Irish Druids And Old Irish Religions

part of his visitor, who had been entranced by a splendid illustration of serpent worship, loudly exclaimed, "I will show you something." He soon returned with a stone image, some two feet high, bearing the rough lineaments of a female, but with the legs being serpents crossed.

Epiphanius vehemently attacked a Gnostic idol of his day; saying, "Yea, even his legs are an imitation of the serpent, through which the Evil One spake and deceived Eve."

Governor Pownall, last century, traced Irish idols to Carthaginian intercourse; "rather," said he, "than to the Celtic Druidical theology of the more ancient Irish; for though their symbolic idols are said to be covered with gold and silver, yet they were but unhewn stones, and not images containing any organized form." His account of the find in the Tipperary Bog of Cullen was addressed to the Society of Antiquaries in 1774

"The fragment," said he, "which is said to be part of an image found at the same time, is of a black wood, entirely covered and plated with thin gold, and seems to have been part of the breasts, the tet or nipple of which is radiated in hammered or chased work, in lines radiating from a centre, as is usual in the images of the sun; and round the periphery, or setting on of the breast, there are like radiations in a specific number, with other linear ornaments. There is another fragment of the same kind of wood, which seems to be a fragment of an Ammonian horn; there are in it the golden studs or rivets by which it may be supposed to have been plated with gold. The first account I had of this image was that it was of a human form, with a lion's face; then, that it was indeed biform, but of what sort not specified. I have since been informed that the image, whatever it was, was of a size sufficient to make a gate-post"

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