ansata, or key in form of a cross. This key is evidently the linga, and intimates, like the compound linga, that the double power of generation and production is vested in the divine personage entitled to bear this distinctive symbol.

The Theogony of Hesiod testifies of the contests between the advocates of the male and female principles. e Ouranus, the god of aur or fire, was hated by his consort Gaia or earth, for his cruelty to his own offspring. She urged them to avenge her wrongs. Saturn, being supplied by her with the means, emasculated the tyrant god, and asserted the pre-eminence of the female principle; which was worshipped in Greece till the sect of Jupiter changed the established religion, and gave an apparent superiority to their god and the male principle, leaving only an optional pre-eminence to the female principle, exhibited in the mysteries of the Ceres of Eleusis.

The pre-eminence of the female goddess Ket over the male deities of the Celtic pantheon is so well known, that the names of male deities, that of her son Beil or Apollo excepted, are rarely noticed or regarded. The contests by which she obtained the superiority over the males, were doubtless recorded in the thousands of verses or sentences which were learned with great labour by the Celtic neophytes, but which perished with them whose remembrances were the only registers of what may be called the Celtic code.

In the worship of priapic gods, licentiousness was a duty, notwithstanding the symbols were only intended to be significant of the power of the Deity exercised in the dispensation of animal life. The instance of Zimri and Cosbi has been given above; others have been also noticed, which shew the reason why, when the Apostles in the first Council held at Jerusalem exempted the Gentiles from the observance of the Law of Moses,f they required them to abstain from fornication; so called from the fornices, the secret or perhaps

e Hesiod. Theog. v. 154, &c.

f Acts xv. 20.

subterranean recesses near the temples. Some of the Celtic rites in Britain were accompanied by practices of the strangest indecency; and similar usages, attended by excesses in women and wine, prevail among some of the sects into which the disciples of the Sastra are divided. It is true that the votaries of the most indecent rites do not readily acknowledge their worship to all, especially to Europeans; but with their own countrymen little secrecy can be necessary, when it is notorious that female prostitutes, called Bayaderes, or dancing girls, form a part of the establishment of every temple of eminence, and the wages of their licentiousness are regarded as an important article in the revenues of the place.

The author of the Celtic Researches, on the authority of a Gaulish poet, mentions an idol commonly denominated the Gallic, but more properly the Celtic Tau. He describes it in the following terms: "This Tau was the symbol of the Druidical Jupiter. It consisted of a huge giant oak, deprived of all its branches except only two large ones, which, though cut off and separated, were suspended from the top of its trunk like suspended arms." This idol was in reality a cross, the same in form as the linga. It was on a very magnificent scale; a proof of the rudeness of the people, but also of their zeal and religious reverence of the Creator as the great source of animal life. Had the cross on which the Redeemer died any such symbolical import, is a question which may be asked, but which even conjecture may hesitate in giving an answer.

On an eminence not far distant from the high hill of Bardon, and nearly in the centre of Charnwood Forest in the county of Leicester, grows an aged oak, called the Copt Oak, which, from several extraordinary circumstances, may be believed to have been an object held sacred by the British Druids, and to have really been a Celtic idol called a Tau.

Plin. Hist. Nat. lib. xxii. c. 1.

h Asiatic Researches, vol. vii. No. 8, p. 280. 'Davies, Celt. Res. p. 143.

Such idols were formed, as above stated, by cutting away the branches of a gigantic oak, and affixing a beam, forming a cross with the bare trunk. The epithet copt, or copped, may be derived from the Celtic cop, a head, and evidently indicates that the tree had been headed and reduced to the state of a bare trunk. That it was gigantic when entire is evident from an actual measurement in its present state. The remains of the trunk, which is twenty feet high, the height proper for the Tau, shew that the circumference at the ground was, or rather is, (for by boring the earth an accurate measurement has been made,) twenty-four feet; at the height of ten feet the girt is twenty, giving a diameter of near seven feet, or more than two yards.

If the tree ever formed a Celtic Tau, it must be more than two thousand years old. The present state suggests the idea that this is very possible. This vast tree is now reduced to a mere shell, between two and three inches only in thickness, being about two-thirds of the original circumference, perforated by several openings, and alive only in about one-fourth of the shell; bearing small branches, but such as could not have grown when the tree was entire: then it must have had branches of a size not less than an oak of ordinary dimensions. This is evident from one of the openings in the upper part of the shell of the trunk, exactly such as a decayed branch would produce. These remains stand just without the bounding wall of the area or consecrated yard of the chapel newly built, and called the Copt Oak Chapel. There is no surrounding wall or fence, nor are there any appearances of such inclosure. It is very probable that when first consecrated it was surrounded by an open glade in a grove, which constituted a Celtic temple; such grove has, however, been felled, yet the Copt Oak has been spared, but it stands in the vicinity of a wood, once part of the supposed grove, and not one hundred yards distant.

The ancient and long continued celebrity of the Copt

Oak accords with the opinion of its former sacredness. It was, before the inclosure, as writes the animated and accurate Potter, the historian of the Forest of Charnwood, one of the three places at which Swanimotes were held, always in the open air, for the regulation of rights and claims on the Forest; and persons have been known even in late times to have attended such motes. The active-minded historian above named observes, "At this spot, it may be under this tree, Edric the Forester is said to have harangued his forces against the Norman invasion; and here too, in the Parliamentary troubles of 1642, the Earl of Stamford assembled the trained bands of the district." These facts mark the Copt Oak extraordinary, and shew, that notwithstanding the lapse of two thousand years, the trunk was at that distant period a sacred structure, a Celtic idol; and that it is illustrative of antiquarian records. At all events the Copt Oak is a venerable vegetable ruin, such as may not be equalled by any other, in any county of this kingdom.

These statements concerning the sexual character assigned to pillars, invite the following remarks. First, that the priapic import given to the symbolical pillar was an idolatrous invention, destitute of any sound principle, and always abhorred by the orthodox worshippers of the Deity, the true sons of God. Secondly, that when received as a sacred symbol, the advocates for the use differed widely as to its proper import, whereby the symbol never acquired the solidity of truth. Thirdly, the use of the symbol even when adopted, was only partial, and did not by any means supersede the more ancient and general reference to the primal high place and the mundane system. It can hardly be said to have been generally adopted, for a priapic pantheon was never formed. The priapic use of the symbol was an excrescence of idolatry. These reasons clearly prove that the sexual import given by idolaters to the pillar, is an anomaly altogether arbitrary, and does not in the slightest degree weaken,

much less overthrow the general principles on which the true import of columnar symbolism depends.

These questions having been discussed with as much brevity as seemed possible, the attention now reverts to the history of the true symbolical import of sacred upright stones and pillars.

Aversion to the use of upright stones and pillars as idols significant of the actual presence of the Deity, was not found in India alone, neither was it very readily adopted in any country; its introduction was certainly resisted by the Phoenicians. The theology of that people, recorded by Sanchoniatho, of the age of the Assyrian Semiramis, and early in the fifteenth century anterior to the christian era, begins with the history of the creation of the earth; which, though so figurative as to appear strange, yet is such as an experienced geologist might reconcile with the Mosaic history of that great event. In an age long anterior to the birth of the Grecian Saturn, that is, before the establishment of his worship, there lived in Tyre a personage (whether figurative or real is of little importance) named Usoüs, who taught the art of navigation to that afterwards commercial people. This Usoüs set up and dedicated two pillars to the elements of air and fire, and worshipped them by offering the blood of the animals which he took in hunting. After the death of this Usoüs and his brethren, between whom and him strife had prevailed during the whole of their lives, the succeeding generation consecrated upright poles and pillars in honour of the elements above mentioned, and observed certain days as festivals every year, in reverence of their power.k

The following inferences may be drawn from this record. The worship of pillars was not introduced into Tyre without much opposition even by brothers, figuratively signifying persons previously entertaining the same religious opinions

k Euseb. Ev. Præp. lib. ii. c. 10.