greek letters, with bulls' heads and sacrificing knives of the rudest form carved on it. Now it is not at all likely that the romans would erect an altar to a phoenician deity, or inscribe greek letters upon it. The only possible solution of the enigma seems to lie in the fact of the old druids using greek characters.

Major Cunningham* tells us there can be no doubt that the budhist form of worship existed at some time and under some form in England, but there seems more reason to think the old english worship was egyptian.

Long before the time of Cæsar the god called Thoth by the Egyptians was worshipped in England.† In a map published little more than a century ago, the hill erected in Westminster to the worship of this god, and from which comes the name of Tothill fields, is shown just at a bend in that ancient causeway, the Horseferry Road. There are several places in England where similar hills either exist or did so. They are scattered all over from Devonshire to Northumberland. Most of the hills on the seacoast of Dorsetshire are called teuts by country people. One of these hills stood lately, and perhaps stands now, near Wilts. It is a lofty conical mound with a vast stone on the top. This was the form under which the early english worshipped this god. There is or was lately another on the east side of Worcester, and the Toot, near Tewkesbury, is well known. The singular stones at

*British Quarterly Review, 1859, vol. ii.

Hermes Britannicus, by the Rev. W. L. Bowles.

Penrith known as the giant's thumbs were very likely erected to this god.*

It is not mere coincidence then that this god is called the Thoth of the egyptians, the god Tot of the gauls, the Taute of the phoenicians, the Teut of the teutons, and the Teutates of the celts; that Mercury or Hermes should be worshipped in Phoenicia and Egypt under this name, and that Cæsar should say he found the worship of Mercury established on his arrival in England; that the ethiopians should have worshipped the dog-star under the name of Tot, and that the Druids should have cut the sacred vervain at the rising of the Dog-star.

Baal, quite a different god from Mercury or Toth, was worshipped in England as well as in Scotland and Ireland. Mr. Bowles mentions a well at Tottenham sacred to Belenus, or the Sun, and another at Sulgrave. The Druids made fires on May eve, Midsummer eve, and the first of November in honour of Baal, and all over Scotland, Wales, the Isle of Man, &c., lie cairns or heaps of stones, like the Mercurial heaps of the Greeks. May day is still known as La Beal tine, or Day of Baal's Fire, by the highlanders.

Easter day was the Astarte day of the ancients. The Christian festival seems only to have been grafted on the old ceremony, as the feast of St. John was grafted in Ireland and Norway on the old Baal worship of the same day.

It is well known that those savages, the phoenicians, would sacrifice their own children to Moloch. This

The reader may see them in Jefferson's History of Cumberland.

244

was practised by the israelites occasionally, and by the assyrians and syrians. In the Valley of Tophet, too, a fire was always kept for burning the flesh and bones of sons sacrificed by their own parents, who dragged them through the flames in honour of Moloch, but nowhere did this far worse than fiendish custom flourish, nowhere was it so thoroughly cherished and enjoyed as among those atrocious devils the phoenicians. While the wretched victims were shrieking in agony, they used to dance round the fire striking the timbrels. The horrible rite generally ended with a scene of most bestial drunkenness. It makes one's blood run cold to read of the extent to which these creatures carried their infatuation. When Agathocles was pressing Carthage two hundred children of the best families in Carthage were sacrificed, and no less than three hundred of the citizens burnt themselves of their own free will. These brutalities are said to have been practised in Ireland, but, according to Mr. O'Brien, not by the phoenicians so much as by the celts. The Tuath-de-danaans, he says, never observed these horrid rites, they were indulged in only by the firbolgs, who were celts, and who contrived the cromlechs for the occasion. "The Scythian Druids would fain re-establish the usage until repressed by the humanizing precepts of the enlightened Danaans. So they immolated only criminals."*

* This old phoenician practice of passing pregnant women and children through the fire has not been long extinct in the Highlands, and a correspondent sent Mr. Hone a transcript from a journal kept by a member of his family, in which it was said that the sister of the queen of the gipsies having died (1769), the other gipsies burnt all her wearing apparel, "including silk gowns,

O'Brien, speaking of the actual fire temples or vaults, of which there are several in Ireland-the very vaults or fire temples described by Hanway as not exceeding ten or fifteen feet in height says that in 1820, meaning I presume 1280, Henry de Loundres put out a fire of this kind called "inextinguishable," which had been preserved, though a remnant of the pagan idolatry of Baal, from the earliest times by the nuns of St. Brigit at Kildare. It was re-lighted and continued to burn until the total suppression of the nunneries; the ruins of the fire-house and nunnery still remain. We may be pretty certain that between the first coming of Tuath-de-danaans and the first preaching of the Christian religion three forms of worship held sway in Ireland; the early persian, phonician, and later persian or scythian. Mr. O'Brien ignores the phoenician faith. He says, "We observe mouldering in decay beside each of the three species of ancient worship, the celtic, the budhist, and the druidical, the first and last of which became ultimately identified, and of which the cromlechs and Mithratic caves are the memorials; while the round towers represent the purer, the bloodless, and the inoffensive budhist faith. Christian ruins of more modern structures yet venerable in antiquity, and composed by architects who could not vie in skill of either design. or ornament with their pagan predecessors."

We always hear of the Druids as priests practising a cruel and bloody religion, professing an immense reverence for the sacred groves, resolutely refusing to give up any of their horrible practices, hated by all

rich laces, silver buckles, gold earrings, trinkets, &c., for such is their custom."

the races near them,-a description which agrees so well with that of the phoenician priests at Carthage that I doubt if accounts of any two classes of a community more completely in accordance could be found in history. But from what the well-spent labours of Mr. Higgins, Mr. Bowles, and others have brought to light, it seems far from improbable that at any rate some of them taught the lofty simple fire-worship of Thoth, the ibis-headed god of the reed - pen and papyrus roll, who ages before the first Pharaoh ruled in Egypt taught men letters, told them that the soul was immortal, and bequeathed them the germ of the solar system and the great doctrines of Pythagoras, while other druids or other priests taught the fiercer religion of Baal, thus giving us two forms of fireworship in England; that, as Strabo says, they had a rude but imposing system of geology, the essence of which was that the universe was immortal and destined to survive fire and water. From the fire-worship of Thoth which adored the Creator under the form of the sun, sprang all the divinities of Greece and Rome, and when it is remembered that the peculiar old peruvian skull has been found in Europe and at Jerusalem, and that the sun-worship has been found in Peru and Mexico, it would seem as if there was behind all this an unwritten and undreamed of history, yet perhaps to be unfolded.

The priests of druidical times are said to have made amulets or rings of glass, some of which are described as very beautiful, being composed of blue, red and green, with spots of white so arranged as to form an emblem of the lives or future states of the wearers.

Villanueva mentions that a tribe of armenians came