Note 169 — Chapter VIII · THE ÆSCULAPIAN STAFF AND SERPENT.

See Lenormant’s Ancient History of the East, vol. ii, p. 230. A pillar, cone, or tree-stem, more or less ornamented, constituted the Ashêrah of the Syrians and others, which many of the Israelites long looked on with favor (see Numbers, xxv, and 2 Judges, xxii), and which is in the authorized version of the Bible translated “grove,” as in the phrase, “the women wove hangings for the grove” (2 Judges, xxxiii, 7). It was the image of the goddess of fertility and life, the Istar of the Babylonians, The Baal-peor of the Moabites, Midianites, and others, and the Priapus of the Greeks and Romans were practically similar. I may add that the Phallus (derived from Apis, the Egyptian sacred bull), the linga of the Hindus, has been taken by many peoples as emblematic of the widely-worshipped, active, renovating power in nature, the sun; just as an oval or round figure, the cteis of the Greeks, the yoni of the Hindus, has been of the passive power, the earth. (See Cox’s Mythology of the Aryans). The latter is the Mipleçeth, or “abominable image for an Ashêrah,” spoken of in the Bible (1 Kings, xv, 13, and 2 Chronicles, xv, 16). The whole subject is well presented in a little book by Messrs. Westropp and Wake,—Ancient Symbol Worship. New York, 1874.