Abstract

© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, May 19, 1999;
Friday, 17 October 2003; Saturday, 01 April 2006

Modern Modesty

Ecclesiastical censorship of all reference to phallus worship in religion, and the concomitant negative view of Christian societies, has distorted the truth about it. The censorship doubtless began even when the bible was first written, for it was written in opposition to the ancient fertility cults, but has continued directly the bible was translated into Greek then English. Before then, the references to phallic religious practices in the bible had been overlooked by the clergy who were the only ones who could read the Latin bible of the Catholics. Yet of the two poles of outlook, sexual expression and sexual suppression, it is the latter as represented by the peculiarly prudish religion of Christianity that is abnormal. Pious Pagans who venerated sexuality did it in no more a licentious manner than pious Christians say grace before a meal. No doubt there were people out for their own personal gratification in these sexual rituals, but will any Christian deny that there have been many, many unscrupulous people in dog collars and frocks who have taken advantage of naïve Christian believers for their own perverted reasons?

The concept of obscenity is largely conditioned by religious conventions. Obscenity is emphasised and particularly propagated by Christianity. If God made us, as Jews and Christians believe, and famously made the unselfconscious first man in His own image, why should nakedness be considered indecent? Why are our perfectly normal and and necessary organs of reproduction considered as taboo? Adam and Eve disobeyed God and became self conscious, and the Christian churches are determined that we should remain that way. Pagans celebrated sexuality and fertility. People were glad of it, in humans for their own existence, and in plants and animals for their sustenance of continuing life. These were divine gifts not smutty recreations given us by the God of Pornology to tempt us into the arms of the Devil. The peculiar prudishness of patriarchal religions has been one of these perverted beliefs’ worst curses. The clergy of Christian denominations depend upon creating guilt in people about sex. It is easily done still, and easily made to seem as if it is guilt for more significant “sins” than a sexual surrender or thought.

Christians believe selectively. Nudity and sex are to be ashamed of but king David had no qualms about dancing naked before a crowd, or seducing the wife of one of his military men. God approved utterly of David’s naked cavorting, and even smote Michal, David’s wife, who thought it infantile, with sterility for disapproving, thus seeming to confirm, in the punishment fitting the crime, the ritual as a fertility rite. The loyal, Uriah, he had killed just so that he could marry his widow. This is that same king David that Christians are pleased to say their God, Jesus, was in the line of. Solomon is the same. Christians admire him for his wealth which extended to a large harem. There can be nothing wrong with that to a Christian, it seems.

God must have approved of these things to ensure they are still illuminating the pages of His so-called Holy Word. But apparently God has moved on, eventually deciding that He would become a God of Love and insist on couples cleaving one to the other for life, after the fashion of Adam and Eve. This Eve however cannot have been too careful about her Christian morality either, breeding like a queen bee with her sons, grandsons and so on, until by the time her son Cain left home, the world was extensively populated through serial incest. It took God’s own son to point out that people had to be like the primæval pair—incest apart.

Early humans keen to propitiate and please their gods did so unselfconsciously in practical and socially acceptable ways. The idea of obscenity in making sexual offerings to a divinity could not have occurred to such people. Modern folk looking aghast at priapic images or being appalled at religious prostitution are projecting Christian conditioning on to people who knew nothing of it. Indeed, the creation myth of Adam and Eve in the bible describes the innocence of such people perfectly.

Gods supplied human needs such as adequate supplies of food and drink, shelter and comfort, and progeny and fertility were among the blessings people prayed to them for. For these people, it was just as much a duty to a god, in expectation of a blessing of fertility, to dress and decorate a lingam, or to ritually perform the fertilising act before the god to show what was needed, as it was to make offerings of food and libations of beer or wine.

The Sacred Landscape

Yet, the church has made fairy tales of the past. Contrary to its dogmatic assertions, sex has been allied to religion through the the ages until modern times. Unsophisticated people are less able to distinguish between subjective and objective stimuli. In this sense, modern religious people are the same. They experience certain feelings or emotions that are purely subjective, yet have to find a suitable objective cause for them. It is, of course, God! The only reason why such behaviour persists in the modern world is that society as a whole accepts that it is, or might be, God, because society condones and even encourages religion whereas it does not condone delusions otherwise. The ability of humans to share experiences through language has allowed most people to distinguish between what is subjective and what is objective. Religious experience is the one exception. Perhaps pseudo sciences like UFOlogy which border on religion are also exceptions.

Emotions seemed peculiar to primitive people. Strong emotions, like fear, impressed them, and they had to attribute what we might call irrational fear, and that fear not today considered as fear—awe—to external causes. What can inspire fear demands respect, and gods seemed to be fearful and angry monsters. The emotion of fear or pleasure was projected on to whatever was seen as the external cause. Storm gods were popular, but so were love goddesses, and both stood for fertility. Pantheons of gods and goddesses arose from these mysterious and uncontrollable emotions projected on to different aspects of Nature.

The Greeks were not unlike the north American Indians, such as the Iroquois, in that their whole countryside was sacred. Stones, trees, rivers and hills each had their spirit or god. Nymphs, dryads and satyrs gambolled in glades, and peered out from behind bushes keeping their eye on the landscape to guard it, and could be fearful if angered. So, superstitious Greeks would carry a flask of oil to offer at wayside and countryside shrines to propitiate the local spirits and thus ensure good fortune. The landscape itself was sacred, and the Renaissance country parks of wealthy European lords in the sixteenth and seventeenth centuries mimicked the classical landscape by hiding shrines amidst the groves, and placing marble temples to reflect serenely in lakes.

That each feature of the countryside had a guardian spirit was itself a projection of human consciousness into Nature. Consciousness or personality was in those days called soul, and was thought of as the property that vitalized us. When the soul temporarily left the body, we fell asleep, and, when it took off forever, the body died. But, if humans had a soul, then why should not everything else? Thus the world was populated with gods and spirits of Nature that humans ought not to offend. Christianity has retained the idea of a soul long past its sell-by date, but out of necessity, and only in human beings. Otherwise Christians reject the animism of the Iroquois and the Greeks utterly, and doggedly aim to force their narrow view on to us all. Clearly enough, human beings are conscious, but no Christian has yet been able to show that human consciousness survives when the human body is dead and putrefying. All evidence and common sense suggests the opposite.

Fertility Religion

The religions of simple people initially had nothing to do with morality. Essentially people feared Nature. If Nature withdrew her blessing of fertility then everyone would starve and would have no kids to care for them in their old age. The return of vegetation in the spring or wet season, and the gathering of harvests in the autumn, or before the onset of the hot season were obviously joyful occasions—the gods too were smiling. The sky-god sent sunshine, rain and fertility, but caused fires, storms, and floods, and Nature might withdraw her munificence through drought, disease and plague. The fear of Nature led to the proper propitiation of all the gods, with all round joy the outcome.

When humans learned agriculture, earth was the goddess (rarely a god) of fertility. The fertility of the earth was seen to parallel a woman’s fertility. At first human beings copulated not even knowing that the man begot the child. Love and fertility became one of the mightiest facts of life. The spirit of sexual pleasure was a most tremendous force, the most bountiful energy in the world. The spirit of generation, in man and in Nature, was as good a candidate for deification as the sun and moon.

It was believed that human copulation could influence the fertility of the earth, by a sort of sympathetic magic. When scientific men find drawings of deer in a prehistoric cavern, they tell the whole world—it was magic. The artist believed he could bring the animals nearer and have a profitable hunt. When the same scientific men find a drawing of a male organ, or a woman with an exaggerated pubic part carved out of a bit of mammoth’s tusk, they say it is a pornographic graffito. Why is it not similar magic—fertility magic?

The sexual act is not only the acme of physical bliss, it is necessary for the continuation of life. Procreation became a religious act. The god or goddess was interested in its happening, not in its prohibition. People came to believe that by human intercourse they prompted the fertility of mother earth. It is not surprising that magical formulae and religious ritual should accrete to this function. So they did among the Hindus in India, the Egyptians, the Babylonians, the Phœnicians, the Assyrians and the Israelites. As they personified the sun and planets, air, water, fire, and other objects, so they personified sexual power.

The belief and practices based upon it lingered in Europe in the Middle Ages. The great Nature festivals were marked by orgies of sexual pleasure and indulgence, and prodigious indulgence too in eating and drinking. Large carvings of the sex-organs stood unblushingly in the temples until prudish Englishmen and Americans came along in the nineteenth century. The ancients worshipped not so much the sexual organs but the fertilizing principle, but they would swear by their sexual organs as representing divine energy and so the most sacred thing, just as Christians now swear by their Bible.

Schocked Christian preachers scare their demure congregations with Frazer's story, in the “Golden Bough”, how the women of ancient Babylon had to go, once in their lifetime before they could marry, to the temple of the Assyrian goddess Astarte or Mylitta—Venus—and have sexual intercourse with a man. Groups of women solicited at the door the interest of any man ready to gratify himself on one of them. He would throw money into her lap, whereupon she would prostitute herself “for the sake of Mylitta”. No man was refused, but ugly women were said to have to wait a long time. The Jewish scriptures describe the same practice (1 Samuel 2:22, see below).

Nor did priestesses demure from the act of which their goddess was the presiding genius. Sacred prostitution was certainly practised in some ancient temples—the appropriate ones—but it was practised by those who chose to, hoping to get some benefit from the deity. The primitive Christians seemed to do a similar thing at their agapes or love feasts, the immoralities of which were among the real causes of Christian persecutions by the Roman emperors, who allowed great freedom of religious opinion. The perversions practised at these assemblies are mentioned by the church historian Eusebius. Before long priests discovered, to their advantage, that they could announce to the pretty women that it was their particular gift to service those who desired the goddess’s benefits.

Fertility was socially a desirable thing. The army wanted men, the men wanted wives and slaves. Disease and war wrought terrible havoc, and population urgently needed to be renewed. The Jewish scriptures urge people to multiply, and it lingers in the Catholic Christian obsession with refusing to approve contraceptives, and the general Christian resistance to abortion of unwanted foetuses. More people is something the earth no longer needs, but the Christian churches still demand it. The development of polygamy, which is not a primitive institution, was scarcely enough. Concubines were allowed. It suited wealthy men.

So, the gods had no regard for rules proscribing sex—quite the opposite—but, with urbanization, Nature gods became ethical gods. People had to please them by observing rules which violently twisted primitive morality, and, just as the spirit of war became deified, another grave perversion of human conduct occurred in moral evolution.

The Phallic Stage

As humans slowly came to think about their experiences, they early on came to want to celebrate the pleasure of sexuality. Once it was realised that the act of coition was necessary for reproduction, people took it that a demonstration of it showed to the gods what they needed. Soon, the demonstration of the sexual act became a necessity for the success of all reproduction, just as religious rituals always do. Sowers of seed had sex with their wives before they sowed to ensure the fertility of the grain. Before long the act was ritualised in seasonal rites in the temples. Upright stones long stood for the phallus and soon gods were being fashioned with an erect phallus, often grossly exaggerated. This god was a healing god, particularly of diseases and defects of the reproductive organs.

Then, to ensure her fertility, the bride customarily devoted herself to the priapic god before marriage. The first fruits of sexual intercourse for a maiden went to the god, just as the god, Yehouah, demanded the first fruit of all things in the Jewish scriptures. Barrenness in women was considered shameful, condemning a couple to a poor and lonely old age, and perhaps some anxious women benefited by having their virginity taken by the god. It was a psychological evasion of possible sexual anxieties. Men too were often grateful that the task of deflowering a virgin bride did not have to fall to them. Menstrual blood was considered dirty or bad luck, and so too was the blood of a broken hymen. More to the point, perhaps, is that often rich old men married pretty young ones, and might have had their own problems. Priests also saw that here was a chance to enjoy choice women, and began to take the duty of the god to themselves. Barren women would spend the night in the temple where the god would “visit” her. Priests could put up with the supposed risks of menstrual blood, protected by their closeness to god.

The phallic cult spread over the entire world. It has been said that to deal with religion and omit the phallic elements is like trying to produce Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. Phallic elements have had an extraordinary part in the development of religion, and it is prudery to ignore them. Even still, there are millions of phallic worshippers today in India and other parts of the world. The two sexual powers of Nature were symbolized respectively by an upright model of the male organ—the phallos or penis or lingam, the Greek, Latin, and Hindu names for it, the ashera, the priapus of the Jews, the Hebrew letter for which was a cross, “T”—and people ancient and modern have happily venerated it. And hardly less so, the female organ, the vulva or the linga and yoni, the Latin and Hindu names—an oval or sometimes a crescent, cup or circle, O—sometimes represented as the mountain of Venus or mons veneris.

The former was a representation of the sun god in his majesty and glory, the restorer of the powers of Nature after the long sleep or death of winter. The latter was a representation of the earth, who yields her fruit under the fertilizing power and warmth of the sun, and when placed upon the Tau, T, or Phallus, formed the crux ansata, or conjunction of the sun and earth, male and female, the Egyptian symbol of life—the original crucifix. Many of the Egyptian gods are shown holding this cross in their hand, which is passed through the oval. Some authorities have wrongly called it a key. The phallus placed erect as a tree, cross, or pole, above a crescent or on a mons veneris, signified the marriage of heaven and earth. In the form of a serpent, it represented life and healing, being still so used as the sign of a physician, and was so worshipped by the Egyptians and Jews. The emblems of the cross and serpent, the quiescent and energizing Phallus, are united in the brazen serpent of the Pentateuch.

The conjunction of the two sexual emblems was represented in the temple of Baal-Peor by a circular altar on which stood an Ashera, and for which the Jewish women wove hangings and under whose protective influence Jacob, on his journey to Laban, slept. It is innocently reproduced in our modern May-pole around which maidens dance as maidens always did. The Catholic priest little dreams that he wears a Phallic vestment at Mass, for upon it is the crux ansata, his head passing through the oval or yoni, the Tau, or cross, falling from the chest in front. The design was that of a phallic surplice. The asymmetric cross is an emblem originally of phallic meaning.

Japan, which was civilized long after China, is instructive. When the country began to be modernized in the early 1870s, Americans were astounded to find, amongst one of the most sober and virtuous nations of the globe, an open and common exhibition of phallic emblems. “Ithyphallic” images were of gods with an erect phallus from the Greek word “ithys”, which means “straight” or “straight up”. In many of the old Shinto temples the statues of the gods were ithyphallic. Missionaries pronounced them obscene, and they disappeared. But the Japanese could scarcely even understand what the missionaries meant. A man who lived in Japan in those early days said that the people of a certain coast-village were told that, in deference to the peculiar feeling of these English and Americans, there must be no more mixed bathing, nude, in the summer time. So they separated the sexes by a rope!

But India is the classic land of phallic worship. The Hindus took over the phallic cult from the original population of the peninsula. In all the islands south of India was an intense phallic cult. In the Barbar Archipelago, a symbol of the sun appears in the shape of a man with stuffed phallus and testicles, and is honoured with orgies of sexual delight. The man has a club which, as in most of the analogous cases, like Hercules, originally represented a phallus. Phallism is often associated with sun-worship. The most religious needs of the tribes are progeny and strength. “The gods we serve are the gods who serve us”.

In the Nias Islands, off Sumatra, the natives draw ithyphallic figures of their ancestors on the walls of their houses, and pray to them for progeny. In New Guinea, certain tribes have special sleeping places for the youths and unmarried men. It sounds cloistral and virtuous, but the walls are covered with ithyphallic figures, and of sexual intercourse.

Celebes was a hot-bed of phallism until the Dutch began a campaign against it. Female figures with exaggerated breasts and pudenda and ithyphallic figures of males were carved all over the temples. In some temples, the detached organs were represented in the act of intercourse. In southern Celebes, Karaeng Lowe, a phallic god, is served with flowers and candles by priestesses, especially on the two great annual festivals.

Java also is intensely phallic. One god is called “the Phallus of the Ulisiwa”. The natives had an ithyphallic statue of him seven feet high, which was regarded with great pride and veneration. When the Dutch interfered with the cult, the natives hid the statue and worshipped it secretly for years. In some parts it is customary, at the time of the blossoming of the rice, for the proprietor of the field and his wife to go round it naked and have intercourse on it. This ancient half-magical, half-religious recipe for a good harvest was not unknown in medieval Europe.

An amusing illustration of the phallism of the Javanese is that the Dutch had left an old cannon in a field, and the belief spread that it was a phallic god of the Europeans. Rice and fruit were offered to it and, with the full encouragement of the local priests, it was worshiped daily. Barren women, particularly, sought its aid. They would deck themselves in their best clothes—which are extremely elaborate and handsome in Java—and sit astride it, often two at a time, to the great scandal of the missionaries. The Dutch government was compelled to remove the “god”.

The cult of the god of love is in the most perfect harmony with the religious impulse. People believe in the efficacy of the cult, but also like it. So the phallic cult has never been destroyed. Today it assumes new secular forms but sexuality can hardly have been more revered.

Solar and Phallic Worship

Is there a connexion between solar and phallus worship? Solar religions often require structures that reach up into the sky. Temples are built on hills, or are built as imitation hills, with ascending terraces or spirals leading up to a shrine at the summit. Pyramids point to the sky. An extension of a pyramid or a cone makes an obilisk or a pillar tipped off with a pyramid or a dome. Now we have a phallic object reaching into the sky. An easy way to make them was to use tree trunks which had this shape anyway, and the translation of “grove”, for the phallic pillars or Asherim of Yehouah worship in the bible, is as close as the translators felt they could get to honesty while disguising the truth.

Once the importance of the seasonal cycle made itself known to the early farmers, the sun became as important as reproduction. Sexual worship is immediately fulfilling, while sun worship is a mental construct. Phallic religion is one of feeling and passion, while solar faith is hypothetical and imaginative. Once the gestalt leap had been made that revealed the relationship between sexual intercourse and fertility, the sun will have seemed like a fertilising father and the earth like a fruitful mother. Both embodied sex divinity. The sun was male, and the moon and earth were normally female. The modern basis of religion had therefore been built. Catholic pictures of Jesus often bear the Latin words, “Deo Soli”. The inscription is delightfully ambiguous. It can be read as “to the only God”, or “to the God Sol”.

The sun was the fertiliser of the earth. Every plant and every animal is a product of the sun. All earthly energy except for vulcanic activity derived from the sun—the god, Sol, Helios, Apollo, Mithras, El, Yehouah. He fertilised and provided the life force for us all, and the things we depend upon for life, keeping its continuity from year to year, and century to century. He seemed worth worshipping for what He did.

Yet, the figures or objects that symbolised the sun were often phallic. Historically, it might have taken a long time for priests to connect the sky god sending his autumn storms or spring thaw to fertilise the earth and a phallic pillar, but the connexion was made and thereafter seasonal fetility cults, phallus worship and solar worship were all part and parcel of the same religious expression. Plutarch characterised the sky as the father and the earth as the mother. Virgil added that all life came from the intercourse of Jupitar (Dyaus Pitar), the sky god, with Juno, the earth goddess. Herodotus said the Persians sacrificed to Jupiter as the god of the whole sky, plainly identifying Ahuramazda with Jupiter.

Baal was worshipped as a pillar, showing that Yehouah, who was similarly worshipped, was a Baal. The sacred hymns of the Egyptians place Osiris as the god living within the sun. He was plainly seen as the power of the sun. Osiris, Plutarch writes, was always shown as an ithyphallic statue, power of generation being the link. The sun god was the god of procreation and had a reputation in many mythologies of siring many children. The Jewish scriptures direct mankind:

Be fruitful, and multiply upon the earth.

Genesis 8:17

 

And you, be ye fruitful, and multiply. Bring forth abundantly in the earth, and multiply therein.

Genesis 9:7

 

The attributes of the supreme god were characteristic of the stud animal. He was strong, powerful, erect, high, firm, bright, upright, happy, splendid, noble, mighty, hard, able, and his representations on earth were with animals that were thought to have these qualities—the bull, ass, goat, ram, and lion—animals of outstanding strength, or sexual stamina. Plutarch said the Apis Bull was the living symbol of the god Osiris, but, even though it was a symbol, it merited worship in its own right with elaborate ritual. The bull was the archetypal symbol of sexual vigour, and was usually associated with the sun. The tortoise was also an object of pious veneration, sacred to Venus. It is, in the way its head and neck extend and withdraw into its shell, the phallus.

The gratitude and devotions of a god’s worshippers were shown in their choice of name for their children. They were theophoric, or bore the name of the god. Many biblical names imply solar or sky worship. El is the Canaanite sun god, but the name of the sun god was different in different languages, appearing as El, Al, Ili, Ilos, On, Bel, Baal, Iao, Yah, Jove, Abram, Brahma, Jupiter, and Yehouah. Al, El, Il are equivalent names for the Canaanite high god, names that became so recognised that they came simply to mean God. Also equivalent names are Yehouah, Yeho, Jah, Iah, Yho, Ju, Jao, Iao, Iu. El appears in Michael, Ezekiel, Raguel, Raphael, Gabriel, Joel, Phaniel, Uriel, Sarakiel, Bethel, Chapel, Eli, Elisha, and many more, while replacing El with Iah yields theophoric names in Yehouah like Michaiah, Hezekiah, Hananiah, Isaiah, Zedekiah, Padiah, Maniah, or with Yeho (Jo), names like Jehu, Joshua, Johanan, and so on. A name like Elijah, means “My El is Iah”, but becasue El had come to mean God, it makes more sense read it as “My God is Iah”. Mishael is “El is erect”.

On is the sun as male Creator, while Am, Om, Um, and Umma are the female deity—the land or earth. On is in names like Abdon, Onan, Aijalon, Ashkalon, Ezbon. Aaron is from the Indo-European “ahura” meaning Lord, from “asura” meaning the sun (surya). Abigal is my father is the Circle (the solar disc). Abram is the father is high or exalted. Samson or Shimshon means Shemesh is On. Solomon is Shalim is On—Shalim being the Canaanite god of the evening, or setting sun, whence “shalom” is peace. The biblical Solomon built temples to the sun god, Chemosh (2 Kg 23:13). From Ra, or Re, arise Rebekah, Regem, Rehoboam, and Reba which signifies sexual congress. Even today, biblical commentaries and dictionaries will not tell the punters what many biblical names and practices really mean.

The cockerel is a link between solar and phallic worship. The rampant cockerel crows to the sun at dawn before indulging his reputation of insatiable virility, whence the vulgar colloquial word for a penis. The spires of Christian churches, phallic symbols reaching for the heaven, are typically topped off with a weather vane in the form of a cock.

Phallism In the Old Testament

Our modern impression that Jews are the guardians of the earliest and most solemn of the serious religious instructions of God, should appreciate that the impression has been moulded by the second temple priests, and then the rabbis with Christian approval. The sex-element was original, not an abberation. It is modern solemnity that is the abberation.

The priestly writers of Exodus lived, as their language alone would suffice to show, only after 300 BC, though bits of more archaic language are embedded. The English translation of the Old Testament, though gross enough in its sonorous language about whoring and fornication, really tones down the original. The Hebrew text itself had, in fact, been modified by the rabbis who expressly said that much of it required “modernizing”, even two thousand years ago. The “revealed” word could not be too crude to meet the Pagan eye of other nations. “Male and female created he them”, (Gen 1:27), yet the word “nequebah”, which is translated “female”, means “the thing to be screwed” (or bored), and that was the ancient Hebrew idea of woman. The story of the Fall is just as crudely sexual.

It is the same today. The reliefs and paintings decorating the temples of the Egyptians have often been censored for American and European sensibilities. Figures of gods and kings in Egyptian temples are often shown as ithyphallic, but habitually these were covered with some innocuous notice, such as, “No Smoking”, or whatever. Reliefs like these were even mentioned in the bible:

And that she increased her whoredoms, for when she saw men portrayed upon the wall, the images of the Chaldeans portrayed with vermilion…

Ezekiel 23:14

Ezekiel is execrating the towns of Samaria and Jerusalem personified as harlots, called Her Own Tent and My Tent Is In Her. The quoted passage is typically euphemistic because “men” means the organ that distinguishes men and is usually red in colour (vermilion).

A scene at Karnak shows Rameses II in triumph supervising the castration of his captives. By the side, heaps of genitals that have been cut off are piled up. Isaiah, speaking prophetically for Yehouah, promises this fate to the offspring of Hezekiah the king:

And of thy sons that shall issue from thee, which thou shalt beget, shall they take away, and they shall be eunuchs in the palace of the king of Babylon.

Isaiah 39:7

If this prophecy was fulfilled, then Jesus could not have been in the princely line of David, and if not, Isaiah was a false prophet. Castration of enemies is described nastily in the romance of Saul and David too:

And Saul said, Thus shall ye say to David, The king desireth not any dowry, but an hundred foreskins of the Philistines, to be avenged of the king’s enemies. But Saul thought to make David fall by the hand of the Philistines. And when his servants told David these words, it pleased David well to be the king’s son in law: and the days were not expired. Wherefore David arose and went, he and his men, and slew of the Philistines two hundred men, and David brought their foreskins, and they gave them in full tale to the king, that he might be the king’s son in law. And Saul gave him Michal his daughter to wife.

1 Samuel 18:25

Perhaps mentioning the castration as bringing foreskins softens the horror of it for Christians and Jews who think it is just some sort of obligatory circumcision. The Philistines were killed and their genitals were brought back as proof of the deed and as vulgar trophies. Do these religious people know what their children are reading?

Sometimes the translation of the text is fair enough but still conceals the original concepts of the people for whom the priests wrote. Not long ago, and perhaps still, girls would wear a ring or a broach with the name “mizpah” on it, apparently believing the word to be a charm or an omen of good luck—the Mizpah benediction, “The Lord watch between me and thee”. It is explained in Genesis 31:49. Originally, it was far from a benediction. The Hebrew text has been discreetly translated, but the story is that Jacob, the chosen of the Lord, has fled from his father-in-law, stealthily, with all his goods. Rachel, the chosen of Jacob, has stolen her father’s “images”, the phallic symbols to which Laban prays for the fertility of his cattle and wines. Laban follows in pursuit to recover his precious carvings, and Rachel sweetly sits on them, on her camel, and lies to her father, saying that she has her monthly period and could not rise. Laban is cheated, and he and Jacob raise up a stone pillar—another phallic image—and swear on it what they will do to each other if either misbehaves again. Mizpah! It is a boundary stone or a look out point—a place that stands out!

Testaments and Testicles

In a mythical history of the Hebrews from Genesis 12, Abraham (Gen 24:2) calls his eldest servant to swear a solemn oath, and Israel calls his distinguished son Joseph to swear a solemn oath in the same peculiar way, even in civilized Egypt.

And Abraham was old, and well stricken in age: and Yehouah had blessed Abraham in all things. And Abraham said unto his eldest servant of his house, that ruled over all that he had, Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh: And I will make thee swear by Yehouah, the God of heaven, and the God of the earth, that thou shalt not take a wife unto my son of the daughters of the Canaanites, among whom I dwell.

Genesis 24:1-3

And the time drew nigh that Israel must die: and he called his son Joseph, and said unto him, If now I have found grace in thy sight, put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh, and deal kindly and truly with me; bury me not, I pray thee, in Egypt: But I will lie with my fathers, and thou shalt carry me out of Egypt, and bury me in their buryingplace. And he said, I will do as thou hast said. And he said, Swear unto me. And he sware unto him. And Israel bowed himself upon the bed’s head.

Genesis 47:29

 

Anyone who took an oath in the patriarchal age put his hand “under the thigh” of the adjurer. The biblical usage is deliberately euphemistic so as not to offend delicate sensibilities. In ancient times, men solemnly made oaths holding their own penis, just as modern Christians might put their hand on their heart. The “thigh” is the penis, regarded as the most sacred part of the body, being most precious as the regenerative organ, and the source of marital bliss. The most solemn oath of the patriarchs was to swear with their hand on a man’s penis or testicles, and the patriarchs in the bible are often celebrated for their remarkable fecundity (Gen 46:26-27; Ex 1:5; Jg 8:30).

Psalms 89:49 has been bowdlerized for the masses. It does not say:

Lord, where are thy former lovingkindnesses, which thou swarest unto David in thy truth?

It says:

O my Adonis, where are thy endearments of old, which thou swearedst for the sake of love, by the phallus, O Amun?

It might have refered originally to the violent death of Osiris who was torn to pieces but reassembled by his wife and sister, Isis. But Isis could not find Osiris’s penis and had to make a phallus so that the god could impregnate her and conceive the infant Horus. Osiris was identified with Adonis and Amun.

The religious significance of circumcision, a rationalization of a token child sacrifice, might have been that the penis was an organ that belonged to God, and the operation signified it. God claimed it as a sign of the covenant between himself and his chosen people. Nothing therefore could render an oath more solemn in those days than taking hold of the sign of the covenant. The custom has persisted in the Orient until recent times, amongst the Arabs for instance, but must have been common generally among earlier people as the Latin words for the male organs and for witnesses shows. Our words for the same things come from the Latin ones, so there is no need to wonder why “testicles” and “testimony”, have the same root.

Mutilated or congenitally deficient men were not fit to meet in the congregation of Yehouah, and disqualified to minister in the holy temples. A man was “an abomination” when his prowess failed, and all social respect went with it. And a woman could not defend her husband in a fight with another man by grabbing his enemy by the balls:

When men strive together one with another, and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand, and taketh him by the secrets, Then thou shalt cut off her hand, thine eye shall not pity her.

Deuteronomy 25:11

Here is another coy euphemism, “the secrets”! The male organ was notionally God’s, and it was an unpardonable sin to humble God by seeking to damage the sacred organ.

As men were inspected in regard to fitness, women were provided in view of that fitness. In Num 31:18, 35, the Word of God says, without a blush, that myriads of captured Midianite virgins were to be retained for the use of the conquering Israelite men:

But all the women children, that have not known a man by lying with him, keep alive for yourselves.

Numbers 31:18

And thirty and two thousand persons in all, of women that had not known man by lying with him.

Numbers 31:35

It is impossible not to smell something disgustingly unsavoury in this, yet Christians want people to read all about it. No wonder they have generally been disgusting themselves.

Female Sexuality in Religion

As Asher and Jupiter were the gods of male potency, so Asherah, Juno and Venus stood for female sexuality. The sistrum of Isis is the virgin’s symbol. The bars across the fenestrum, or opening, are bent so they cannot be taken out, and indicate that the door is closed. It signifies that the woman is still virgo intacta, even if she is a mature goddess with children. The virginity of the Great Mother was a tenet of faith for 2,000 years before the accepted Virgin Mary was adored. The sistrum, in the worship of Isis, was meant to drive away Typhon (Set, Satan, evil).

What then of the biblical arks? The ark symbolized the woman, whereas serpent and pillar symbols related to men. An ark is a vessel. Ships are female. An arga is a boat-shaped dish or plate used as a sacrificial cup in the worship of Astarte, Isis, and Venus, often seen with the crux ansata on Egyptian monuments. It is the Holy Grail. The Greek heroes, the Argonauts sailed in a vessel of the same name, the Argo. Hollow objects like vessels are considered as symbolising a woman’s sexual orifice. The Indian word “argha” is the same as “yoni”, or “yauna” (Juno, Jana, Diana), standing for:

1. the vulva
2. the place of birth
3. the womb
4. origin
5. water
6. a mine, a hole, or pit.

God addresses the people:

Hearken to me, ye that follow after righteousness, ye that seek Yehouah. Look unto the rock whence ye are hewn, and to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged.

Isaiah 51:1

The imagery of the rock and the pit are explicit. Concave objects stood for the feminine organs just as protruding ones stood for the masculine one. Words and figures are veiled so as not to be understood by the multitude, yet significant enough to the initiated. In Deuteronomy 32:1, what is to be understood by the metaphor that God made Jacob “suck honey out of the rock”, and, “of the rock that begat thee thou art unmindful, and hast forgotten God that formed thee”? And in Psalms 81:12, 16, God gave up His people to “their own hearts’s lust”, and thought He should have satisfied them with “honey of the rock”.

The palm-tree, the wine-press, the pomegranate, the tower, steeple, hand gestures, are quite innocent in common conversation, while in myths they have a hidden meaning. Equivalent to Iao, or the Lingam, are Ab, the Father, the Trinity, Asher, Anu, Hea, Abraham, Adam, Esau, Edom, Ach, Sol, Helios (Greek for Sun), Dionysos, Bacchus, Apollo, Hercules, Brahma, Vishnu, Siva, Jupiter, Zeus, Aides, Adonis, Baal, Osiris, Thor, Oden, the cross, tower, spire, pillar, minaret, rock, tolmen, and a host of others. The Yoni was Io, Isis, Astarte, Juno, Venus, Diana, Artemis, Aphrodite, Hera, Rhea, Cybele, Ceres, Eve, Frea, Frigga, the queen of heaven, the oval, the trough, the delta, the door, the argha, the ark, the ship, the chasm, a ring, a lozenge, cave, hole, pit, Celestial Virgin, Holy Grail, and a number of other names. Figurative language says one thing and means two or more.

In the Genesis story of the Flood, Noah saves all the animal life of the world in an Ark. The whole tale of the Ark, with pairs of every living species, is manifestly absurd to everyone except convinced Jews and Christians. It is less so if the Ark is considered to be a primæval womb. So, for Ark, read a mythical primæval womb. In the Ark were the seeds of all living things on earth. The sacred “argha” of Hindu mythology, like the moon in Zoroastrian teaching, carried in itself the germs of all things, explaining what otherwise was incomprehensible in the biblical story. In the Persian myth, the soul of the dying Primæval bull carried all of the germs of everything it contained to the moon to be kept alive by the rays of the sun. The primæval ship called the Ark was the moon—the Persian myth brought to earth. Indeed, the moon was typically a cow-goddess, like Hathor, and her horns stood for the crescent moon in the form of an ark. The Zoroastrian primæval bull, died but left its seed in the moon, here representing a cow! Perfect logic!

The story of Noah’s Ark is therefore part of, or a variation on, a creation myth, but has no Primæval Bull, so how were the germs in it fertilised? According to a non-canonical legend (The Book of the Bee), Noah prayed to the mummified body of Adam within the Ark. The body of Adam was allegedly embalmed and passed by Lamech to Noah who placed it in the center of the Ark as a holy shrine. A mummified Adam is beginning to sound like Osiris. Osiris was often ithyphallic. Thus the “body of Adam” introduced into the shrine by Noah served the function of the penis of Osiris, and, indeed, the “body” of Adam might be simply a euphemism for a phallus. The divine vessel, the Ark, contains within itself the ova of everything on earth waiting to be impregnated when the conditions were again right. The phallus of Adam introduced into the center of the Ark generates all of life on earth after the Flood. It is a metaphor of Nature’s fecundity.

In Babylonian myth, the whole of the world was like a vessel floating on the primæval waters, not a briny ocean, but fresh water that oozed up as fountains, mists, wells and springs. So, the Flood myth simply had the Ark standing for the world, and Noah for a primæval man, showing that here is another Babylonian creation myth. In like fashion, the Indians considered their Argha as the earth—doubtless cognate words. The dove in the biblical myth, in ancient times, was the emblem of love and fruitfulness, always consecrated to Venus in her many temples. The dove was “Yona”, devoted to the feminine (Yoni, Juno). The associated god was Janus, a “god of opening and shutting” associated with water—Ea, Eannes, Ionnes, John. The name “Jonah”, who was swallowed by a fish, in Hebrew, means a dove.

The period spent by the Ark floating on the subterranean uprush of waters properly represents the gestation period of life, though the bible gives 40 days, 150 days, or a total of about a year within the Ark, in a confusing account. The receding of the waters is a metaphor for the bursting of the amniotic sac, and the release of the amniotic fluid preceding birth. Life then emerges from the womb.

Notice the peculiar sequel (Gen 9). Noah was drunk and naked in his tent. Ham had some reason to go in, “saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without”. Perhaps any cheeky youth would find it amusing and tell his brothers, yet God’s heavy curse fell upon the unfortunate Ham and his posterity forever! We are asked to believe that Noah and his offspring were incredibly prudish and sensitive about nakedness in the semi-barbaric period of humanity. Centuries afterwards, David, the great Israelite king, danced naked before all the people and God, with His approval. Prophets stalked the land naked, and were proud of it. But in the most primitive human society, there was a sexual delicacy equal to that of the most refined home in Boston! The rabbis said that what Ham really did was to castrate his father, and consequently Noah dies in the next verse.

Such analysis raises a suspicion that “the ark of the testimony” was a receptacle, representing the female organ, containing male emblems. What was in the ark was a deadly secret, though later priestly writers said that their legendary tables of the law were in it. Critics scorn the idea that the law would be stored in secret, and say that phallic stones must have been in the box. Phallic stones were sacred all over the region, and, on one occasion, when enemies stole the ark, the punishment took the form of widespread venereal sickness, euphemistically and ludicrously translated haemorhoids. Let the punishment fit the crime.

In Exodus (Ex 25:10-27:19, 36:8-38:31) are two long descriptions of the “tabernacle” or tent that was the Hebrew place of worship until Solomon is supposed to have built his wondrous temple. Exodus is a third century BC forgery, fabricated by the Jewish priests and the Egyptian priests of Ptolemaic Egypt to counter the influence of the Babylonian priests. Although this description is so minute and precise that readers of the bible have never had any doubt that it was written at the time when the tabernacle was made, close examination shows not only that the material could not possibly have been obtained by Hebrews in the desert, but that the details of the construction are contradictory and the whole plan impracticable. It is a literary fiction by a priest.

An important point in the account is carefully ignored by clerics. In Exodus 26, the great tent was to have a covering of goats’ skins, of rams’ skins dyed red,and of badgers’ (properly porpoise) skins. These coverings are so drawn over at one end to meet in a closed slit, through which the high priest forces his way dramatically during the great festival. Imagine or draw a sketch of these three layers of skins, with the sheepskin dyed red surmounted by a hairy skin and all drawn over a porpoise skin forming a slit! You might be shocked or amused at the outcome. No one can read these details and not admit the sexual implications.

Clergymen accept that the fictional account is a later description of some sort of large tent for the worship of a holy object called the ark of the covenant when the Israelites were desert nomads and until some sort of temple was built. The priestly writer of Exodus seems to have incorporated and glorified the description of this tent in his piece of fiction. It plainly mimicked the female exterior sexual organs and the priests entered through it as phalli.

The Feast of Tabernacles was just the occasion when this would happen. The Greek writer, Plutarch, described it as a Dionysiac festival, a feast in honour of the Hebrew equivalent of the god Dionysos or Bacchus. It was a harvest festival, which the priests sought to have reinterpreted as a festival celebrating the Israelites’ period in booths or tabernacles in the desert.

Traditionally, like all similar festivals, especially when the harvest is good, it was the baudiest of all Jewish feasts. For seven days the people lived in tents, made of the branches of olive, pine, myrtle, and palm trees, on the roofs of their houses or in the streets and open spaces. Wine and love were, as in harvest festivals all the world over, the chief rites of the great festival. Little bowers of fragrant vine and myrtle branches were inspiring places of retreat for the young folk. There were mysterious libations, which no one now understands, but libations constitute one of the chief and most significant rites of the phallic cult. There was a grand illumination of the women’s court at night. There was continual music and dancing. And there were mysterious wands or rods of intertwined branches to be borne in the hand by everybody, just as in the Greek Bacchanalia, the great feast of wine and sex.

Evidently, the Hebrew religion originally was phallus worship. It was saturated with phallic elements until the ark and its contents mysteriously disappeared in the fifth century when the priests fabricated a more sophisticated religion under the inspiration of Persia and Babylonia. So, an ancient Canaanite phallus worship merged into the Jewish cult imposed by the Persians, and the Jewish cult was modified into the Christian religion. The Old Testament, a second century scissors and paste compilation of earlier legends and fiction with original fiction added, tells us the situation.

The biblical suggestion is that Baal was worshipped as a phallic god. Baal seems to have been a sky or storm god so must have been worshipped in a phallic form as an impregnater. Hadad the Syrian storm god had a phallic form, and so, it seems, did Yehouah, the Canaanite storm god. Phallic gods “open” the womb by breaking a maiden’s hymen, and so are called “the Opener”. Baal-Peor (Num 25:3) is “My Lord the Opener” (of the hymen). The Canaanite Baal was “the Opener”. What do we read for Yehouah, for whom old maidens rather than young ones seem the attraction:

And when Yehouah saw that Leah was hated, he opened her womb, but Rachel was barren.

Genesis 29:31

And God remembered Rachel, and God hearkened to her, and opened her womb.

Genesis 30:22

Hebrew words commmon in the Jewish scriptures confirm it. Chesil is the loins or flanks, where loins is a euphemism for the male genitals. Dodai is loving, amatory. Elkoshi is El my hardness. Enam is the eye or fountain of the mother. Enan is the eye or fountain of On or Anu. Tamar is the palm, a euphemism for the male organ. Gilgal is a wheel, a circle, the sun’s heap of stones, a standing stone as a phallus. The two pillars at the porch of Solomon’s temple were Jachin, he strengthens, and Boaz, with the same phallic meaning. Lucian, who was an Assyrian, and visited the temple of Dea Syria, near the Euphrates, said there were two phalli standing in the porch with this inscription on them, “Those phalli I, Bacchus, dedicate to my step-mother Juno”.

Ahab made a “grove” (1 Kg 16:33) which he placed in the temple in the house of Baal. The word “grove” translates “Asherah” here but Ahab could not have made a copse of trees and put them in the temple. It was an idol or a phallic post or stone. Asa’s mother, Maachah, did the same (1 Kg 15:13) and the king later had it burnt by the brook Qidron, showing it to have been a wooden post or image. Jacob set up a pillar at Bethel (formerly Luz) and poured a libation of oil on to it, calling it “God’s House”, which is the meaning of Bethel. He promised to make Yehouah his god but only on his own terms. God had to be good to him then he would be good to god.

Elsewhere a “grove” is set up under every green tree!

For they also built them high places, and images, and groves, on every high hill, and under every green tree.

1 Kg 14:23

And they set them up images and groves in every high hill, and under every green tree.

2 Kg 17:10

The absurd and deliberate mistranslation of “Asherah” as “grove” is demonstrated unequivocally.

All images of the gods of the nations had to be destroyed according to Deuteronomy 12:2-4 (cf Dt 4:15-16; Lev 26:1):

Ye shall utterly destroy all the places, wherein the nations which ye shall possess served their gods, upon the high mountains, and upon the hills, and under every green tree. And ye shall overthrow their altars, and break their standing pillars, and burn their Asherahs with fire, and ye shall hew down the graven images of their gods, and destroy the names of them out of that place. Ye shall not do so unto Yehouah your God.

There is no instruction here to destroy the altars, pillars, Asherahs and images relating to Yehouah. The pillars and Asherahs of Yehouah were to be left standing. Exodus mentions a cloudy pillar at the entrance to the tabernacle whence Yehouah spoke to Moses. This need only be a wooden pillar with a fire before it. Long caravans through the desert were preceded by a constantly burning brazier to show those trailing behind the way. At temporary stoppings, these had to be kept somewhere, and here it is in front of the tabernacle.

Yehouah particularly, but other gods, were so often spoken of as a stone or a rock that there seems little doubt that the god was seen as a stone or a rock in the popular imagination.

Of the Rock that begat thee thou art unmindful, and hast forgotten God that formed thee.

Dt 32:18

And he shall say, Where are their gods, their rock in whom they trusted, Which did eat the fat of their sacrifices, and drank the wine of their drink offerings? let them rise up and help you, and be your protection.

Dt 32:37-38

Joshua (Josh 24:26-27) invoked a rock and an oak tree as a witness to a covenant.

And Joshua wrote these words in the book of the law of God, and took a great stone, and set it up there under an oak, that was by the sanctuary of Yehouah. And Joshua said unto all the people, Behold, this stone shall be a witness unto us; for it hath heard all the words of Yehouah which he spake unto us: it shall be therefore a witness unto you, lest ye deny your God.

Josh 24:26-27

For who is God, save Yehouah? and who is a rock, save our God?

2 Sam 22:32

Yehouah is my rock, and my fortress, and my deliverer; my God, my strength, in whom I will trust; my buckler, and the horn of my salvation, and my high tower.

Ps 18:2

To shew that Yehouah is upright: he is my rock, and there is no unrighteousness in him.

Ps 92:15

O come, let us sing unto Yehouah: let us make a joyful noise to the rock of our salvation.

Ps 95:1

The second half of Psalms 92 is decided phallic fertility symbolism in its allusions. God is plainly a standing stone in the verse cited. Verse 92:10 is worth considering too. It is translated as:

But my horn shalt thou exalt like the horn of an unicorn: I shall be anointed with fresh oil.

It can better be read as:

But my horn (something projecting) shalt thou exalt (bring up or raise up) like the horn of an unicorn (properly a “wild ox”, a “bull”. Since a wild ox has two horns, what single horn could have been intended here?): I shall be anointed (this word is properly “overflow”!) with fresh oil (the ritual was to use oil for anointing standing stones, but what it symbolises is plain enough).

This is plainly a prayer for masculine sexual vigour.

The Trinity and the Cross

Sexual religion has the proper explanation of the Trinity—the tria juncta in uno—the three in one. The cross in its original form as a taw (T) has three protruberances which constitute the Trinity. It is the image and therefore the symbol of a penis dangling between the testicles. Invert it and it is an erect penis. Each of the three constituents were personified or represented as a god, according to Rawlinson. They were Asher (Assur or Ashur, equated with El, Yeho, Ra, and so on), Anu and Hea. Asher (Gen 30:13) means to be happy or blessed, the happiness it causes. Asher was the Creator and the power of procreation.

Abisha S Hudson, writing as Sha Rocco in The Masculine Cross and Ancient Sex Worship (1874), and more recently repeated by George Ryley Scott (Phallic Worship, 1966), says that the Assyrians called the penis Ashur, their national god therefore plainly being a phallus, but the right testicle was called Anu, and the left testicle Hea. Anu was the sky god, and Hea must be the earth and fresh water god, Ea. The penis here is between heaven and earth and so has the place of the sun which spurts forth its fructifying power.

Beltis (Ishtar) was the Mesopotamian Goddess associated with them, but in Canaan it was Asherah. These four, Asher, Anu, Hea, and Beltis, were Arba, the four great Gods, celebrated in the name of Hebron in Genesis, Kiriath-Arba—the City of the Four. Anu produced masculine seed, and when males were begotten they developed in the right side of the womb.

Interestingly, in Hebrew Anu becomes Oni and so the right testicle is Oni. When the dying Rachel named her last son Benoni, she was not calling him “Son of My Sorrow” but “Son of a Right Testicle”, Ben Oni. Biblical editors, perhaps the Rabbis, were soon at work, and one had Jacob renaming him as Benjamin, meaning “Son of My Right Hand”, not much of an improvement, one might think, but by derivation, “Son of the South”, because the right hand is on the south side of anyone greeting the rising sun.

The male was typified by the idea of firmness or solidity, and the female by softness or fluidity, and water. Rawlinson said Hea corresponded to Neptune who was in the Babylonian pantheon none other than Ea, a name cognate with Yah and so Yehouah. Like Neptune, Ea was the presiding god of the great deep, “Ruler of the Abyss”, and “King of Rivers”, the god in charge of fresh waters generally. The salty oceans were not the deep of Ea. This was the notional ocean of fresh water that the world floated in. The salty oceans were considered the remnants of the primæval Chaos, ruled over by the female dragon, Tiamat, the Tehom of the Jewish scriptures.

The fruit of man is both solid and fluid. It was natural to imagine that the two male appendages had distinct duties. One (Anu) formed the infant, the other (Hea) the water in which it lived. Anu generated the male and the Hea the female, thus water had to be feminine, the emblem of the passive powers of creation. Water signified new birth. John is the same name as Ea (Greek, Oannes) so baptism stands for being “born again”—“born of water”, and it would represent the phenomenon which occurs when the being first emerges into day. Ea is the wet, winter sun, when the days are cool, and the crops are not scorched. It is also the night time sun, when it travels under the ocean to return to the east. The night is favorable to intercourse, and the dark, wet interior of the womb protects the fœtus for many months while the new person is gradually formed.

Lo, children are an heritage of Yehouah: and the fruit of the womb is his reward.

Psalms 127:3

 

Exactly! Asher, Anu, and Hea, three persons and one God, or, as modern theologians say—the Trinity. Inverting the diagram of the triple deities Asher, Anu, Hea yields the ancient taw cross (T) of the Christians, Greeks, and the Israelites—the oldest form of the cross.

The fig-leaf, having three lobes to it, became a symbol of the triad. As the male genital organs signified male creative power, a similarity was seen in various natural objects like a pillar, a heap of stones, a tree between two rocks, a club between two pine cones, a trident, a thyrsus tied round with two ribbons with the two ends pendant, a thumb and two fingers, the caduceus. Asher is symbolized by a single stone placed upright—Gilgal—the stump of a tree, a block, a tower, spire, minaret, pole, pine, poplar or palm tree. While eggs, apples, pomegranates, citrons, plums, grapes, and the like, represented the remaining two portions.

If we are to believe the perverted rantings of Ezekiel against Jerusalem, lewd rituals were performed, some with the triad T. The triad image of Asher, Anu and Hea was made of gold and silver, and was actually used as a dildo, for he says:

Thou hast built thy high place at every head of the way, and hast made thy beauty to be abhorred, and hast opened thy feet to every one that passed by, and multiplied thy whoredoms.

Ezekiel 16:25

Thou hast also taken thy fair jewels of my gold and of my silver, which I had given thee, and madest to thyself images of men, and didst commit whoredom with them.

Ezekiel 16:17

“Images of men” is the usual euphemism, meaning the characteristic organ of men. It was with this cross in the form of the letter T that Ezekiel was directed to stamp the foreheads of the men of Judea who feared the Lord (Ezek 9:4).

If Ashur (Asher) stood for the phallus, then the goddess, Asherah, is logically the vulva. Asher is a tribe of Israel that disappeared. The tribe of Asher began in the mythical history as the most numerous, the largest tribe at Sinai, and highly blest by Jacob (Gen 49:20) and Moses (Dt 33:24-25) yet is ignored in the sacred history. Notionally, the region assigned to Asher was the coastal plain north of Carmel. This is Phoenicia, and it seems that Asher was in the biblical myth the northern Semites of Syria, and Assyria, whose god was, indeed, Assur.

Fissures and openings stood for the vulva, just as pillars stood for an erect penis. Many consider that the “fish” sign used by the first Christians consisting of two opposed curves touching at one end, and crossing slightly at the other, actually is an old symbol for the sexual orifice of a woman.

The fish was a sacred symbol. The statue of Isis with her child Horus has a fish on her head. The ancients took to fish meals because they believed it had aphrodisiac powers. Eating fish for supper on Friday night is a Jewish custom. Fecundity among His people is a blessing specially promised by Yehouah—Asher. Nothing prevents God’s wish from being enhanced by practical measures. Saturday, moreover, was the day set aside for Yehouah. The Jewish Sabbath begins at sunset on Friday. Three meals are taken during the day, prepared with meat and fish, garlic and pepper, which are said to be aphrodisiacs. Joshua was the son of Nun. Nun in Hebrew is the name for fish, but also a woman, or, rather, the sexual area of a woman.

In the scriptures, Baal and Asherah (grove) come into conjunction sometimes:

And the sons of Israel did that which was evil in the sight of Jehovah, and forgot Jehovah their God, and served the Baals and the Asherahs.

Judges 3:7 LitV

For again he rebuilt the high places that his father Hezekiah had broken down, and raised up altars for the Baals, and made Asherahs and bowed himself to all the host of the heavens, and served them.

2 Chronicles 33:3 LitV

And they broke down before him the altars of the Baals, and the images that were on high above them, and he cut down the Asherahs, and the graven images, and the molten images he broke down and beat small, and scattered on the surface of the grave of those who sacrificed to them.

2 Chronicles 34:4 LitV

These pillars and posts were what the Greeks called Hermae, after the phallic god, Hermes, later reduced to a messenger boy. Hermes, one of the primæval gods of antiquity, was the Egyptian Thoth, and the Roman Mercury. It was customary to set up a stone, or “Hermes”, symbolizing a phallus, on the road-side, and each traveller as he passed paid his homage to the deity by either throwing a stone on the heap, or by anointing the upright stone with oil. Moslems have the same ritual but rationalize it as throwing stones at Satan! The Greek Hermes was connected also with the Israelitish God. When Jacob entered into the covenant with his father-in-law Laban, he “rose up early in the morning, and took the stone that he had for a pillow, and set it up for a pillar, and poured oil upon the top of it”. Laban said to Jacob:

Behold this heap, and behold this pillar, which I have cast betwixt me and thee. This heap be witness, and this pillar be witness, that I will not pass over this heap to thee, and that thou shalt not pass over this heap and this pillar unto me, for harm.

Genesis 31:51-52

Here are the Hermae and Hermean heap used by the Greeks, on the public roads, as boundary markers. Scarcely a nation of antiquity did not set up these stones, as emblems of the reproductive power of Nature, and worship them. The custom is found among the ancient Druids of Britain. The Greek historian, Pausanias, says:

The Hermiac statue, which they Venerate in Cyllene above other symbols, is an erect phallus on a pedestal.

Festivals to the god were held in Greece and called Hermaea. The Hermae were at first just roughly hewn upright phallic stones, but later had a carved head and a protruding penis. Careful statues of the god showed him carrying a caduceus, the rod of life, a phallic stick with snakes coiling together on it in coitus. The bible is proof enough that the same forms of worship were practised in Israel. According to Artapanus, the Jews were called Hermioth before they were called Hebrews! Jacob’s pillar was supposedly venerated long afterwards, and Bethel was the center of Canaanitish worship and the main rival to Jerusalem as the center of Judaism. When Jerusalem was chosen in the fifth century, Jacob’s Stone was apprently moved to Jerusalem where pious visitors would anoint it after the fashion of Jacob himself. When Titus took Jerusalem in the Jewish War, the Romans forbade the practice except for once a year on the anniversary of the fall of the city as a measure to stop the Jews from gathering together too often.

Phallism Under Christianity

By the time that Christianity was beginning to emerge in the Roman empire, a reaction against the cult of sex had already been felt throughout the Graeco-Roman world. Apollonius of Tyana, Plutarch, Dio Chrysostom, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Julian, Seneca condemned it, as well as the church fathers. The religions of Mithras, Serapis, and Manichæus, and the philosophies of the Platonists and Neo-Platonists, the Stoics, and the Epicureans, all considered the world too sexually oriented and campaigned for more decorum, and with more success than Christianity, until the church got and used political power. Christianity was bound to denounce phallism because it was in large part a campaign against sexual pleasure, if not all pleasure, and because it did not care a cent about the social aspect of fertility and progeny. Christianity notionally abolished all public manifestations of a phallic cult. It cut the root of phallism, the public love of pleasure, but instituted a reign of private and public squalor and hypocrisy that the likes of Swaggart have continued, to acclaim.

It was a fundamental feature of the early Christian Church that sex was anathema. Even carnal intercourse for reproduction was distasteful and discouraged. The ascetic mind of Paul the Apostle was the funnel for a hatred of sexuality that perverted Christianity for 2000 years, and blighted the lives of millions of people doing perfectly natural things. The source of it was the sexual ascetism of the monkish Essenes from whom Christianity sprang. Jesus loathed sex for sacred reasons, being an Essenian monk, and Paul propagated the same view into the general population for no good reason at all. The Essenes knew that angels were not sexual creatures and that sex had no place in the lives of the immortal beings they aspired to become. They gave it up as an important step from the mortal state to the angelic one. These leading Essenes did not expect others in normal times to eschew sex. They knew it was necessary to the continuation of human life on earth, but they also eagerly expected abnormal times to begin when heaven and earth would unite and only the Perfect, or, the perfectly repentant, would survive.

This was the expectation that Paul spread. His negative message of sexuality for those aspiring to heaven at the eschaton—his Christian converts—became a central element of Christian belief. It immediately got a following among those obliged through circumstances to forgo sexuality—slaves often forbidden to marry, those unable to get partners because they were so ugly through disease or congenitally, barren women who were frowned upon in society, impotent and infertile men, and those with genital injuries and deformities through warfare or venereal disease, and perhaps homosexuals—paradoxically in the light of modern intra-communion squabbles—because lower class Romans, unlike the earlier Greeks, were critical of homosexuality. Among these too were pretty and often wealthy young women who had been forced into an arranged marriage they hated. They could join the Christians and avoid their fate on religious grounds, much to the annoyance of their husbands or fiancés. This seems clear even in the bible, and is clearer in the non-canonical romance about Paul and Thecla.

The unfulfilled sexual energies of some new Christians, however, soon began to exceed their determination, and for several hundred years the agapae or Christian love feasts seem to have blown away the falsely justified prudishness of the Essenes in joyous sexuality, but eventually the Essenism laid down by Paul and produced by the Church as holy scripture reasserted itself in the decrees of the Church Councils.

Christianity began to get power after the conversion of Constantine, in the fourth century. S Jerome, the greatest ascetic of the fourth century, wrote explicitly to the aristocratic Christian ladies of his day. What theologian or preacher would now dare to draw an illustration, as S Augustine did, from the fimus infantis, or say that Priapus was deified propter magnitudinem instrumenti sui? Women no longer sat on the organ of Priapus, but they were driven to the opposite and more deplorable extreme of rejecting love for life under the promise of a certain place in a legendary heaven. Matrons no longer gave each other phallic cakes, but they had to go to church, like criminals, after childbirth to be purified.

The temples and groves of Ephesus, Antioch, Baalbek, Alexandria, were “purified”, meaning that the explicit but priceless works of art in them all were destroyed. By the end of the fourth century the phallic temples had gone up in smoke. By the end of the fifth century the Pagans had mainly ceased to worship Cybele, Astarte, Aphrodite, Isis, Venus, Adonis, Attis, Osiris, Tammuz, Dionysos, and all the rest. Mary was substituted for Cybele-Isis-Ishtar, Jesus replaced Mithras-Tammuz-Osiris. The “pale Galilean”—or, rather, a pale priest at Milan named Ambrose—had conquered. Christianity was an expression of the negative result of phallism, the ascetic reaction against it, and the result was deplorable.

The point about sex in the Christian tradition is that it is the opposite of immortality. Immortal beings like gods and angels do not need to reproduce. The aim of sexual abstinence among the earliest Christians, and perhaps still for some, is to aspire to the angelic state. That was the aim of the Essene leaders, of which Jesus was surely one. Even so, in older traditions, the gods were themselves sexual creatures, and sex must have been something other than for simple reproduction. In the biblical origin story of Adam and Eve, the primæval couple are set in the Garden of Eden with a tree of life and a tree of knowledge, but were forbidden to eat from the latter. The tree of life conferred immortality, but what of the tree of knowledge? Plainly enough, it conferred knowledge, but whatever other knowledge it conferred, the point of the story was it made the pair know about their sexuality. So, the two trees in the Genesis myth counterpoint immortality and sexuality from the beginning. It also suggests that the myth was late, when people could have felt embarassed over nudity, and sexuality. The story has, incidentally, been altered from the Iranian original which had only a single tree, the Tree of Life, and clumsy traces remain of the change.

Christianity has always denigrated and laughed at the notion of a god residing in a carved statue or a standing stone, but ancient people required the idol or other object of devotion to be consecrated first. Chrysostum, Lucian, Cyprian and Tertullian agreed that even a manufactured object like an idol could become the home of the god it represented, once it was consecrated. What then is the difference between this procedure and the consecration of the Catholic host, making it the body of Christ? There is none, except that Christians arbitrarily designated anyone’s god that lived in such an object as the Devil!

Protestants do not need an old book to be specially consecrated for them to treat it as a god. Christians make their vows on this ancient old tome as if it were God Himself, and so it is, so far as they are concerned. The worm-eaten old pages contain the infallible Word of God Himself, the Word being a personified aspect of God, and indeed identified with the Son of God, otherwise know as Jesus Christ. A book is the Christian Saviour, and their Saviour is an outdated book. Moreover, it is somehow imbued with the Holy Spirit, the third aspect of the Christian Trinity. Christians are no less idolatrous than those who decorate their lingam.

And these old habits die hard. Rome officially stamped out the phallic cult, but quietly winked at it everywhere, Joseph McCabe says. When everybody was a Christian if they did not want to smell their own flesh burning, in the Middle Ages, people used phallic images much of the time. The Flagellants of the Middle Ages—the crowds that went about scourging themselves from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries—were sexually masochistic. The dancing mania was an expression of the morbidly repressed sex-sentiment. The vice which spread over the whole clerical world when celibacy was enforced, the almost universal license of nuns and monks, and at the other end of the scale, the fantastic “ecstasies” of nuns like S Catherine and S Teresa and the fearful self-mutilation of holy monks, were all outcomes of the attempt to repress sex.

The concern of the early Church with phallus worship was shown by its decrees. The Council of Arles (452) forbade anyone from worshipping trees or stones and declared that anyone who did not destroy such objects of worship would be guilty of sacrilege. A hundred years on, the Council of Tours was still concerned about it, and made the threat of punishment excommunication. Another century or so passed and the Council of Toledo (681 AD) decried tree and stone worshipping yet again, calling it “Devil worship”. In 789, Chalemagne was still condemning it! Despite it all, churches in Embrun, Puy-en-Valay, Poligny, Auxerre, Orange, Aix, Le Chatelot, and doubtless many other places still had phallic objects of veneration until after the Reformation.

Michael Harrison cites Professor Geoffrey Webb, Secretary of the Royal Committee on Historic Monuments, who had to survey the war damage done to historic buildings in the UK and in Europe. A bomb had knocked aside the altar stone of one church thus revealing hidden under it a ritual phallus. Webb thereafter made a point of checking ancient churches for the presence of a phallus similarly hidden, finding that 90 per cent of churches built before the Black Death had them. Guy R Phillips, the Yorkshire antiquarian, found on requesting it that all of this evidence had disappeared, both the reports and the relics, and no old British churches proudly display any phalli found under their altars as curiosities of a bygone age. Webb unquestionably wrote reports that the British Civil Service knew about but could not find, even his reports on Europe. Phillips, in his own survey of of old British churches (The Unpolluted God, 1987) found that few pre-1348 churches still had their original stone altars in place. Most had wooden tables, often Jacobaean, but a few had had their stone altars restored. None, or very few, seemed to have been left undisturbed.

Ancient phallic idols had been turned into Christian saints, and had become objects of intense veneration. Women would rub off a few particles of the phallic object and drink them with water or wine, or simply hung garlands round it in Indian fashion, or they poured wine over the phallus and called it “holy vinegar”. Amongst the holy relics in the sacristy of some French churches was a withered thing that the priests said was the phallus of some holy saint and the end of it was red with the libations of wine which pious women had poured upon it.

G J Witkowski wrote Les License de l’Art Chrétien, and other books, in which he can “leave no doubt as to the connexion of Phallicism with Christianity”, thus disabusing those Christians who think the distringuishhing feature of it is its “essential sex-purity”.

In the great temple of Aphrodite at Paphos, in Cyprus, a white conical stone, anointed in feast-days, was the emblem of the goddess. As late as 1896 the peasants of the district were still, once a year, solemnly anointing the corner stones of the ruined temple of Aphrodite! They recited charms, and made passes through perforated stones, to remove the barrenness of their women and increase the virility of their men. Moslems and Christians joined in the phallic rites, and both said that they did this “in honour of the maid of Bethlehem”. The Holy Spirit is a dove, the emblem of the phallic goddess, because it is the third and female part of the Trinity. It was the Phallic goddess, but doubtless was not by the time of Jesus.

The most orgiastic of the phallic cults originally, that of Dionysos, came to Greece from Thrace, which was then a part of primitive, barbaric Europe. Yet, as late as the year 1906, the Greek Christians in the village round Viza, which is the old capital of Thrace (Bizye), had annually a kind of sacred drama or pantomime, in which the chief performer had a large wooden phallus. Girls represented “brides”, and he chased them, and captured and “married” one. He and the girl then danced “obscenely” in the streets and collected money, and the whole affair ended in a general orgy.

At the other end of Europe, in Scandinavia, the phallus similarly figured in popular plays until recent times. In Ireland the female figure pointing to or contemplating her pudenda, known to Celtic scholars as Sheela-na-gig (variously spelt), was often inserted in the keystone of the arch of the church-door—to avert the evil eye. One was exhibited in the Royal Irish Academy at Dublin. Some of these images still remain, yet the police will arrest anyone who displays the real thing. There were similar figures on churches in Britain and in Spain. The Reformation has destroyed most of them, but one survived in Herefordshire and another in Cornwall.

Perhaps relevant is an incident in the myth of Demeter acted out at Eleusis. This story is told by Arnobius and Clemens Alexandrinus. Demeter, overcome with grief for the loss of her daughter, Kore, arrived at the hut of an Athenian peasant woman named Baubo, who received her hospitably. The woman offered her the sacred brew of Eleusis called kykeon, but the goddess was too grief stricken to accept. Baubo sought some way to cheer up her guest. She shaved her pubic area and exposed it suddenly for Demeter to see. At this sudden sight, the goddess erupted in laughter, and thoroughly cheered up, drank the kykeon. Perhaps this was a bit of light relief in the solemnity of the ritual at Eleusis, but it seems more likely that it was considered a good charm. Small statuettes exactly like the Shelah-na-Gig are found all over the world apparently effective against curses and the evil-eye. Other cultures have ben known to put these crude images over doors for protection, but the images over time became styled and finished up looking just like a horse shoe. By this time, people were assuming that is what it was, and took to nailing up actual horse shoes.

There are phallic stones still surviving in many parts of England. On Trendle Hill, is the figure, cut in the turf, of the “Cerne Giant”, one hundred and eighty feet long, a nude giant with monstrous phallus and a club (another symbol of a phallus). It is traditionally scoured every seven years. Every English village once had its “May-Pole”, which was originally phallic.

Communion

The idea involved in communion is the reception of something from God. By prayer, man asks something, by purification, he makes himself meet to approach God, by communion, he receives what he desires of deity by union with him.

S Baring Gould

Different religions accomplish communion by different methods. Priests who make and expound the laws, which they declare to be from God, are men, and think of the gratification of men through religion. The simplest and most natural way of achieving communion is by sexual intercourse. The legends and myths of the union of gods and women (Gen 6:2), or men and goddesses, are justification for ancient communions. Herodotus says, at the summit of the temple of Bel was a chamber with a bed beside a golden statue. Each night, a woman was laid in this bed, to which the God descended. Egyptian Thebes and Patara in Lycia were similar—a priestess was locked into the temple every night. Diodorus alludes to the tombs of the concubines of Jupiter Ammon, and Strabo says the fairest and noblest ladies were vowed to share his couch. S Christina, a virgin and abbess, believed herself to have received favours which left her no longer a virgin.

In Assyrian, “shaga” is a feast. Feasts and holy days were devoted to this passion, and generally concluded with excess. Diodorus Siculus says:

Our gala or solar days begin with fasting as a prelude to another form of sensual enjoyment.

At Athens, Corinth, and elsewhere, the temples of Venus were supported by groups of women, who consecrated themselves, or were dedicated by their parents, to the use of the male worshippers. The custom of women waiting in the temple to act as a temple prostitute for passing men appears in the Jewish scriptures in 1 Samuel 2:22, where “the sons of Eli lay with the women that assembled at the door of the tabernacle of the congregation”. In pre-temple days, the tabernacle of the Hebrews is the same as the temple of the Assyrians. In both, the holy presence of God was made manifest to the pious congregations. Women who consecrated themselves in this way were called Qadeshoth, Holy Ones! Common prostitution has another Hebrew word, “zanah”. Qadeshim were male prostitutes in the temple.

Consuming food was another way of achieving communion, and often the food reflected the sexual approach. Cakes made of figs were used in the worship of Baal. The buns known by that name (boun, made of flour and honey, according to Diogenes Laertius) shaped as sexual organs, or having horns at each end (Julius Pollux), were used in the worship of the Queen of Heaven, the Goddess Easter (Ishtar or Astarte), as early as the days of Cecrops, the founder of Athens, 1,500 years before the Christian era. Jeremiah the prophet was familiar with this worship:

The children gather wood, the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead the dough to make cakes to the Queen of Heaven.

Jeremiah 7:18

The Greeks changed the final “nu” into a “sigma” in the nominative, expressing it “bous”, a word which becomes “bouc” with a Cyrillic “s”, billy-goat in French, a priapic animal and supposedly the god of the witches. An Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic festival was held in April, and was transformed by the Catholic church into the great Christian religious feast. It was called Easter, because the Teutons had a goddess named, in Old German, Ostara—Eastre or Eostre, in Anglo-Saxon. Nothing is known about her except that she must have been a highly honoured Teutonic deity, and her festival must have been deeply implanted in the popular psyche for the church to have identified it with the main Christian festival of the year. Romans considered April as dedicated to Venus, no doubt because the productive power of nature began to be seen afresh, and Eastre is so obviously the same Aryan word as Ishtar.

Among objects offered to the goddess were cakes but nothing more is known about them. The Christians adopted the habit and perhaps Christianized it by adding a cross to the buns, although crosses were used to decorate cakes dedicated to Mithras, and doubtless many others. The original Easter cakes might have been in the form of a phallus. Martial made the subject of two of his epigrams a phallus of bread made of the best flour, and a similar bun resembling a vulva.

In Saintonge, near La Rochelle, small cakes baked in the form of a phallus were made as offerings at Easter, carried and presented from house to house. The festival of Palm Sunday, in the town of Saintes, was called le fete des pinnes—the feast of the penises. Palm is a euphemism of the male organ, and here it was united with an actual phallus in Christendom. Women and children each carried in procession a phallus made of bread, which they called a pinne, at the end of their palm branches. These pinnes were blessed by the priests, and carefully preserved by the women during the year. Palm Sunday! Cakes symbolizing the male were made in Lower Limousin, and especially at Brives, while cakes of female form were baked at Clermont, in Auvergne, and elsewhere when Delaure described them about 1825. A similar practice existed at S Jean-d’Angély, where small cakes, made in the form of the phallus, and named “fateux”, were carried in the procession of the Fête-Dieu, or Corpus Christi. This practice was suppressed about 1800.

In Italy wax phallic images were, on the saint’s great feast day, sold to women by the thousand and presented by them, unblushing, to the priests. At Isernia, in the Abruzzi, there used to be a popular festival every year on the feast of Cosmas and Damian, saints of Pagan origin. People flocked from all parts, particularly barren women and people with venereal disease. The stalls in the streets were covered with phallic images in wax, and the women bought them and presented them in church. Men and women with venereal disease bared themselves, and were smeared by the priests with the holy oil of the saints. This went on, and had gone on from time immemorial, until the Vatican interfered in 1780.

At Alatri, there are phalli on the walls of the buildings. Women and girls in the crowd wore little gold phalli as amulets, in the ancient form of a closed fist with the thumb peeping out between the first and second fingers (the fico). This phallic gesture is still used by Italians. In the Portici Museum, there is an old altar vessel with a woman embracing a phallus engraved on it. At Trani a Priapean figure, known as “the holy member” figured until recently in the carnival.

All are remnants of the medieval past which the church is now hiding. How extensive the cult of Priapus was in the Middle Ages is best seen in France, where the Protestantism of the Huguenots called our attention to it. In the south of France, Provence, Languedoc, and the Lyonnais, Priapus was worshipped as S Foutin. The saint was said to have been Photinus, the first Christian bishop of Lyons, and his cult spread over the entire region. At Embrun, in the department of the Upper Alps, an actual preserved phallus, supposed to be of S Foutin de Varailles, was worshipped by the women pouring a libation of wine upon its head, which was collected in a vessel, in which it was left till it became sour. It was then called “holy vinegar”, used for no one quite knows what. When the Protestants took Embrun in 1585, this phallus was laid up carefully among the relics in the church, its head red with the wine which had been poured upon it.

Elsewhere women scraped the wooden member, and, having steeped the scrapings in water, drank them to cure their barrenness, or gave it to their husbands to make them vigorous. Wax models of S Foutin’s celebrated organ were everywhere. In some southern French towns, like Varailles in Provence, wax models of male organs in bunches, and female ones, hung from the rafters of the church such that when a wind blew, the worshippers complained the rattling disturbed them.

About 20 km from Clermont in Auvergne, there was a rock like an immense phallus, popularly called S Foutin. S Foutin was similarly an object of worship at Porigny, at Cives in the diocese of Viviers, at Vendre in the Bourbonnais, at Auxerre, at Puy-en-Velay, in the convent of Girouet near Sampigny, and in other places. Sex cakes were sold and exchanged as freely as in ancient Greece. Barren women used to go out to the ancient (Neolithic) standing stones and rub against them, though any upright stone would do, and in places the statues of the saints were found more convenient.

Elsehwere an ordinary image of a saint might have the phallic function of opening the womb of infertile women through an embrace. One saint, lying on his back, had hopeful women stretched prone upon him in a tight embrace. S Rene of Anjou, and S Guerlichon, or Greluchon, at Bourg-Dieu in the diocese of Bourges, seem to have been ithyphallic because their lack of modesty is mentioned—albeit modestly—in some accounts. It seems S Guerlichon was an ancient ithyphallic statue so popular that the monks had to Christianize it and give it a legend. Women scraped a little off his phallus and drank it in water.

In many places in France and Belgium phallic saints survived. S Ters in Belgium, S Gilles in the Cotentin peninsula in Brittany, S Rene of Anjou, S Regnaud in Burgundy, S Arnaud, S Guignolé near Brest and at the village of La Chatelette in Berri, and other famous saints of “the land of saints” grew out of old ithyphallic statues. In Antwerp, Belgium, Abraham Golnitz, in 1631, confrms a story by Goropius Becanus that over the door of a house adjoining the prison was a statue in stone, about a foot high, with its arms raised up, and its legs spread out, and with a large phallus, even then worn away or broken off by the women, who had been in the habit of scraping it and making a potion of the dust which they drank as a preservative against barrenness.

At Brest, the statue of S Guignolé had a wooden pole passing through it emerging in a suggestive spot. Hopeful women would scrape the end of the pole for a few splinters so that it gradually wore away, but periodically the canons of the church could effect a miracle with a sharp blow to the end of the rod protruding to the rear of the statue. So, the saint’s virtue never diminished! S Arnaud wore an apron, which was lifted only for barren women. At Orange, in the church of S Eutropius, a large wooden phallus covered with leather, was greatly venerated and sought. It was seized by the Protestants and burnt publicly in 1562.

In a corner in the church of the village of S Fiacre, near Mouceaux in France, was a stone called the chair of S Fiacre, which confers fecundity upon women who sit upon it, but nothing must intervene between their bare skin and the stone. In the church of Orcival in Auvergne, was a pillar which barren women kissed for the same purpose, probably an innocent substitute for a former phallus.

That women went so far as to allow a phallic saint to take their virginity seems certain from the French proverb for a woman who has lost her virginity—“she has left her virginity on the altar of S Foutin”. From this nuns were understood to have used dildos, initially as a religious ceremony (cf Ezek 16:17). The Ecclesiastical Penitentials of the middle ages confirm it then by specifying the penance for it. One such canons of the eighth century speaks of “a woman who, by herself or with the help of another woman, commits uncleanness”, for which she was to do penance for three years, one on bread and water, and if this sin was committed with a nun, the penance was increased to seven years, two on bread and water. Burchardus, bishop of Worms, describes the phallus and use of it in detail.

Dulaure (1825) relates that one day a villager’s wife entering the church of Orcival in the Auvergne, and finding only a burly canon in it, asked him earnestly, “Where is the pillar which makes women fruitful?” “It is I,” said the canon, “I am the pillar.” Such practices saved the face of impotent and infertile men, who could nevertheless have sons with no disgrace on them. Indeed, in Christianity, the prince and noble was added to the priest as having God’s special protection leading to the law of Jus Primae Noctis.

Christians looked to Jesus and Mary to remove their barrenness as a rule. The ancient phallic cults had died with their gods, but the gods had been resurrected as phallic saints and their attendant canons keen to serve their public. Certainly the death of the phallic gods and their rites did not improve the sexual behaviour of the Europeans in charge of the churches, even if it did the others. More on Phallic saints#Saints in Thomas Wright.

Christian Chastity

Christianity is considered particularly effective in checking the sex-impulses of men and women, yet people were most frankly and unrestrainedly sexual whenever they believed most confidently in the authoritative character and dire penalties of the Christian ethic. The Christian Era, before our un-Christian days, reeks with sexual license from the fifth century to the nineteenth.

Joseph McCabe says that John Buchara, the Papal Master of Ceremonies, in his private Diary, describes how Pope Alexander VI was entertained by fifty of the loveliest prostitutes of the Holy City dancing naked before him and his court, stooping in every posture to pick up chestnuts from the floor as their lithe forms shone in the light of the candles. Cesare Borgia provided these exotic entertainments. The model who sat for a painting in the Vatican of the Virgin painted by Pinturecchio was Giulia Farnese, the the pope’s golden-haired young sweetheart. Already, the word model had its modern connotation. The notion that Christianity has been a special guardian of purity of women is a joke.

Our generation is more sexual than many, but if the Christian ethic was ineffective when Christianity was strongest, how will it work now? How often do the clergy figure in your daily paper in connection with sexual offenses? Do you find professors, doctors, or lawyers in the same position as frequently as you find clergymen? Surely not. If some person with plenty of leisure cared to compile the lists of cases, he would find that these clerical guardians of our chastity figure in the daily press for sex-irregularities three times as frequently as any other correspondingly large body of professional men. The clergy are far more immoral than teachers, doctors, or lawyers, and Catholic priests are more immoral than Protestant clergymen. A large number of the Popes themselves were notoriously immoral, and some homosexual despite the supposed gravity of this particular sin, and the license of prelates, priests monks and nuns has been colossal.

Where is the foundation of a law of chastity? The law of chastity is “priestly morality” and “emanates from religion”. European-American civilization bows to it in theory only because Christ endorsed it. He did not invent it. Every moralist of those centuries, from Pythagoras to Marcus Aurelius, urged it. Three thousand years earlier Egyptians had prayed to Osiris, “I am pure, I am pure, I am pure”.

The real evolution of the idea has never been traced. In its earlier form it was simply—for Egyptians, Babylonians, Jews, etc—“Thou shalt not covet thy neighbour’s wife”, it did not forbid concubines and harlots. In the first millennium before Christ, however, priestly and philosophical ascetics arose everywhere, and “chastity” declared. The more philosophers glorified the spirit, the more the flesh was depreciated. The Essenes of Palestine got these ideas from the Persians, and Jesus got them from the Essenes, and two thousand years later this marvelous scientific civilization of ours, this generation which cuts off the heads of kings and boasts of its independence, bows down to the habits of an Essenic zealot leader.

If Jesus was not divine, he may have blundered on this point as he did in regard to the end of the world. There is no such law. The Old Testament authoritatively forbids only adultery, and married folk should keep their contract as long as they hold each other to it. The belief in a God has in itself nothing to do with the matter. Just imagine the Almighty taking an interest in the copulations of mortals. It makes him sound perverted. Yet to disapprove of it he must observe it. Christians do not see the humour of this. And then who made us in His own image?

The law of chastity is based on the Christian and Jewish scriptures, that most modern scholarship regard as pious fiction. Even if they do give the words of Jesus, which is hardly credible, his authority has gone. Social law can be worked out without the entanglement of laws “emanating from and grounded on religion”. Christians no doubt should observe their own law—though most of them never did, and half of them do not now, and never will—but when they invoke “the voice of conscience” and “the universal moral sense”, they talk psychological rubbish, and non-Christians told they are bound by these same laws may justly tell them to mind their own business. Anyone’s feeling of obligation is the plain product of education and environment and faithfully reflects them.

Sensual people were never good Christians. Christians can be fond of good cheer and even good liquor, but it is not the ideal of Jesus and Paul. Those who indulged their senses were more apt to be tempted and to “sin”. Yet someone can be sensual yet perfectly refined and of high character. Sensuality, not gluttony or any excess, is neither coarse nor vulgar, and adds to the happiness and geniality of life, having no injurious effect whatever on intellect or character. What stops anyone from being lusty in sensual enjoyment, yet delicate in taste and sentiment, intelligent and sweet in character? Against those Fundamentalists that take literally the command to multiply—and take this as religious license to exploit their women to the limit of their health—promiscuity out of choice could hardly be worse. Not sensuality, but refinement is what we need to recommend to them.

Ask the moralists and preachers to count up the misery and suffering their law of chastity has caused and causes all over the world today, all the joy that mortals might have had in their brief lives and the clergy have persuaded them to sacrifice for an illusory heaven, all the dreary waiting and anemia and nervous disease, all the sourness of disappointment and the feverish anxiety to secure a mate. Reflect on the ghastly havoc that lies behind all this hollow rhetoric about “the Christian purity of our women”. Religion alone can sustain the law of chastity. The only thing that superstition can sustain is superstition.

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