The Phœnician origin of Britons, Scots & Anglo-Saxons : discovered by Phœnician & Sumerian inscriptions in Britain, by preroman Briton coins & a mass of new history : with over one hundred illustrations and maps
PHGNICIAN SUN-WORSHIP IN BRITAIN 263
preserved by Shakespeare in his Cymbeline above cited. It is also attested by its very numerous sculptures and inscriptions on pre-Christian monuments in Britain, besides those of the Cup-marked inscriptions, and of cavesand the Newton and other widely diffused sculptured stones; by the profusion of its symbols and stamped legends on the preRoman coins of Ancient Britain, by the vestiges of Bel and Beltain rites which still survive in these islands, from St. Michael’s Mount in Comwall to Shetland, and in the “ Deazil ’ or Sun-wise direction in masonic and cryptic rites, and in the “lucky way’ of passing wine at table, and in other ways now detailed.
The Early Phcenicians were, as leading Aryans, an intensely religious people. They made religion the foundation of their state and gloried in their knowledge of the Higher Religion, as recorded in their Vedic hymns and in their own epic cited in the heading. And similarly, even in regard to the later Phceenicians, it is noted :—
“ In every city the temple was the chief centre of attraction, where the piety of the citizens adorned every temple with abundant and costly offerings.’
These Early Phcenicians—contrary to the now current notions of popular writers who have confused the real Phcenicians with the mixed Semitic and polytheistic people remaining in the later province of “‘ Phoenicia’ after it had been mostly abandoned by the Pheenicians, properly socalled—were monotheists, or worshippers of the One God of the Universe, whom they usually symbolized by his chief visible luminary, the Sun, as we have already seen established by a mass of concrete evidence.
This important fact, now so generally overlooked by modern writers, was well expressed by the late Prof. G. Rawlinson in his great work on the “ History of the Phoenicians.” He says? :—
“ Originally, when they first occupied their settlements upon the Mediterranean, or before they moved from their primitive seats upon the shores of the Persian Gulf, the Phenicians were Monotheists. . . . It may be presumed that at this early
NROHEE, 3205 *1&., 321-2.