General Forlong alludes to the thigh as the symbol of phallic worship. "The serpent on head denoted Holiness, Wisdom, and Power, as it does when placed on gods and great ones of the East still; but the Hindoo and Zoroastrian very early adopted a symbolic thread instead of the ophite deity, and the throwing of this over the head is also a very sacred rite, which consecrates the man-child to his God; this I should perhaps have earlier described, and will do so now. The adoption of the Poita or sacred thread, called also the _Zenar_, and from the most ancient pre-historic times by these two great Bactro-Aryan families, points to a period when both had the same faith, and that faith the Serpent. The Investiture is the Confirmation or second birth of the Hindoo boy; until which he can not, of course, be married. After the worship of the heavenly stone--the Sāligrāma, the youth or child takes a branch of the Vilwa tree in his right hand, and a mystic cloth-bag in the left, when a Poita is formed of three fibres of the Sooroo tree (for the first cord must always be made of the _genuine living fibres_ of an orthodox tree), and this is hung to the boy's left shoulder; he then raises the Vilwa branch over his right shoulder, and so stands for some time, _a complete figure_ of the old faiths in Tree and Serpent, until the priest offers up various prayers and incantations to Soorya, Savitri or Sot, the Eternal God. The Sooroo-Poita is then removed as not durable enough, and the permanent thread is put over the neck. It also is formed of three threads, each 96 cubits or 48 yards long, folded and twisted together until only so long that, when thrown over the left shoulder, it extends half-way down the right thigh, or a little less; for the object appears to be to unite the Caput, Sol, or Seat of intellect with that of passion, and so form a perfect man."[608] All Parsis wear the sacred thread of serpent and phallic extraction, and the investiture of this is a solemn and essential rite with both sects [i.e., the Hindus and Parsis], showing their joint Aryan origin in high Asia, for the thread is of the very highest antiquity. The Parsi does not, however, wear his thread across the shoulder, and knows nothing of the all-but-forgotten origin of its required length. He wears it next to his skin, tied carefully round the waist, and used to tie it round his right arm, as is still the custom with some classes of Brahmins who have lost purity of caste by intermarriage with lower classes.[609]