Christianity
Phallic Elements in Christianity 3
Abstract
© Dr M D Magee
Contents Updated: Wednesday, May 19, 1999;
Friday, 17 October 2003; Saturday, 01 April 2006
Abstract
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.
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.
