Serpent Worship and Other Essays

Rivers of religious life have a beginning, like other streams, and what are the sources to which man’s primitive faiths may be traced? The early “symbolic objects of man’s adoration” are arranged by General Forlong in the following order: First, Tree; 2nd, Phallic; 3rd, Serpent; 4th, Fire; 5th, Sun; 6th, Ancestral. The first “breathings of the human soul” were manifested under the sacred tree or grove, whose refreshing shade is so highly valued in the East. All nations, particularly the Aryan peoples, have considered tree-planting a sacred duty, and the grove was man’s first temple, “and became a sanctuary, asylum, or place of refuge, and as time passed on, temples came to be built in the sacred groves.”