14 JOHN ERASER,, B.A., LL.D. 



of the Babylonian gods. So also, in the Bora, the worshipper 

 advances by stages along the passage leading from the one 

 circle to the other, and pays his devotions to each of the 

 images in succession. In Greece and in Rome the roofed 

 temples were commonly arranged in two parts, an inner and 

 an outer, and the statue of the god was so placed that a 

 worshipper, entering by the external door, saw it right before 

 him. At the very ancient temple of Dodonaoan Zeus, in 

 Greece, the god was supposed to reside in an oak tree, and 

 it is quite possible that the Xoanon, or wooden image of the 

 god, was here, as in other grove worship, merely a carved piece 

 of oak as in the Bora. In this sense Festus gives Fustis 

 decorticatus as an equivalent for delubrum. The student of 

 Biblical archasology will also remember the Asherah of the 

 Israelite idolaters, the consort of the sun-god Baal ; this was a 

 wooden pillar or statue of the goddess which could be cut 

 down and burned. Such a pillar our black fellows also have 

 been known to erect; for on one occasion several men of a tribe 

 which is well known to me were seen to cut down a soft cedar 

 tree; they dressed it with their hatchets, and cut the end of it 

 into the rude figure of a head and face ; they then carried it some 

 distance down the river to a sandy spot, and, setting it up there 

 like a pillar, they danced in a circle around it. This was 

 certainly an act of worship, the same as many other acts of 

 worship in the heathen world. Was it merely a happy thought 

 on the part of these black fellows, or undesigned coincidence, 

 which led them to do so; or was it a portion of an ancestral 

 form of worship brought from other lands ? 



(C.) In the Bora, the novice in the outer circle has his body 

 all painted over with red, but at the close of his novitiate he 

 washes in a pool, is thereby cleansed, and then paints himself 

 all white. The other members of the tribe paint themselves 

 red and white for the ceremony; they, too, at the close, wash 

 in the pool and retire white like the " boombat." This trans- 

 formation is to them a source of much rejoicing. 



(c.) Among the black races the colour red was the symbol 

 of evil ; and so Plutarch tells us that the Egyptians sacrificed 

 only red bullocks to Typhon, and that the animal was reckoned 

 unfit for this sacrifice if a single white or black hair could be 

 found on it ; in certain of their festivals the . Egyptians 

 assailed with insults and revilings any among them who 

 happened to have red hair, and the people of Coptos had a 

 custom of throwing an ass down a precipice because of its 

 red colour. The god Typhon was to the Egyptians the 

 embodied cause of everything evil, malignant, destructive, 

 man-hating in the economy of nature, just as Osiris, the bright 



