which were disguised in the habiliments of symbols and of veils, were neither more nor less than representative forms of generation and production. These were the theme which made the canopy of the firmament to ring with their songs; and these the spring which gave vigour and elasticity to those graceful displays which, under the name of dances, typified the circular and semicircular rotations of those bright objects of their regard.[120]
The Eleusinian[121] rites themselves were essentially of this kind; for though the benefits of agriculture were said to be chiefly there commemorated, this after all resolves itself into the above: for as the process of the earth’s bearing is similar to that of our own species, and indeed of all creatures that rest upon her,—no seed bringing forth fruit until, as the apostle has affirmed,[122] it first dies,—the representation of this miracle of nature’s vicissitudes led the mind to the contemplation of general fecundity. And hence the culture of the ground, and the propagation of human beings, being both viewed in the same light, and sometimes even named by the same epithet, viz. tillage, were inculcated no less as beneficial exercises than as religious ordinances. Did a doubt remain as to the accuracy of this connection between the worship of the ancients and their sexual correspondence, it would be more than removed by attending to the import of the terms by which they mystified those celebrations, and which, with the sanctity attached to the parts themselves, will come consecutively under our review. One of them, however, is too apposite to be omitted here, and that is the term by which they designated a certain ceremony still practised on the coast of Guinea, and which neither the blandishments of artifice nor the terrors of menace could ever prevail upon them to divulge. This ceremony they call Belli-Paaro. The meaning they assign to it is regeneration, or the act of reviving from death to a new state of existence; and when we see that the name itself is but an inflection of the Baal-Peor of the Scriptures, the Baal-Phearagh of our forefathers, and the Copulative deity of the amative universe, it will not be hard to dive into its character, though so shrouded in types.
But the Budhists, not content with this ordinary veneration, or with paying homage in secret to that symbol of production which all other classes of idolators equally, though privately, worshipped,—I mean the Lingam,—thought they could never carry their zeal sufficiently far, unless they erected it into an idol of more than colossal magnitude—and those idols were the Round Towers. Hence the name Budhism, which I thus define, viz. that species of idolatry which worshipped Budh (i.e. the Lingam), as the emblem of Budh (i.e. the Sun)—Budh signifying, indiscriminately, Sun and Lingam.
Such was the whole substance of this philosophical creed, which was not—as may have been imagined—a ritual of sensuality, but a manual of devotion, as simple in its exercise as it was pious in its intent—a Sabian veneration and a symbolical gratitude. I shall now give a summary of their moral code, couched in the following Pentalogue, as presented by Zaradobeira, chief Rahan at Ava, to a Catholic bishop, who expressed a wish some years ago to be favoured with a brief outline of their tenets; it is this:—
1. Thou shalt not kill any animal—from the meanest insect up to man himself.
2. Thou shalt not steal.
3. Thou shalt not commit adultery.
4. Thou shalt not tell anything false.
5. Thou shalt not drink any intoxicating liquor.
The extension of this first commandment from the crime of homicide to the deprivation of life of any breathing existence, arose from their doctrine of the transmigration of souls, which they believed should continue ever in action, and, after release from one tenement of earthly configuration, enter into some other of a different species and order.