526 Transactions. — Miscellaneous. 



tion, liowever shocking to ordinary view the subject be. That 

 the generative organs should ever have been deemed objects 

 worthy of adoration, and symbols of Deity, seems so marvellous 

 a thing to Europeans that a study of the peculiar phase of mind 

 which led to such a cult has always been approached with a 

 prejudice that has, in very many cases, amounted to a loath- 

 ing. While, on the one hand, the matter has been viewed as 

 a symptom of the terrible depravity and degeneracy of the 

 originally pure human mind ; on the other hand, by others, it 

 has been viewed as marking an infant and sensuous stage of 

 human speech, and human thought. That there is anything 

 occult or esoteric underlying such beliefs as tree-propped 

 heavens, or creation of life on the falling of stones that turn into 

 men, or of serpents talking to women, and suggestmg the tasting 

 of the fruit of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, seems 

 completely ignored. That there may have been a stage in the 

 development of the human intellect when people viewed their 

 surroundings as endued with a life and intelligence similar 

 somewhat to their own, may be true, or may not be true ; but 

 certainly this explanation is not true, as applied to the tales 

 that have had their origin among the philosophical Hindus, as 

 most of the tales of the East have had. There is nothing 

 infantile about the story of Tane Mahuta, of the Hindu-taught 

 Maori; in the story of Deucalion raising up men by casting 

 stones behind him, of the Hindu-taught Greek ; (for the name of 

 the Phoenician Cadmus, and the Cretan Minos, prove their 

 teachers to have been Hindus ; Cadmus is one of the Gauta- 

 mas of India, and Minos is a Manu). Nor is there anything 

 infantile, or even mythical, in the story in Genesis of the 

 temptation and the fall of Adam (whose name is also, as I have 

 proved elsewhere, only a mutilated form of the Benne Guadam, 

 or Benne Kedem, or sons of the East, who migrated from India 

 to Western Asia). 



In the first case, as has been shown, it is the Phallic tree, 

 or prop ; in the second it is still the phallos, or meteoric stone, 

 in a figure, by its fall impregnating the womb of earth ; sym- 

 bolising the union of spirit and matter. In the third case, 

 we have a concentrated and exoteric account of the Phallo- 

 pantheistic philosophy, viewed from a Buddhistic standpoint, 

 wherein birth into a material existence, (or " falling into genera- 

 tion," as it was termed,) is viewed as a calamity, Iience a fall. 

 The occult symbols of the first philosophical faith of India are 

 employed in the story— viz., the Phallic-serpent, and the Phallic 

 tree of knowledge of good and evil — the truncated tree, or 

 phallos. The Hebrew philosophy very justly starts with this 

 damnatory view of human life that was promulgated in the 

 early philosophies of India : and proceeds to show what more 

 hopeful views were engrafted on the tree of knowledge and 



