By William Long, Esq., M,A. 353 



Briton, who, before the light of revelation or civilization dawned, 

 traversed these solitary plains. 



" The Phoenicians brought the knowledge of this personage to 

 Britain; this personage, as described by the Phoenicians, was the 

 great instructor; the greatest instructor became the greatest deity, 

 and the temple at Abury records the truth respecting the sole Deity 

 which he taught. On the mound in front, stood the image or si- 

 mulacrum of the great deified teacher of this truth ; and this most 

 magnificent Celtic Temple stood as emblematical of the One God, 

 having in front the image of him who was the greatest of the sub- 

 ordinate popular Celtic deities, who instructed the Phoenicians in 

 the knowledge of this one God, and which they, with all the mj's- 

 terious discipline of Druidism, taught to the British Celts; and that 

 Silbury-hill was the mound of Mercury; and Abury the greatest 

 Celtic temple, sacred to him, and emblematical both of the know- 

 ledge he taught and the God he revealed."^ 



" The v/orship of the serpent " saj^s Mr. Bathurst Deane, 

 "may be traced in almost every religion through ancient Asia, 

 Europe, Africa, and America. The progress of the sacred ser- 

 pent from Paradise to Peru is one of the most remarkable 

 phenomena in mythological history, and to be accounted for only 

 upon the supposition that a corrupted tradition of the serpent in 

 Paradise had been handed down from generation to generation." 

 Other temples supposed to have been dedicated to this kind of wor- 

 ship are to be seen at Carnac in Brittany, at Stanton Drew in 

 Somersetshire, on Dartmoor, and at Shap in Westmoreland.^ In the 

 time of Dr. Stukeley, the country people of the neighbourhood had 

 a tradition that " no snakes could live within the circle of Abury." 

 This notion may have descended from the times of the Druids, 

 through a very natural superstition that tlie unhallowed reptile was 

 divinely restrained from entering the Sanctuary, through which the 



' Hermes Britannicus, pp. 63, G4, 65. See also Parochial History of Brcm- 

 hill, by the same writer, 1S27. 



* In the Oeiitlumaii's lIuKazinc for October, 1844, is a skctcli of the circle of 

 stones at iShap. it was tlieii tliruatuned with destruction, by a railway which 

 was to pass over it. The avenue there is supposed to have almost rivalled those 

 at Carnao, in lenyth. 



