Here I cannot do better than set the reader right as to the rendering of a subsequent text, which says that “God set a mark upon Cain lest any one meeting him should kill him”; nor can I recollect another instance wherein human ingenuity, while struggling after truth, has been more directly instrumental in the dissemination of error.
One would suppose that the setting “a mark upon” a person, instead of allaying his fears of being molested by those meeting him, should, on the contrary, aggravate them, from its extraordinary aspect. Besides, in the innumerable fantasies which commentators have conjured up as specifications of this “mark,” no vestige whatsoever has been yet traced on the human form to justify the inference.
We are obliged, therefore, at last, to recur to the truth, and it fortunately happens that this is accessible by only translating the original as it should properly be, thus, viz. “And God gave Cain a sign lest any meeting him, should kill him.”
The only question now is what that sign was, which God gave to Cain? And to resolve this, we have but to bethink ourselves of his dereliction,—namely, the offering worship to Budh, i.e. nature, or the sun: and his refusing to sacrifice, in consequence of such devotion, anything endowed with life, of which Budh, i.e. Lingam,—according to the double acceptation of the word,—was the type, as it is also the sign of Budh, the sun,—and we have infallibly developed the answer and the secret.
Stamping the nature of his crime, and at the same time indicating that, in the now fallen condition of man, this badge of his revolt would be rather a security against trespass, and a passport to acceptance than an inducement to annoyance, God shows to Cain, as much in derision as in anger, the substantial image of that deity to which he had but just before done homage, viz. Budh; and thereupon, Cain goes, and, on “the land a wanderer,” he erects this sign into a deified Round Tower.
Perhaps the reader would like to have some collateral proofs for these startling interpretations. I shall give them, as convincing as the solution itself is irrefutable and true.
The Maypole festival, which the Rev. Mr. Maurice has so satisfactorily shown to be but the remains of an ancient institution of India and Egypt (he should have added Persia, and, indeed, placed it first), was, in fact, but part and parcel of this Round Tower worship. May the 1st is the day on which its orgies were celebrated; nor is the custom, even now, confined to the British Isles alone, but as naturally prevails universally throughout the East, whence it emanated of old to us. Lest, too, there should be any mistake as to the object of adoration, we are told in the second volume of the Asiatic Researches, in a letter from Colonel Pearce, that Bhadani, i.e. Astarte, i.e. Luna, i.e. Venus, i.e. “Mollium mater cupidinum,” was the goddess in whose honour those festivities were raised.
Now as astronomy was connected with all the ceremonies of the ancients, the sun’s entrance into Taurus, which in itself bespeaks the vigour of reanimated productiveness at the vernal equinox, was the symbol in the heavens associated by the worshippers with this allegorical gaiety. But this event takes place a little earlier every year than the preceding one, by reason of what astronomers call the precession, so that at present it occurs at a season far more advanced than it did at first.
Theory and observation both concur in establishing that 72 years is the period which the equinox will take to precede 1 degree of the 360 into which the heavens are divided,—2160 years 30 degrees, that is, one sign,—and 25,920, 360 degrees, or the twelve signs of the Zodiac. If, therefore, we compute at this rate the precise year at which the vernal equinox must have coincided with the 1st of May,—which must certainly have been the fact at the origin of the institution,—it will prove to have been about the four thousandth before the Christian era, which exactly corresponds with the time of Cain, and irrefutably confirms the origin which I have assigned to the worship of the Budh, Tower, Phallus, or Maypole.
Mr. Maurice’s position deserves to be remarked. “I have little doubt, therefore,” says he, “that May-day, or at least the day on which the sun entered Taurus, has been immemorially kept as a sacred festival from the creation of the earth and man, originally intended as a memorial of that auspicious period and that momentous event.”