“As an old serpent casts his scaly vest,
Wreaths in the sun in youthful glory dress’d;
So, when Alcides’ mortal mould resign’d,
His better part enlarg’d, and grew refin’d;
August his visage shone; almighty Jove
In his swift car his honoured offspring drove:
High o’er the hollow clouds the coursers fly,
And lodge the hero in the starry sky.”[244]
CHAPTER XVII.
“Chilly as the climate of the world is growing—artificial and systematic as it has become—and unwilling as we are to own the fact, there are few amongst us but who have had those feelings once strongly entwined around the soul, and who have felt how dear was their possession when existing, and how acute the pang which their severing cost. Fewer still were the labyrinths unclosed in which their affections lay folded, but in whose hearts the name of woman would be found, although the rough collision with the world may have partially effaced it.”
This instinctive influence, which the daughters of Eve universally exercise over the sons of Adam, is not more irresistible in the present day, than it proved in the case of their great progenitor. Love, however disguised—and how could it be more beautifully than by the scriptural penman?—love, in its literal and all-absorbing seductiveness, was the simple but fascinating aberration couched under the figure of the forbidden apple.
All the illusions of fancy resolve themselves into this sweet abyss. The dreams of commentators may, therefore, henceforward be spared; the calculations of bookmakers, on this topic, dispensed with: whatever be my fate, one consolation, at least, awaits me, that in addition to the Towers, I shall have expounded the mysteries of Genesis.
In the Irish language, which, as being that of ancient Persia, or Iran, must be the oldest in the world, and of which the Hebrew, brought away by Abraham from Ur of the Chaldees,[245] is but a distant and imperfect branch,—well, in this primordial tongue, the nursery at once of science, of religion, and of philosophy, all mysteries, also, have been matured: and it will irrefutably manifest itself, that in it, exclusively, was woven that elegantly-wrought veil, of colloquial illusiveness, which shrouds the nature of our first parents’ downfall.
How, think you, was this accomplished? By assigning to certain terms a twofold signification, of which one represented a certain passion, quality, or virtue, and the other its sensible index. To the latter alone had the multitude any access; while the sanctity of the former was guarded against them by all the terrors of religious interdicts.
For instance, in the example before us, Budh, or Fiodh,—which is the same thing,—means, primarily, lingam, and secondarily, a tree. Of these, the latter, which was the popular acceptation, was only the outward signal of the former, which was the inward mystified passion, comprehended only by the initiated. When, therefore, we are told that Eve was desired not to taste of the tree, i.e. Budh, we are to understand that she was prohibited what Budh meant in its true signification, viz. lingam: in other words, that when cautioned against the Budh, it was not an insensible tree, its symbolic import, that was meant thereby, but the vital phallus, its animate prototype:—that, in short, “missis ambagibus,” the word Budh was to be taken, not figuratively, but literally.[246]