Christianity
Thomas Wright, the Worship of the Generative Powers
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Monday, 22 February 2010
Roman Worship of Priapus
Worship of sex and fertility is among the most ancient superstitions of the human race, prevailing among most peoples before the introduction of Christianity. Even then it continued to exist, accepted and often encouraged by the medieval clergy, and still prevailed at Isernia in the kingdom of Naples in the eighteenth century. The town of Isernia was destroyed, and many killed, in the earthquake which devastated the kingdom of Naples on the 26 July, 1805, nineteen years after the appearance of Payne Knight’s famous book on phallic worship, but even he did not know that this superstition existed throughout Southern and Western Europe during the Middle Ages.
The medieval worship of the power of sex, represented by the sexual organs, was derived from two separate sources. First, Rome carried into the her provinces Roman institutions and forms of worship and established them permanently. The worship of the god Priapus—the penis—is multiply confirmed from the provinces of Rome from monuments and findings identical to those found in Italy. Among the remains of Roman civilization in Gaul are statues or statuettes of Priapus, altars dedicated to him, gardens and fields entrusted to his care, and the phallus, the penis, figured in a variety of shapes as a protecting power against various evil influences.
Sculptured on the walls of public buildings, placed in conspicuous places in the interior of the house, worn as an ornament by women, and suspended as an amulet to the necks of children, it was a charm against harm. Erotic scenes of the most extravagant description covered vessels of metal, earthenware, and glass, intended for festivals connected with the worship of fecundity, and for common usage because sex was not alarming, but was considered important and valuable.
An enormous phallus, encircled with garlands, sculptured in white marble, was found at Aix in Provence, on the site of the ancient baths. At Le Chatelet, in Champagne, on the site of a Roman town, another colossal phallus was also found. Similar objects in bronze, and of smaller dimensions, are common on Roman sites, and examples abound in museums of Roman antiquities. Phallic worship appears to have flourished especially at Nimes (Nemausus) in the south of France, where the phallus was sculptured on the walls of the amphitheatre and on other buildings, often fanciful or playful forms.
The first is a double phallus, sculptured on the lintel of one of the rows of seats of the Roman amphitheatre, near the southern entrance gate. The double and the triple phallus are common among the small Roman bronzes, which served as amulets and for other similar purposes. One phallus is the body, and usually has the legs of a goat. A second is where the penis should be, between the legs, and a third is a tail. Such a triple phallus appears on a pilaster of the amphitheatre of Nimes. A small bell is suspended from the smaller phallus in front, and the larger organ which forms the body has wings. The picture is completed by the introduction of three birds, two pecking the head of the principal phallus, while the third holds down the tail with its foot.
Several examples of these triple phalli occur in the Musee Secret of the Antiquities of Herculaneum and Pompeii. An example has the hind part of the main phallus in the form of a dog. To most of them are attached small bells, their explanation yet uncertain. Wings also are common attributes of the phallus in these monuments. Plutarch is quoted as an authority for the explanation of the triple phallus as intended to signify multiplication of its productive faculty.
On the top of another pilaster of the amphitheatre at Nimes, to the right of the principal western entrance, was a bas relief, also representing a triple phallus, with legs of dog, and winged, but with a woman, dressed in the Roman stola, standing upon the phallus forming the tail, and holding both it and the one forming the body with a bridle. This bas relief was taken down in 1829, and is now preserved in the museum of Nimes.
Another remarkable example was found at Nimes in 1825. It is a bird, perhaps a vulture, with spread wings and phallic tail, sitting on four eggs, each of which represents the female organ. A similar design sometimes occurs among Gallo-Roman antiquities. The triple phallus controlled by the woman appeared in bas relief also on a small bronze plate in a private collection in London, with a duplicate, cast from the same mould, meant to be suspended from the neck. The woman here bridles only the principal phallus. The legs are again those of a bird, and it is standing upon three eggs, standing for the females sexual organ.
Another monument at Nimes of what seems to have been an open worship, was found while excavating the Roman baths. It is a squared stone, the four sides of which are covered with figures of the sexual characteristics of the female, arranged in rows. It must have been the pedestal of a statue, or an altar. It is in the museum at Nimes. Nimes seems to have been a center of priapic worship in the south of Gaul, but other centers existed even to the northern extremities of the province and across the Rhine. Pottery and other objects found in quantity on the site of Roman settlements near Xanten, in lower Hesse, proved the prevalence of phallus worship there. The Roman settlement of Antwerp was a main center of the worship of Priapus in the north of Gaul, and there it continued until early modern times.
Phallic worship is also found in Britain. Statuettes of Priapus, phallic bronzes, pottery covered with pictures considered obscene in our prudish view, conditioned by Christianity, are found wherever extensive remains of Roman occupation are found. The many phallic figures in bronze, in England, are like those in France and Italy. The triple phallus shown as an example was an amulet in great favour, according to Plutarch. In the first, found in London in 1842, again a principal phallus forms the body, having the hinder parts apparently of a dog, with wings of the form, perhaps, of a dragon. Several small rings are attached, probably for suspending bells. The second example, found at York in 1844, also suggests that the hinder parts were meant to be those of a dog.
Many priapic subjects appear among the fine red pottery called Samian ware, found abundantly throughout Roman Britain. They show erotic scenes of promiscuous intercourse between the sexes, including homosexuality, with figures of Priapus, and phallic emblems. An example is a Samian bowl found in Cannon Street, London, in 1828. Found with it was an oil lamp, of phallic shape, of earthenware, decorated with such scenes. The subject of this lamp, found in London in the mid nineteenth century is plain. Such objects were for special occasions, festivals, perhaps, like those described in in the satires of Juvenal, but they are not uncommon.
The parish of Adel north of Leeds, Yorkshire, was important in Roman times. Temples with altars were found there and stones with inscriptions. They werer placed in the museum of the Leeds Philosophical Society. One was a votive offering to Priapus, but under the name Mentula. A rough, unsquared stone had been selected for its tolerably flat and smooth surface, then the figure and letters were made with a rude implement, but by someone too unskilled to cut a continuous smooth line. The figure of a phallus occupied the middle of the stone, and the inscription seemed to read Priminus Mentalae, “Priminus to Mentula”. Priminus maybe wanted an heir, or had some sexual infirmity, so dedicated his crude stone to the god, a local Priapus, whose assistance he sought. Another suggestion is that Mentla, or perhaps Mentila or Mentilla, might be the name of a woman joining with her husband in this offering for their common good. It is rather late in the Roman period.
Westerwood Fort in Scotland, one of the Roman fortresses on the wall of Antoninus, has also yielded a votive object, a square slab of stone, in the middle of which was a phallus, and under it the words EX : VOTO. Above were the letters XAN, meaning, perhaps, that the offerer had laboured ten years under the grievance of which he sought redress from Priapus.
At Housesteads, in Northumberland, are the extensive remains of one of the Roman stations on Hadrian’s Wall named Borcovicus. The walls of the entrance gateways are especially well preserved. On that of the guard house attached to one of them is a slab of stone with the figure shown on Plate IV, fig 3. It is a rude outline of a phallus with the legs of a fowl. These phallic images were no doubt carved in such situations to protect the locality or the building. Whoever saw the phallus thought himself safer for it.
The God of the Teutons, Frea
Phallic worship was part of the religion of the Teutons. Ihre, in his Glossarium Sueco Gothicum, mentions objects of antiquity dug up in the north of Europe, which show the prevalence of phallic rites. The Teutonic god equivalent to the Roman Priapus, was called Frea in Anglo-Saxon, Freyr in Old Norse, and Fro in Old German. Among the Swedes, the main center of his worship was Upsala, and Adam of Bremen, who lived in the eleventh century, when the north was still pagan, describing how the gods were represented there, tells us that “the third of the gods at Upsala was Fricco [another form of the name], who bestowed on mortals peace and pleasure, and who was represented with an immense priapus”. He adds that they offered sacrifice to Fricco at the celebration of marriages. So this god, like the Priapus, presided over generation and fertility, either of animal life or of the produce of the earth, and was invoked accordingly.
To this god, or to his female equivalent, the Teutonic Venus, Friga, the fifth day of the week was dedicated, and so was named Frige-daeg in Anglo-Saxon—Friday in modern English. Frea himself was apparently called Frigedaeg in Anglo-Saxon. In a charter of 959 AD, printed in Kemble’s Codex Diplomaticus, a boundary marker on an area of land is Frigedaeges-Treow, “Friday’s Tree”, presumably meaning Frea’s tree, a tree dedicated to the god, perhaps the scene of priapic rites.
There is a place called Fridaythorpe in Yorkshire, and Friston, a name which occurs in several parts of England, means, probably, the stone of Frea or of Friga. It seems likely that names commencing with the syllable “Fri” or “Fry”, are relics of phallic worship among the Anglo-Saxon forebears of the English. Two old English popular customs might be derived from this worship, the “need fires”, and the procession of the boar’s head at the Christmas festivities. The former were fires kindled at the period of the summer solstice. The boar was intimately connected with the worship of Frea.
Phallic Worship in the Middle Ages
The phallic practices of the middle ages might have been mainly derived from the Roman worship of Priapus of the Teutonic worship of Frea, or both. In Italy and in the southern parts of Gaul, Roman influence remained strong, so the phallic customs will have been more Roman. Though the records of such a worship are accidental and imperfect, the phallus was worshipped by medieval Christians, and forms of Christian prayer and invocation were addressed to it.
One name of the male organ among the Romans was fascinum. A fascinum was suspended round the necks of women and children, and it was believed to possess magical influences which acted on others and defended anyone under its protection from magical and evil outside influences, whence the words “to fascinate” and “fascination”. The word is used by Horace, especially in the epigrams of the Priapeia, which expound the popular creed in these matters.
It seems to have become the popular or vulgar word for the phallus at the close of the Roman period, for in the first clear signs of its worship afterwards it has this name, in the French form fesne. The medieval worship of the fascinum is first spoken of at the end of the eighth century. An ecclesiastical tract entitled Judicia Sacerdotalia de Criminibus, directs that “if any one has performed incantation to the fascinum, or any incantation whatever, except any one who chaunts the Creed or the Lord’s Prayer, let him do penance on bread and water during three lents.”
An act of the council of Chalons, held in the ninth century, prohibits the same practice in almost the same words, and Burchardus repeats it again in the twelfth century, a proof of its persistence. The statutes of the synod of Mans, held in 1247, similarly enjoin the punishment for him “who has sinned to the fascinum, or has performed any incantations, except the creed, the pater noster, or other canonical prayer”. This same provision was renewed in the statutes of the synod of Tours, held in 1396, in which the Latin fascinum is the French fesne, they being published in French. The fascinum to which such worship was directed must have been something more than a small amulet.
The worship of the priapus engaged the attention of ecclesiastical synods for a long time in Western Europe. Plainly it was continuing. One object of it was to have fertile animals and plants—as well as wives and husbands—for Priapus was the god of the horticulturist and the agriculturist. S Augustine, declaiming against the open obscenities of the Roman festival of the Liberalia, says that an enormous phallus was carried in a magnificent chariot into the middle of the public place of the town with great ceremony, whereupon the most respectable matron advanced and placed a garland of flowers “on this obscene figure”, and this, he says was done to appease the god, and “to obtain an abundant harvest, and remove enchantments from the land”.
The Chronicle of Lanercost records that, in the year 1268, a pestilence prevailed in the Scottish district of Lothian, which was very fatal to the cattle, to counteract which some of the clergy taught the peasantry to make a fire by the rubbing together of wood—a need fire—and to raise up the image of Priapus, as a means of saving their cattle.
When a lay member of the Cistercian order at Fenton had done this before the door of the hall, and had sprinkled the cattle with a dog’s testicles dipped in holy water, and complaint had been made of this crime of idolatry against the lord of the manor, the latter pleaded in his defence that all this was done without his knowledge and in his absence, but added, “while until the present month of June other people’s cattle fell ill and died, mine were always found, but now every day two or three of mine die, so that I have few left for the labours of the field”.
Fourteen years after this, in 1282, an event of the same kind occurred at Inverkeithing, in the county of Fife in Scotland. The cause of the following proceedings is not stated, but it was probably the same as that for which the cistercian of Lothian had recourse to the worship of Priapus. In the Easter week of the year just stated (29 March-5 April), a parish priest of Inverkeithing, named John, performed the rites of Priapus, by collecting the young girls of the town, and making them dance round the figure of this god. Without any regard for the sex of these worshippers, he carried a wooden image of the male members of generation before them in the dance, and himself dancing with them, he accompanied their songs with appropriate movements, and urged them to licentious actions by his no less licentious language. The more modest ones present felt scandalized with the priest, but he treated their words with contempt, and uttered coarser obscenities. He was cited before his bishop, defended himself upon the common usage of the country, and was allowed to retain his benefice. But he must have been rather a worldly priest, after the style of the middle ages, for a year afterwards he was killed in a vulgar brawl.
This brings us to the close of the fourteenth century. The Roman practice of placing the figure of a phallus on the walls of buildings continued into the middle ages. It was considered a protection against enchantments of all kinds, and, people then lived in constant terror of witchcraft. The protection extended over the place and over those who frequented it provided they looked confidingly upon the image. The buildings especially placed under the influence of this symbol were churches. Such images were seen, usually upon the portals, on the cathedral church of Toulouse, on more than one church in Bourdeaux, and on various other churches in France, but, during the French revolution, many were destroyed as marks of the depravity of the clergy. Allegedly drawings of them had been made previously (Dulaure). Meanwhile, a Christian saint had inherited some of the qualities of Priapus. S Nicholas (Santa Claus!) was often painted in a conspicuous position in the church. Whoever looked upon it was protected against enchantments, and the evil eye for the rest of the day.
Shelah-na-Gig
In Ireland, it was the female organ which was shown in this position of protector upon the churches, and, from the elaborate though rude manner in which these figures were sculptured, they were considered objects of importance. They showed a woman exposing herself to view in the most unequivocal way, crouching and holding open her vulva, and are carved on a block which appears to have served as the keystone to the arch of the doorway of the church, so that everyone who entered could hardly miss her. They are found principally in the old churches, and most of them have now been taken down. People have called them Shelah-na-Gig, which is, in Irish, a term for an immodest woman, but they were meant as charms against the fascination of the evil eye.
The first was in an old church at Rochestown, in county Tipperary, placed in the arch over the doorway. It has been removed. The second was taken from an old church pulled down in county Cavan, and was preserved in the museum of the Society of Antiquaries of Dublin. The third was found at Ballinahend Castle, also in county Tipperary. The fourth was in the museum at Dublin, but its source is unknown. Another, also in the Dublin Museum, was taken from the old church on the White Island, in Lough Erne, county Fermanagh. This church is supposed by the Irish antiquaries to be a structure of great antiquity, maybe the seventh century, but most likely an exaggeration.
Another came from an old church pulled down by order of the ecclesiastical commissioners, and presented to the museum at Dublin, by the late Dean Dawson. The last example was once owned by Sir Benjamin Chapman, Bart, of Killoa Castle, Westmeath, but went into a private collection in London. It was found in 1859 at Chloran, in a field on Sir Benjamin’s estate known by the name of the “Old Town”, whence stones had been removed at previous periods, though now litle remains. It was found at a depth of about five feet, so the building, a church no doubt, must been in ruins a long time. Contiguous to this field, about two hundred yards from the spot where the Shelah-na-Gig was found, was an abandoned churchyard, separated from the Old Town field only by a loose stone wall.
The universality of this superstition suggests Herodotus may have erred in the explanation he has given of certain monuments of a remote antiquity. Sesostris, king of Egypt, raised columns in some of the countries he conquered, on which he had carved the female sexual organ as a mark of contempt for those who had submitted easily. Maybe these columns, if the truth be known, were meant as protections for the people of the district in which they stood, and placed in the position where they could most conveniently be seen.
This superstitious sentiment may also explain an incident in the mysteries of Eleusis. Ceres, wandering over the earth in search of her daughter Proserpine, and overcome with grief for her loss, arrived at the hut of an Athenian peasant woman named Baubo, who received her hospitably, and offered her to drink the refreshing mixture which the Greeks call Cyceon. The goddess rejected the offered kindness, and refused all consolation. Baubo, in her distress, bethought her of another expedient to allay the grief of her guest. She removed the pubic hairs from her sexual organ, and showed it to Ceres, who, at the sight, laughed, forgot her sorrows, and drank the cyceon. A belief in the beneficial influence of this vision, rather than its humor, seems the best explanation of the story.
This superstition which, as shown by the Shelah-na-Gigs of the Irish churches, prevailed largely in the middle ages, explains another class of antiquities which are not uncommon. These are small figures of nude females exposing themselves in exactly the same manner as in the sculptures on the churches in Ireland. They are found not only among Roman, Greek, and Egyptian antiquities, but among every people who had any knowledge of art, from the aborigines of America to the natives of Japan.
In the last century, small statuettes in metal, in a rude but peculiar style of art, were found in the duchy of Mecklenburg-Strelitz, in a part of Germany formerly occupied by the Vandals, and by the tribe of the Obotrites, a division of the Vendes. They seemed to be deities worshipped by the people who made them. Some of them bore inscriptions, one of which was in Runic characters, so belonged to a period not much older than the fall of the Western Empire. Some time afterwards, a few statuettes in metal were found in the island of Sardinia, so closely similar to those just mentioned, that D’Hancarville, who published an account of them with engravings, considered himself justified in ascribing them to the Vandals, who occupied that island, as well as the tract of Germany alluded to.
One of these images, which D’Hancarville considers to be the Venus of the Vandal mythology, represents a female in a reclining position, with the wings and claws of a bird, holding to view a pomegranate, open, which, as D’Hancarville remarks, was considered as a sign representing the female sexual organ. It was a form and idea more unequivocally represented in the Roman figures already described, but which continued through the middle ages, and was preserved in a popular name for that organ, abricot, or expressed more energetically, abricot fendu, used by Rabelais. This curious image is represented, after D’Hancarville, in three different points of view, in Plate VII.
Several figures of a similar description were brought from Egypt by a Frenchman. One of these small bronzes presents an exact counterpart of the Shelah-na-Gig. These Egyptian images belonged no doubt to the Roman period. Another similar figure, made of lead, and apparently medieval, was found at Avignon, and a third, was dug up, in the mid nineteenth century, at Kingston-on-Thames. The form of these statuettes seems to show that they were intended as portable images, for the same purpose as the Shelahs, which people might have ready at hand to look upon for protection whenever they were under fear of the influence of the evil eye, or of any other sort of enchantment.
Of the Shelah-na-Gig in churches out of Ireland, an example has been found in one of the little churches on the coast of Devon, and there are curious sculptures, which appear to be of the same character, among the architectural ornamentation of the early church of San Fedele at Como in Italy. Three of these are engraved in Plate VIII. On the top of the right hand jamb of the door is a naked male figure, and in the same position on the other side a female, which are meant to be Adam and Eve, and the source describes the one at the apex merely as “the figure of a woman holding her legs apart”. The surface of the stone in these sculptures is so much worn that it is uncertain whether the sexual parts were ever distinctly marked, but from the postures and positions of the hands, and the situation in which these figures are placed, they seem to resemble closely, except in their superior style of art, the Shelah-na-Gigs of Ireland. There were extraordinary sculptures in the church of Schoengraber in Austria, and the capital of a column in the church of Egra, a town of Bohemia, shows the two sexes displaying their sexual organs, meant to ward off the power of fascination.
The Arabs of Northern Africa put over the door of the house or tent, or nailed on a board, the sexual organ of a cow, mare, or female camel, as a talisman to avert the evil eye. The female organ was much less easy to draw in a recognizable form than that of the male, and soon transmuted into more of a symbol than a true representation, though symbolism was not intended, at least initially. Thus the figure of the female organ quickly assumed the shape of a horseshoe, and when the original meaning was forgotten, was taken as a horseshoe by intent, whereupon a real horseshoe was nailed up for the same purpose. The practice continues to exist in some parts of England, originating from the popular worship of the female sexual organ as a protection against the power of witchcraft.
Priapic Saints
In antiquity, Priapus was a god, in the middle ages, a saint, or rather several saints. In the south of France, Provence, Languedoc, and the Lyonnais, the phallic saint was S Foutin, a corruption of Fotinus or Photinus, the first bishop of Lyons. Foutin was a large phallus of wood and an object of reverence to women, especially infertile ones, who scraped the wooden member, steeped the scrapings in water, then drank the latter as a cure for infertility, or gave it to their weak or impotent husbands. In the Confession de Sancy, waxen images of the members of both sexes were offered to S Foutin, and suspended to the ceiling of his chapel at Varailles in Provence. As the ceiling was so covered with them that, when the wind blew them about, the noise disturbed the devotions of the worshippers. The same kind of worship existed at Isernia, in the kingdom of Naples.
At Embrun, in the department of the Upper Alps, the phallus of S Foutin was worshipped in a different form. Women poured a libation of wine upon the head of the phallus, and collected it in a vessel, where it was left till it became sour. Now it was “sainte vinaigre,” and the women used it for what obscure purpose they would! When the Protestants took Embrun in 1585, they found this phallus laid up carefully among the relics in the principal church, its head red with the wine which had been poured upon it. A larger phallus of wood, covered with leather, was worshiped in the church of S Eutropius at Orange. It was seized by the Protestants and burnt publicly in 1562. 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.
At a distance of about four leagues from Clermont in Auvergne, was an isolated rock in the shape of an immense phallus, popularly called S Foutin. Similar phallic saints were worshipped under the names of S Guerlichon, or Greluchon, at Bourg-Dieu in the diocese of Bourges, of S Gilles in the Cotentin in Britany, of S Rene in Anjou, of S Regnaud in Burgundy, of S Arnaud, and above all of S Guignole near Brest and at the village of La Chatelette in Berri. Many of these were still in existence and their worship in full practice in the eighteenth century. In some of them, the wooden phallus is described as being much worn down by the continual process of scraping, while in others the loss sustained by scraping was always restored by a miracle. Thhe phallus consisted of a long staff of wood passed through a hole in the middle of the body, and as the phallic end in front became shortened, a blow of a mallet from behind thrust it forward, so that it was restored to its original length.
The people worshiped these saints in another manner passed down from the worship of Priapus among the ancients. Then, in nuptial ceremonies, the bride surrendered her virginity to Priapus, by placing her sexual parts against the end of the phallus, introducing herself on to it and completing the act. It is shown in a bas relief in marble, an engraving of which is in the Musee Secret of the antiquities of Herculaneum and Pompeii. Its was meant to avert sterility by gaining the favour of the god. Christian writers, such as Lactantius and Arnobius, said it was a common practice among the Romans, and long it prevailed over much of the East, from India to Japan and the islands of the Pacific.
In a public square in Batavia, there is a cannon taken from the natives and placed there as a trophy by the Dutch government. It presents the peculiarity that the touchhole is made on a phallic hand, the thumb placed in the position which is called the “fig,” which is described further on. There are traces of the existence of this practice in the middle ages.
Women more modestly sought a remedy for barrenness by kissing the end of the saintly phallus, or sometimes they placed part of their body naked against the image of the saint, or sat upon it. Later, it was more innocently done by lying upon the body of the saint, or sitting upon a simple stone, understood to represent the saint without being unduly phallic. In a corner in the church of the village of S Fiacre, near Mouceaux in France, there is a stone called the chair of S Fiacre, which confers fecundity upon women who sit upon it, as long as there was nothing between their bare skin and the stone. In the church of Orcival in Auvergne, there was a pillar which barren women kissed for the same purpose, and which had perhaps replaced some more obvious object. Girls on the point of marriage offered their last maiden robe to S Foutin, a superstition which became proverbial. A story is told of a young bride who, on her wedding night, sought to deceive her husband about her virginity, although “she had long ago deposited the robe of her virginity on the altar of S Foutin”, as the writer puts it.
In nunneries, the use by women of artificial phalli seems to have derived from an ancient religious ceremony. It is alluded to in the scriptures as part of pagan worship. In the early middle ages it is described in the Ecclesiastical Penitentials with its appropriate penitence. One from 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. If this uncleanness was committed with a nun, the penance was increased to seven years, with two on bread and water. Burchardus, bishop of Worms, describes the instrument, and use of it in greater detail. The practice had evidently lost its religious character, and the object become a dildo.
Antwerp was the Lampsacus of Belgium, and, until quite recent times, Priapus was its patron saint under the name of Ters. John Goropius Becan, who published a learned treatise on the antiquities of Antwerp in the middle of the sixteenth century, says how well Ters was regarded in his time by the Antwerpians, especially women, who invoked it every time they were surprised or shocked. He states:
If they let fall by accident a vessel of earthenware, or stumbled, or if any unexpected accident caused them vexation, even the most respectable women called aloud for the protection of Priapus under this obscene name.
Becan adds that there was over the door of a house adjoining the prison, a statue which had a large phallus, even then worn away or broken off. Among other writers who mention this statue is Abraham Golnitz, who published an account of his travels in France and Belgium, in 1631 and he informs us that it was a carving in stone, about a foot high, with its arms raised up, and its legs spread out, and that the phallus had been entirely worn out 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. Golnitz further tells us that a figure of Priapus was placed over the entrance gate to the enclosure of the temple of S Walburgis at Antwerp, which might have been built on the site of a temple dedicated to Priapus. At certain times, the women of Antwerp decorated the phalli of these figures with garlands.
The Romans commonly used priapic figures as amulets, carried as charms against the evil eye and other noxious influences, a practice certainly continued through the middle ages. Medieval writers rarely mentioned them, but examples have been found, mostly in the river Seine, usually made of lead—cheap and popular, so common—ranging from the fourteenth to the beginning of the sixteenth century. Small leaden tokens or medalets, bearing on the obverse the figure of the male or female organ, and on the reverse a cross, a curious intimation of the adoption of the fertility worship among Christians. These leaden tokens were first collected and made known by M Forgeais, who published examples in his work on the leaden figures found in that river.
The phalli on these tokens are nearly all furnished with wings, one has a bird’s legs and claws, another has signs of a bell suspended from the neck. The tradition is distinctly that of Roman phallic ornament, but the bells borne by two examples are medieval, and not Roman bells. In the first, a female is riding upon the phallus, which has men’s legs, and is held by a bridle. It was meant to be attached to the dress as a brooch, for the pin which fixed it still remains on the back. Two other examples present figures of winged phalli, one with a bell, and the other with the ring remaining from which the bell has been broken. One of these has the dog’s legs. A fourth example represents an enormous phallus attached to the middle of a small man. In another, which was evidently intended for suspension, probably at the neck, the organs of the two sexes are joined together.
Three other leaden figures, apparently amulets, which were in the Forgeais collection, offer a peculiar form, representing a figure, a male by its attributes, though it has a feminine look, and wears the robe and hood of a woman. Its peculiarity consists in having a phallus before and behind. A still more remarkable example of the combination of the cross with the emblems of priapic worship, is an object found at San Agati di Goti, near Naples. It is a crux ansata, formed by four phalli, with a circle of female organs round the center, and appears by the loop to have been intended for suspension. The cross is of gold, so was made for someone of rank, possibly an ecclesiastic, and probably then for some ritual purpose. From the monkish cowl and the cord round the body, of the last figure, it seems to be a satirical image of a friar, some of whom wore no breeches, and most were known as being great corruptors of female morals.
In Italy, the continuous use of these phallic amulets is traced down to the present time much more distinctly than in more Western countries. They are still in common use, like two examples of such bronze amulets, commonly still sold in Naples in the nineteenth century for a carlo, equivalent to fourpence in English money (say, $15, today). One is encircled by a serpent. Hardly an Italian peasant was without one, usually carried in his waistcoat pocket. Phallic Elements.
The Fig
The ancients had two forms of the phallic hand, one in which the middle finger was extended at length, and the thumb and other fingers doubled up, while in the other the whole hand was closed, but the thumb was passed between the first and middle fingers. They are signs that have lasted as amulets for ages. The first form is the more ancient, and is still common, the extended middle finger being a phallus, and the bent digits on each side the testicles. This gesture of the hand was looked upon at an early period as an amulet against magical influences, and, though carried in the same manner as the Phallic amuleta, was made of different materials. It is quite common among Roman antiquities, and was a Gnostic symbol.
In the second of these types of phallic hand, the thumb forming the phallus, was also well known among the Romans, and is found made of various material, such as bronze, coral, lapis lazuli, and crystal, of a size suitable as a pendant. In the Musee Secret at Naples are examples of such amulets as two arms joined at the elbow, one terminating in the head of a phallus, the other having a hand as described, intended as ear rings.
The gesture of the hand was called in later non-classical Latin, ficus, a fig. Ficus being a feminine word, was recast as a typical Latin feminine noun, fica, whence arose the Italian fica or now fico, the Spanish higa, and the French figue. Florio, who gives the word fica, a fig, says that it was also used as other fruits, such as the pomegranate and the apricot, to which an erotic meaning was given. The form, under this name, was preserved through the middle ages, especially in the South of Europe, where Roman traditions were strongest, both as an amulet, and as an insulting gesture. The Italian called this gesture “fare la fica”, “to make” or “do the fig” to any one, the Spaniard, “dar una higa”, to give a fig, and the Frenchman, like the Italian, “faire la figue”.
This phrase goes back to the thirteenth century at least. In the judicial proceedings against the Templars in Paris in 1309, one of the brethren of the Order was asked in his examination, jokingly because he was rather loose and flippant in his replies, “if he bad been ordered by the said receptor (the officer of the Templars who admitted the new candidate) to make with his fingers the fig at the crucifix”. This phrase was introduced into the English language in the time of Elizabeth and said to have been taken from the Spaniards. From the circumstance, the English phrase was “to give the fig” (dar la higa), and the writers of the Elizabethan age called it “the fig of Spain”. Thus:
A figo for thy friendship!—The fig of Spain.”Pistol, in Shakespeare, Henry V
We still say in English, “a fig for anybody”, or “for anything”, not meaning that we value them as no more than a fig, but that we consider them to be a prick! In Baretti’s Spanish Dictionary, which belongs to the beginning of the nineteenth century, the word higa is defined as:
A manner of scoffing at people, which consists in showing the thumb between the first and second finger, closing the first, and pointing at the person to whom we want to give this hateful mark of contempt.
Baretti also gives as still in use then the original meaning of the word:
Higa, a little hand made of jet, which they hang about children to keep them from evil eyes; a superstitious custom.
Robin Goodfellow
The Teutonic race believed in a spiritual being, who inhabited the woods, called in old German scrat. His character was the equivalent of the English hobgoblin, or the Irish cluricaune. The scrat as the spirit of the woods was properly called a waltscrat, but as he also inhabited fields, and homes, he was a field spirit, and a domestic spirit or ghost haunting the house. An old German vocabulary (1482) explains schraetlin, little scrats, by the Latin word penates, so, an image of him was probably an amulet, a protection to the house.
The lascivious nature of this spirit is implied by the fact that scritta, in Anglo-Saxon, and scrat, in old English, meant a hermaphrodite. Accordingly, the medieval vocabularies explain scrat by Latin equivalents, which all indicate companions or emanations of Priapus, and in fact, Priapus himself. Isidore gives the name of Pilosi, or “hairy men”, and tells us that they were called in Greek, Panitae—an error for Ephialtae?—and in Latin, Incubi and Inibi, applied to them on account of their intercourse with animals. So, they were the fauns and satyrs of antiquity, haunting, like them, the wild woods, and were characterized by the same petulance towards the other sex. Woe to the modesty of maiden or woman who ventured incautiously into their haunts.
As Incubi, they visited the house by night, and sexually violated females. Some of the most celebrated heroes of early medieval romances, like Merlin, were the children of incubi. They were known at an early period in Gaul by the name of Dusii, from which comes our modern word “deuce”, a word for a devil, used in such phrases as “the deuce take you!”. The term ficarii was also applied to them in medieval Latin, from the word ficus, already explained. Most of these Latin synonyms are given in the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary of Alfric, and are interpreted as meaning “evil men, spirits of the woods, evil beings”.
An old bible commentary describes these spirits of the woods as “monsters in the semblance of men, whose form begins with the human shape and ends in the extremity of a beast”. They were half man, half goat, identical with a class of hobgoblins known in England by the popular name of Robin Goodfellows, whose priapic character is sufficiently proved by the pictures of them attached to some of our early printed ballads.
The first illustration is a figure of Robin Goodfellow, which accompanies a popular ballad of the earlier part of the seventeenth century, entitled “The mad merry Pranks of Robin Goodfellow”. He is shown party coloured, and with the swollen priapus. Next is a second illustration of the same ballad, in which Robin Goodfellow is shown as Priapus, goat shaped, with his phallus still more strongly pronounced, and surrounded by a circle of his worshippers dancing about him. He appears here in the character assumed by the demon at the sabbath of the witches, of which more later. The Roman Church called these mythic people devils, causing confusion. One of these priapic “demons” illustrates the broadside ballads of the age of James I and Charles I.
Fertility Festivals
Besides the invocations addressed principally to Priapus, or to the power of sex, the ancients had established great festivals in their honour, which were remarkable for their licentious gaiety, and in which the image of the phallus was carried openly and in triumph. These festivities were held chiefly in the summer, and were especially celebrated among the rural population. The plowing and sowing labours of the peasant were over, and they had leisure to joyfully welcome and observe nature’s reproductive powers working, and in due time to bring their fruits.
Among the most celebrated of these festivals were the Liberalia, which were held on 17 March. A monstrous phallus was carried in procession in a car, and its worshippers indulged loudly and openly in obscene songs, conversation, and attitudes, and when it halted, the most respectable of the matrons ceremoniously crowned the head of the phallus with a garland. The Bacchanalia, representing the Dionysia of the Greeks, were celebrated in the latter part of October, when the harvest was completed, and were attended with much the same ceremonies as the Liberalia. The phallus was similarly carried in procession, and crowned, and, as in the Liberalia, the festivities being carried on into the night. As the celebrators became heated with wine, they entered into licentiousness in which they indulged without a blush.
The festival of Venus was celebrated towards the beginning of April, and in it the phallus was again carried in its car, and led in procession by the Roman ladies to the temple of Venus outside the Colline gate, and there presented by them to the sexual parts of the goddess. At the close of the month came the Floralia, which, if possible, excelled all the others in licence. Ausonius, in whose time—the latter half of the fourth century—the Floralia were still in full force, speaks of their lasciviousness.
The women of the town and its neighbourhood, called together by the sounding of horns, mixed with the multitude in perfect nakedness, and excited their passions with obscene motions and language, until the festival ended in a scene of mad revelry, in which all restraint was laid aside. These scenes of unbounded licence, deeply rooted in people’s minds by long established customs, caused little public scandal. Cato the younger, when he was present at the celebration of the Floralia, instead of showing any disapproval of them, he retired, that his well known gravity might be no restraint upon them, because the multitude manifested some hesitation in stripping the women naked in the presence of a man so celebrated for his modesty.
The festivals more specially dedicated to Priapus, the Priapeia, were attended with simillar ceremonies and similarly licentious orgies. Their forms and characteristics are better known, because they are so frequently shown to us as the subjects of works of Roman art. The Romans had other festivals of similar character, but of less importance, some of which were of a more private character, and some were celebrated in strict privacy. Such were the rites of the Bona Dea, established among the Roman matrons in the time of the republic, the disorders of which are described in such glowing language by the satirist Juvenal, in his enumeration of the vices of the Roman women.
Among the Teutonic, as well as among most other peoples, similar festivals appear to have been celebrated during the summer months, and, arising from the same feelings, they took on the same forms. The principal popular festivals of the summer during the middle ages occurred in the months of April, May, and June, and comprised Easter, May day, and the feast of the summer solstice. All these seem to reflect the same phallic worship of the Roman festivals, and these were just those likely to outlive without material change, the collapse of the Roman empire. By the time these festivals become familiar, most of their phallic character had been purged and forgotten, but scattered clues of their original character remain.
The first of the three great festivals just mentioned was purely Anglo-Saxon and Teutonic, but it appears to have been identified with the Roman Liberalia. The Catholic church transformed it into a great Christian religious feast. In Teutonic mythology there was a female deity named, in Old German, Ostara, and, in Anglo-Saxon, Eastre, or Eostre, though all we know of her is Bede’s statement that her festival was celebrated by the ancient Saxons in the month of April, from which circumstance, that month was named by the Anglo-Saxons “Easter-monath”, or “Eoster-monath”, and that the name of the goddess had been then given to the Paschal time with which it was identical. The name of this goddess was given to the same month by the old Germans and by the Franks, so she was one of the most highly honoured of the Teutonic deities. Her festival must have been an important one, deeply implanted in popular feeling, or the church would not have wanted to identify it with one of the greatest Christian festivals of the year.
Easter Buns
The Romans considered this month dedicated to Venus, no doubt because it was that in which the productive power of nature began to be visibly developed. When the Pagan festival was adopted by the church, it became a moveable feast instead of being fixed to the month of April. Among other objects offered to the goddess at this time were cakes, made of flour. The Christians, when they adopted the Easter festival, made the cakes into a bun, at that time the normal form of bread. To protect themselves and those who ate them from any enchantment or other evil arising from their former pagan nature, the Christian clergy wanted them marked them with the the cross. Hence were derived the cakes we still eat at Easter called hot cross buns, and the superstitious feelings attached to them, for multitudes of people still believe that if they failed to eat a hot cross bun on Good Friday they would be unlucky all the rest of the year.
The pagan Easter cakes had apparently been of a different form originally—that of the phallus. Such at least was the case in France, where the custom still existed in the nineteenth century. In Saintonge, in the neighbourhood of La Rochelle, small cakes, baked in the form of a phallus, were made as offerings at Easter, and were carried from house to house and presented. When Dulaure wrote, the festival of Palm Sunday, in the town of Saintes, was called the fete des pinnes, pinne being a popular and vulgar word for the phallus. At this fete, the women and children carried in the procession, at the end of their palm branches, a phallus made of bread, which they called a pinne, and which, having been blest by the priest, the women carefully preserved during the following year as an amulet.
A similar practice existed at S Jean-d’Angely, where small cakes, made in the form of the phallus, and named fateux, were carried in the procession of the Fete-Dieu, or Corpus Christi. Shortly before Dulaure wrote, this practice was suppressed. The custom of making cakes in the form of the sexual members, male and female, dates from a remote antiquity and was common among the Romans. Martial made a phallus of bread (Priapus siligineus) the subject of one epigram, and the image of a female organ made of the same material another.
This custom was preserved from the Romans through the middle ages, and may be traced distinctly as far back as the fourteenth or fifteenth century. In some of the earlier French books on cookery, recipes are given for making cakes in these forms. In the sixteenth century, Johannes Bruerinus Campegius, describing the different forms in which cakes were then made, enumerates those of the genitals of both sexes, a proof, he says of “the degeneracy of manners, when Christians themselves can delight in obscenities and immodest things even among their articles of food”. When Dulaure wrote (1820s) cakes of these forms continued to be made in various parts of France, those representing the male organ in the Lower Limousin, and especially at Brives, while those of the female organ were made at Clermont in Auvergne, and in other places. They were popularly called miches.
Another Easter custom related to sexual worship seems once to have prevailed throughout England, though by 1860 it was confined to Shropshire and Cheshire. In the former county it is called “heaving”, in the latter “lifting”. On Easter Monday, the men go about with chairs, seize the women they meet, and, placing them in the chairs, raise them up, turn them round two or three times, and then claim the right of kissing them. On Easter Tuesday, the same thing is done by the women to the men. This is only practiced now among the lower classes, except sometimes as a frolic among intimate friends. The chair was a comparatively modern addition. In the eighteenth century, four or five of the one sex took the victim of the other sex by the arms and legs, and lifted her or him in that manner, and the act was attended, at all events on the part of the men, with much indecency. The women usually expected a small contribution of money from the men they have lifted.
More anciently, in the time of Durandus in the thirteenth century, a still more singular custom prevailed on these two days. In many countries, on the Easter Monday, the wives to beat their husbands, and then, on the Tuesday, the husbands beat their wives. Brand, in his Popular Antiquities, tells us that in the city of Durham, in his time, it was the custom for the men, on the one day, to take off the women’s shoes, which the latter were obliged to purchase back, and that on the other day the women did the same to the men.
Mayday
In medieval poetry and romance, the month of May was celebrated above all others as that consecrated to Love, which seemed to pervade all nature, and to invite mankind to take part in the general enjoyment. Hence, among nearly all peoples, its approach was celebrated with festivities, in which worship was paid to Nature’s reproductiveness. The Romans welcomed the approach of May with their Floralia, a festival remarkable for licentiousness, and Teutons had also their festival of the season long before they knew the Romans. Yet much of the medieval celebration of May day, especially in the South, was derived from the Roman Floralia.
As in the Floralia, the arrival of the festival was announced by the sounding of horns during the preceding night, and no sooner had midnight arrived than the youth of both sexes proceeded in couples to the woods to gather branches and make garlands, with which they were to return just at sunrise for the purpose of decorating the doors of their houses. In England, the grand feature of the day was the Maypole. This maypole was the trunk of a tall young tree cut down for the occasion, painted of various colours, and carried in joyous procession, with minstrels playing before, until it reached the village green, or the open space in the middle of a town, where it was set up. It was there decked with garlands and flowers, the lads and girls danced round it, and people indulged in all sorts of riotous enjoyments. All this is well described by a Puritan writer of the reign of Queen Elizabeth, Philip Stubbes, who says:
Against Maie, every parishe, towne, and village assemble themselves together, bothe men, women, and children, olde and yong, even all indifferently, and either goyng all together, or devidyng themselves into companies, they goe some to the woodes and groves, some to the hilles and mountaines, some to one place, some to another, where they spend all the night in pleasant pastymes, and in the mornyng thei returne, bryngyng with them birch bowes and braunches of trees to deck their assemblies withall… But their cheerest jewell thei bryng from thence is their Maie pole, whiche thei bryng home with greate veneration, as thus: Thei have twentie or fourtie yoke of oxen, every oxe havyng a sweete nosegaie of flowers placed on the tippe of his hornes, and these oxen drawe home this Maie poole (this stinckyng idoll rather), whiche is covered all over with flowers and hearbes, bound rounde about with strynges, from the top to the bottome, and sometyme painted with variable colours, with twoo or three hundred men, women, and children following it, with greate devotion. And thus beyng reared up, with handekerchiefes and flagges streamyng on the toppe, thei strawe the grounde aboute, binde greene boughes about it, sett up sommer haules, bowers, and arbours hard by it. And then fall thei to banquet and feast, to leape and daunce aboute it, as the heathen people did, at the dedication of their idolles, whereof this is a perfect patterne, or rather the thyng itself.
The Puritans were deeply impressed with the belief that the maypole was a substantial relic of Paganism, and they were right. At some unknown time, the maypole had taken the place of the phallus. The ceremonies attending the elevation of the two objects were identical. The same joyous procession in the Roman festivals, described above, conducted the phallus into the midst of the town or village, where in the same manner it was decked with garlands, and the worship partook of the same character. Both festivals were attended with the same licentiousness. Stubbes, says:
I have heard it credibly reported, and that viva voce by menne of greate gravitie and reputation, that of fourtie, three score, or a hundred maides goyng to the woode over night, there have scarcely the third part returned home again undefiled.
The day concluded with bonfires, the need fires, intimately connected with the ancient priapic rites. Fire, as the most powerful of the elements, was itself an object of worship, but it was supposed to lose its purity and sacred character in being propagated from one material to another, and the worshippers sought on these solemn occasions to produce it in its primitive and purest form. This was done by the rapid friction of two pieces of wood, attended with superstitious ceremonies. The pure element of fire was believed to exist in the wood, and to be thus forced out of it, and hence it was called need fire—in Old German notfeur, and in Anglo-Saxon, neod-fyr—meaning literally a forced fire, or fire extracted by force. Before extracting the fire from the wood, all the fires previously existing in the village had to be extinguished, to be revived from the bonfire which had been lit from the need fire.
The tradition of bonfires originated from this superstition, even those adopted on occasions of popular rejoicing, and the bonfires commemorating the gunpowder plot being only adaptations of the practice to a particular case. The universality of this superstition is proved by it existing in the Highlands of Scotland, especially in Caithness, where it is adopted as a protection for the cattle when attacked by disease which the Highlanders attribute to witchcraft. It was from the remotest ages the custom to cause cattle, and even children, to pass across the need fire, as a protection to them for the rest of their lives.
S John’s Eve and Plants
The need fire was kindled at Easter, on May day, and especially at the summer solstice, on the eve of the feast of S John the Baptist, or of Midsummer day. The eve of S John was in popular superstition one of the most important days of the medieval year. The need fire—or the S John’s fire, as it was called—was kindled just at midnight, the moment when the solstice was supposed to take place, and the young people of both sexes danced round it, and, above all things, leaped over it, or rushed through it, which was looked upon not only as a purification, but as a protection against evil influences. It was the night:
- when ghosts and other beings of the spiritual world were abroad, and when witches had most power
- when people’s souls left the body in sleep, and wandered over the world, separated from it
- when the witches held their great meetings, and it was that in which they mixed their most deadly poisons, and performed their most effective charms
- especially favourable to divination in every form, and when maidens sought to know their future sweethearts and husbands
- that plants possessed their greatest powers either for good or for evil, and that they were dug up with all due ceremonies and cautions.
The more hidden virtues of plants, indeed, depended much on the time at which, and the ceremonies with which, they were gathered, and these latter were extremely superstitious, no doubt derived from the remote ages of paganism. As usual, the clergy applied a half remedy to the evil—they forebade any rites or incantations in the gathering of medicinal herbs except by repeating the creed and the Lord’s prayer.
The medicinal virtues of many plants gathered on S John’s eve, with due ceremony, were more powerful than when gathered at other times. Many practices of these superstitions are now mostly forgotten, but remaining clues suggest they belonged to the same sexual worship prevailing generally. In one of the earlier editions of Mother Bunch, maidens who wished to know if their lovers were constant or not were directed to go out exactly at midnight on S John’s eve, strip themselves fully naked, proceed to a plant or shrub, the name of which was given, and round it they were to form a circle and dance, repeating words which they had been taught by their instructress. Having completed this ceremony, they were to gather leaves of the plant round which they had danced, which they were to carry home and place under their pillows, and what they wished to know would be revealed to them in their dreams. In medieval treatises on the virtue of plants are directions for gathering some plants of especial importance, requiring naked young girls to do it.
Plants and flowers were intimately connected with this fertility worship. Constantly garlands are used, and always among the offerings to Priapus. It was the universal practice, in dancing round the fire on S John’s eve, to conclude by flowers and plants into it, considered as propitiatory, to avert the evils to which people were liable in the following year. Among the plants they offered were mother wort, vervain, and violets.
Plants associated with priapus worship often had obscene names, and, though most are now lost or so modified as to no conjure the same idea, some are still suggestive. Thus the well known arum of our hedge bottoms received the names, no doubt suggested by its form, of cuckoo’s pintle, or priest’s pintle, or dog’s pintle, and, in French, those of vit de chien and vit de prestre. In English it is now cuckoo pint, or cuckoo point. Orchids are similar. In William Coles’s Adam in Eden (1659) are the different names, for different varieties, of doggsstones, foolstones, foxstones, in the older Herbal of Gerard (1597) triple ballockes, sweet ballockes, sweet cods, goat’sstones, hare’sstones, etc, in French, couillon de bouc—the goat was especially connected with the priapic mysteries—and couille, or couillon de chien.
In French too, as Cotgrave and the herbals show, “a kind of sallet hearbe” was called couille a l’eveque. The greater stone crop was named couille au loup, and the spindle tree was known by the name of couillon de pretre. Several plants look like a rough bush of hair. One of these, a species of adiantum, was known even in Roman times by the name of Capillus Veneris, and in more modern times it has been called “maiden hair”, and our “lady’s hair”. Another plant, the asplenium trichomanes, was and is also called popularly “maiden hair”, or “maiden’s hair”, and the same name has been given to one or two other plants. The hair implied in these names was that of the pubes.
In an old calendar of the Romish church, which is often quoted in Brand’s Popular Antiquities, the seeking of plants for their hidden virtues and magical properties is especially noted as part of the practices on the eve of S John, and one plant is especially specified in terms too mysterious to be easily understood. Fern seed, also, was a great object of search on this night, for it was believed to possess powerful magical properties, and especially that of rendering someone invisible.
The Mandrake
But the most remarkable of all the plants connected with these ancient priapic superstitions was the mandrake (mandragora), a plant which has been looked upon with a sort of feeling of reverential fear at all periods, and almost in all parts. Its Teutonic name, alrun, or alraun, speaks at once of the belief in its magical qualities among that race. People looked upon it as possessing some degree of animal life, and it was generally believed that, when it was drawn out of the earth, it uttered a cry, and that this cry carried certain death or madness to the person who extracted it. To escape this danger, the remedy was to tie a string round it, which was to be attached to a dog, and the latter, being driven away, dragged up the root in its attempt to run off, and experienced the fatal consequences.
The root was the important part of the plant. It often looks like a forked radish, and was believed to represent exactly the human form below the waist, with, in the male and female plants, the human sexual organs distinctly developed. The mandrake, when it could be obtained, was used in the middle ages in the place of the phallic amulet, and was carefully carried on the person, or preserved in the house. It conferred fertility in more senses than one, for it was believed that as long as you kept it locked up with your money, the latter would become doubled in quantity every year, and it had at the same time all the protective qualities of the phallus.
The Templars were accused of worshipping the mandrake, which became an object of great celebrity in France during the reigns of the weak monarchs Charles VI and Charles VII. In 1429 one Friar Richard, of the order of the Cordeliers, preached a fierce sermon against the use of this amulet, the temporary effect of which was so great, that a certain number of his congregation delivered up their mandragoires to the preacher to be burnt.
People who dealt in these amulets used their skill to help nature produce the expected form. The roots in their natural state representedonly imperfectly the form imagination had given to them. So they obtained the best roots, which, fresh from the ground were plump and soft, and ready to take any impression given to them. Then they stuck grains of millet or barley into the parts where they wished to have hair, and again put it into a hole in the earth, until these grains had germinated and formed their roots. It had happened within twenty days. Then they pulled up the mandrake again, trimmed the fibrous roots of millet or barley which served for hair, retouched the mandrake roots to give them a more perfect and permanent shape, and then sold it.
Besides these general priapic festivals were others less important, or more local in their character, which degenerated later into local ceremonies and festivities. This would be the case especially in cities and corporate towns, where the guilds came in, to perpetuate the institution, and to give it gradually a modified form. Most towns in England had once festivals of this character, and at least three representatives of them are still kept up, the procession of Lady Godiva at Coventry, the Shrewsbury show, and the guild festival at Preston in Lancashire.
In the first of these, the lady who is supposed to ride naked in the procession probably represents some feature in the ancient priapic celebration, and the story of the manner in which the Lady Godiva averted the anger of her husband from the townsmen, which is certainly a mere fable, was no doubt invented to explain a feature of the celebration, the real meaning of which had in course of time been forgotten. The pageantry of the Shrewsbury show appears to be similarly the unmeaning reflexion of forms belonging to older and forgotten practices and principles. On the continent there were many such local festivals, such as the feast of fools, the feast of asses—the ass was an animal sacred to Priapus—and others, all which were adapted by the medieval church exactly as the clergy had taken advantage of the profit to be derived from the phallic worship in other forms.
The leaden tokens or medalets suggest the existence in the middle ages, besides the public festivals, of secret societies or clubs connected with priapic worship. Evidence of secret societies is of their essence slim, but the accusations of such rites conducted by such secret societies abound. The Catholic Church was ready to tolerate popular phallic worship in places for its own profit, but more generally used accusations of orgiastic rites against sects regarded as religious or political heretics.
Conclusion
These witch depositions are striking is their general resemblance among themselves, although told in different countries, but also striking is the points of identity between witches’ Sabbath and the secret assemblies with which the Templars were charged. In both are the initiatory presentation, the denial of Christ, and the homage to the new master, sealed by the obscene kiss. The mass and weight of the evidence certainly does not prove that obscene rites prevailed either among the Templars or the witches, because the Church was determined to propagate horrors as a deterrent to anyone dismayed by Catholicism and the sacraments, and through its powers could distort and harmonize the evidence. The similarity of the witch confessions and those of the Templars in all countries where they were taken, seems to show that there was in them also a foundation in truth, but it was that they were obliged to act in secret because their form of worship, phallic or otherwise, was contrary to much Catholic teaching, and opposed to the sacraments.
It seems that priapic orgies and the other periodical assemblies for phallus worship were continued long after the fall of the Roman power and the introduction of the Christian religion. The rustic population, mostly servile, whose morals or private practices were little heeded by the other classes of society, might, in a country so thinly peopled, assemble by night in retired places without any fear of observation. There they perhaps indulged in priapic rites, followed by the old priapic orgies, which would become more and more debased in form, but through the effects of exciting potions, as described by Michelet, would have become wilder than ever.
They became, as Michelet describes them, the “Saturnalia of the serf”. Where this older worship was preserved among the middle or more elevated classes of society, who had other means of secrecy at their command, it would take a less vulgar form, and would show itself in the formation of concealed sects and societies, such as those of the different forms of Gnosticism, of the Stadingers, of the Templars, and of other less important secret clubs, of a more or less immoral character, which continued no doubt to exist long after what we call the middle ages had passed away.
The worship of the reproductive organs as representing the fertilizing, protecting, and saving powers of nature, apart from these secret rites, prevailed universally. Perhaps the last traces of it is now [1866] to be found in our islands on the western shores of Ireland. Off the coast of Mayo, there is a small island named Inniskea, which takes its name from a female saint—it is the insular sanctae Geidhe of the Hibernian hagiographers—but does not contain a single Catholic priest. Its inhabitants, as we learn from an interesting communication to Notes and Queries by Sir J Emerson Tennent, are mere idolaters, and their idol, no doubt the representative of Priapus, is a long cylindrical stone, which they call Neevougee. This idol is kept wrapped in flannel, and is entrusted to the care of an old woman, who acts as the priestess. It is brought out and worshipped at certain periods, when storms disturb the fishing, by which chiefly the population of the island obtain a living, or at other times it is exposed for the purpose of raising storms which may cause wrecks to be thrown on the coast of the island. The Name “Neevougee” is merely the plural of a word signifying a canoe, and it may perhaps have some reference to the calling of fishermen.
