Dwipas of Cusha, Asiatic and African. In the Asiatic Cusha-Dwip
they supported themselves by violence and rapine. Parvati,
however, or their tutelary goddess, Yoni, always protected them;
and at length, in the fine country which they occupied, they
became a flourishing nation.[50] Wilford relates that there is a
sect of Hindoos who, attempting to reconcile the two systems,
declare in their allegorical style that "Parvati and Mahadeva
found their concurrence essential to the perfection of their
offspring, and that Vishnu, at the request of the goddess,
effected a reconciliation between them."[51]
[49] See The Evolution of Women, p. 303.
[50] Asiatic Researches, vol. iii., pp. 125-132.
[51] Asiatic Researches, "Egypt and the Nile," vol. iii., pp.
361-363.
The people who were dominant in Asia long before the rise of the
late Assyrian monarchy, are said to be those whom scriptural
writers represent as Cushim, and the Hindoos as Cushas. They
were the descendants of Cush, or Cuth, and were believed to have
been the architects of the Tower of Babel. Epiphanius, Eusebius,
and others assert that at the time of the building of this tower
there existed two rival beliefs, the one demonstrated as
Scuthism, the other as Ionism, or Hellenism, the latter of which
embodied the worship of the Great Mother, or the female element,
which was worshipped in the shape of the mystic "Iona or Dove."
The Scuths, on the other hand, believed in the pre-eminence of a
Great Father, or, perhaps I should say, in a Deity composed of a
triad containing the elements of a male parent. Upon this
subject the learned Faber remarks: "I am much mistaken if some
dissension on these points did not prevail at Babel itself; and I
think there is reason for believing that the altercation between
the rival sects aided the confusion of languages in producing the
dispersion."[52]
[52] Pagan Idolatry, book vi., ch. ii.
Those who believed in the superiority of the male in the
processes of reproduction, adored the male element in the Deity,
while those who held that the female is the more important,
worshipped the female energy throughout Nature under one or
another of its symbols, sometimes as a woman with her child and
sometimes as a dove, but oftener as an ark, box, or chest.
It is evident from the sacred writings of the Hindoos that in
India, during a period of several thousand years, there existed
|
