Phallic worship

“ Though phallic cults proper cannot be shown to be universal among men, they have played a not inconsiderable part in religious history. They appear to have passed through the usual grades of development—simple at first, later more complicated. The attitude of savages and low communities generally, non-Christian and Christian, toward the phallus, suggests that in the earliest stage of the cult some sort of worship was paid the physical object itself considered as a creator of life; satisfactory data on this point, however, are lacking. ”

“ One point of interest in connection with the above facts is that the old religions, however much of force, beauty, and truth we may concede to them, have never made warfare against these obscene forms of worship, nor against the notorious immorality of their devotees. Whatever may be said of the profound philosophy of life involved in phallic worship, for many hundreds of years it has been a source of outrageous immorality. Nevertheless, there has never been any continued and effective effort on the part of the higher types of religion to exterminate the lower. ”

“ The conclusion we come to, and which we think is fully warranted by all the circumstances, is, that the great mass of phallic worship existing in different parts of the world began in India, and gradually found its way into the western nations, becoming, as was perfectly natural with such a system, more and more depraved as time went on, and as it was found that it could be made subservient to the desires and passions of licentious men. ”

“ And, before beginning the discussion of this subject, I beg to remind the reader that a priest of Priapus regarded his sistrum as being just as sacred as a Catholic priest now considers any vessel or robe used in the service of mass, and that the priests of Brahma look on the Lingam with as much reverence and awe as did the Levites on the Ark of the [43] Covenant and the Holy of Holies. Phallic worship is a religion, the oldest abstract religion in existence. Fundamentally the Creator—the Life Giver—is the phallic worshiper’s god. Is he very far wrong in all that is absolutely essential? ”

“ Even the British Museum does not include works on phallicism in its catalogue, and special permission has to be obtained to consult them. Yet the subject is of vast importance as concerns the origin and development of religion and philosophy, and the extent of phallic worship may be gathered from the widespread occurrence of obelisks and similar objects amongst ancient relics. Our own maypole dances may be instanced as one survival of the ancient worship of the male generative principle. ”

“ Had it been agreeable to the Creator that all nations should have had the same form of worship, would it not have been as easy to His omnipotence to have created all men with the same sentiments 70and dispositions, and to have inspired them with the same notions of the True Religion, as to endow them with such different tempers and inclinations? Ought they not rather to believe that the true God has as much pleasure in being honoured by a variety of forms and ceremonies, as in being praised and glorified by a number of different creatures? ”

“ The best example of a half-civilized phallic cult is that which is now practiced in Yoruba and Dahomi, countries with definite government and institutions. The cult is attached to the worship of a deity (Elegba or Legba) , who appears to be a patron of fertility; the phallus occupies a prominent place on his temples, and its worship is accompanied by the usual licentious rites.716 These are expressions of popular appetite, and it does not appear that the cult itself is otherwise religiously significant. ”

“ Thus we find it probable that, in order to understand the sequence of the actual and historical phases of religious worship, we must approximately reverse the order above-given in which they have been STUDIED, and conclude that in general the Phallic cults came first, the cult of Magic and the propitiation of earth-divinities and spirits came second, and only last came the belief in definite God-figures residing in heaven. ”

“ Hargrave Jennings, the author of several books on some aspects of religions of antiquity, among them one on phallicism deals freely with the phallic principles embodied in these religions. As do many other writers, he identifies fire worship with sex worship, and the following short paragraph shows his conception of their interrelationship, as well as the significance of the upright of antiquity. ”

“ HINDU PHALLICISM The following curious fable is given by Sir William Jones, as one of the stories of the Hindus for the origin of Phallic devotion:—“Certain devotees in a remote time had acquired great renown and respect, but the purity of the art was wanting, nor did their motives and secret thoughts correspond with their professions and exterior conduct. They affected poverty, but were attached to the things of this world, and the princes and nobles were constantly sending their offerings. ”

“ The women sanctified a crack of one of the walls of the temple, their attitude toward it corresponding to the yoni worship of India. Near by was an ancient stone pillar held in great veneration, which was the representative of the phallus.
It is observed that in this small community some remnants of phallic belief of a very primitive type have been retained for centuries. The religious development, an index of [Pg 122] mental development, has become “set” as it were and no further progress is possible. ”

“ He makes a woman say, “He shall lie all night betwixt my breasts” (S. of S. i. 13) . Again, of the Phallus, or Linga, she says, “I will go up the palm-tree, I will take hold of the boughs thereof” (vii. 8) . Palm-tree and boughs are euphemisms of the male genitals.
HEBREW PHALLICISM The nations surrounding the Jews practising the Phallic rites and worshipping the Phallic deities, it is not to be supposed that the Jews escaped their influence. It is indeed certain that the worship of the Phallics was a great and important part of the Hebrew worship. ”

“ But, if it is this that idolatry is made to rest upon, then the two Churches—the Greek, and the Latin especially—are as idolatrous and pagan as any other religion.639 It was only in the Fourth Race that men, who had lost all right to be considered divine, resorted to body worship, in other words to phallicism. ”

“ The extraordinary way in which polytheism has sought by an amalgamation of rites, and so of properties and personalities, to regain that unity of worship of which it is the formal negation, is a great distraction to antiquarians, who would fain distinguish precisely the various cults of paganism. ”

“ The Papist faith is that subtlest, most fascinating form of art for art’s sake—religion for religion’s sake. From the years it has taken boldly all symbolism that rouses the emotions of its own significance—from its pagan altars to the saying of prayers by rote. Whatever of outward pomp and majesty all other worship has known, whatever of mysticism and of craftsmanship and of artistry all other worship has known, this splendid church has taken into itself. ”

“ Whatever ethical purity may have adorned the lives of the first converts, Christianity as an established religion was not less of a grovelling superstition than Paganism in its worst forms. The worship of martyrs, of saints, the factitious miracles wrought at their graves, the veneration of their relics and images, were but a travesty of polytheism under another name without the saving graces of the old belief. ”

“ In a generous eclecticism, within the bounds of her liberty, and as by some providential power within her, she gathers and serviceably adopts, as in other matters so in ritual, one thing here, another there, from various sources—Gnostic, Jewish, Pagan—to adorn and beautify the greatest act of worship the world has seen. It was thus the liturgy of the church came to be—full of consolations for the human soul, and destined, surely! one day, under the sanction of so many ages of human experience, to take exclusive possession of the religious consciousness. ”

“ Paul is not meaning to depreciate the sacrificial ritual, from which he drew his emblem. But he is meaning to assert that the devotion of a life, manifested through bodily activity, is higher in its nature than the symbolical worship of any altar and of any sacrifice. And that falls in with prevailing tendencies in this day, which has laid such a firm hold on the principle that daily conduct is better than formal worship, that it has forgotten to ask the question whether the daily conduct is likely to be satisfactory if the formal worship is altogether neglected. ”

“ So much of truth, only under an ancient obsolete vesture, but the spirit of it still true, do I find in the Paganism of old nations. Nature is still divine, the revelation of the workings of God; the Hero is still worshipable: this, under poor cramped incipient forms, is what all Pagan religions have struggled, as they could, to set forth. ”

“ It is the church's business to insist that men must live in the world of the sacred, the uncommon, the particular, in order to be able to surmount and endure the secular, the common and the universal. It is her business to insist that through worship all this can be accomplished. But can worship be taught? Is not the devotee, like the poet or the lover or any other genius, born and not made? ”

“ Yet it must be confessed that again, as so often, we are doing what the Germans call "throwing out the baby with the bath," namely, repudiating a defect or the perversion of an excellence and, in so doing, throwing away that excellence itself. It is clear that no Protestant is ever tempted today to consider worship as its own reason and its own end. We are, in a sense, utilitarian ritualists. Worship to us is as valuable as it is valid because it is the chief avenue of spiritual insight, a chief means of awakening penitence, obtaining forgiveness, growing in grace and love. ”

“ Modern indifferentism may regard all the pagan worships as expressions of truth, and the worship of their deities as something merely symbolical of the operations of nature, not the actual rendering of divine honors. But to us there can be no such theory. The worship was real and the objects were demons, blinding and misleading men through their passions and ignorance. ”

“ It is not for man to make, by his private judgment, a form of public worship that will avoid the sentence, “Salvation is not in it.” As the figurative sacrifices of the old law derived their value from divine institution as typical of Calvary, so the public worship of the new law must be connected with Calvary by divine institution.
Now, in the popular forms of public worship in our days, there is no essential element, either of divine or human creation, to connect it with Calvary. It is inferior even to the Samaritan worship, which Christ so decisively condemned. ”

“ The day is far distant when the mass of men will be capable of the austere mystic vision, which relies little on external ceremonies of worship. Certainly the last ages of paganism in the West were not ripe for any such reserved spirituality. And the religions which captivated the ages that preceded the triumph of the Catholic Church, while they strove to satisfy the deeper needs of the spirit, were more intensely sacerdotal, and more highly organised than the old religions of Greece and Rome. ”

“ In like manner, the various systems of Polytheism were local, and animated with no spirit of propagandism. Each country had its own divinities; and as a miserable substitute for one, supreme omnipresent being, the number of local deities was so, multiplied that Polytheism was likely to break down of its weight. So far from excluding the Gods of a conquered territory, conquest only served to enlarge the boundaries of idolatry; until, as in the Pantheon at Rome, thousands of divinities were assembled in friendly embrace, representatives of the diversified worship of mankind. ”

“ It is a valuable example to us of the complete and radical difference that existed between the Pagan and the Christian ideas of worship. The Pagan world had no idea of gathering a congregation together, any more than I may say have the old canons of Florence, or of S. Peter's, Rome, who shut themselves into glass boxes, of bringing all men into one building to unite in prayer and praise. The sanctuaries of the Pagan gods were quite small and dark. Worship was simply an individual matter, a bringing of a sacrifice to an altar. ”

“ When the aid of a Christian saint is sought in order to secure fertility, the trust in the phallus-symbol involves no unworthy desire; and what is true of medieval European peoples may have been true of ancient peoples. In the ancient world these cults took many forms, ranging from naïve faith to frank obscenity on the one hand and philosophic breadth on the other hand. They take their place as part of the general worship of the forces of nature, and follow all the variations of human culture. ”

“ Let the mind of the most devout Catholic feed on the writings of the Protestant or sensualist and mark the transformation. See how his soul becomes enervated, his judgment warped and his heart invaded by every temptation. His Catholic principles insensibly vanish, and the standards of paganism replace them. The light of the supernatural dies in his eyes, a film of clay overspreads his vision; he looks on the Church through coloured lenses, and the rankness of earth is upon his life. ”

“ In heathenism, the 'service' of a god is a mere matter of outward acts of so-called worship. There is absolutely no connection between religion and morality in idolatrous systems. The notion that the service of a god implies any duties in common life beyond ceremonial ones is wholly foreign to paganism in all its forms. The establishment of the opposite idea is wholly the consequence of revelation. So we need not wonder if the pagan conception of service was here in the minds of the vowing assembly. ”