210 
BEAMBLES AND BAY LEAVES. 
great solemnity by the Egyptian priests, and the deities 
were painted sitting in their leaves. The creation of 
Brahma on the leaf of the lotos was, however, the legend 
which formed the groundwork of all others of the same 
class; Osiris, Puzza, and Priapus being but modifications 
of the same personage, less sublime in character, because 
removed a greater or less degree from the sources of the 
original thought. In Hindoo worship, its fecundating 
properties associate it with the worship of the Linga in 
the shrine of Siva, one of those mysteries of the temple 
which, to an European mind, appears but an orgie of dis¬ 
gusting indecency, but wdiich, to the devout son of 
Mizriam, whose chastity of character is too often a 
rebuke to his Christian master, is purely emblematic of 
the creative power of the universe. 
Priapus, who, with the Greek and Bom an poets, was 
the son of Bacchus and Yenus, the god of debauchery, a 
sort of guardian devil, invented to countenance the luxury 
of Athens and the sensuality of Borne, was a god of 
highest repute in the Chaldaic and Egyptian mytholo¬ 
gies, profoundly venerated under the names of Orus and 
Apis, the god of light, the son of the world. The 
Priapus of the Greeks is a compound of Peor-Apis, 
according to the Grecian mode of adopting Egyptian 
names; he is sometimes called Poer singly, sometimes 
Baal Peor, the same with whose rites the Israelites are 
so often upbraided. Phurmitus supposes Priapus to 
have been the same as Pan, the shepherd god; who was 
equally degraded on one hand and as highly reverenced 
on the other. The Bomans, reducing the ideas of a re¬ 
fined mythology to their own sensual imbecility, degraded 
