Sex worship

“ It is a case of faulty adaptation in the race, or at least in certain elements of it, rather than in the individual. These general analogies are noteworthy from the standpoints of mental evolution and abnormal psychology.
In order to show how sex worship as practiced by a later civilization was the expression of an unhealthy tendency, we must digress sufficiently to show the setting in which decadent sex worship existed. It is necessary to give a chronological outline indicating how primitive beliefs succeeded each other as a result of man’s progressive development. ”

“ We may now return to the interpretation of decadent sex worship. When we understand the setting in which sex worship was practiced in the middle ages we are better able to appreciate its significance. As stated above, it was the attempt by certain elements of the race to return to more primitive motives, and to derive satisfaction from beliefs which had long been outgrown by advancing civilization. This clinging to an early type of reaction, or the return to more primitive feelings, must be regarded as an unhealthy tendency. ”

“ These primitive people exhibit many of the qualities of the child. They are quite without sex consciousness. Their motives are at once both simple and direct, and they are doubtless sincere. Much misunderstanding has arisen by judging such primitive people by the standards of our present day civilization. Sex worship, while it held sway was probably quite as seriously entertained as many other beliefs; it only became degraded during a decadent age, when civilization had advanced beyond such simple conceptions of a deity, but had not evolved a satisfactory substitute. ”

“ These origins, found associated especially in art and religious usages, have not been generally understood. Yet when we reflect upon the fact that many religious customs are of great antiquity; that when once a certain form or custom becomes established, it is well nigh ineffaceable, although subject to great change or disguise throughout the centuries; when we reflect upon these conditions, and realize the fact that sex worship with its accompanying symbolism is found throughout primitive religions, we may then more readily appreciate the entire significance of the above interpretations. ”

“ In the remotest antiquity the worship of the generative principle was the only religion known to men. Sex-worship was not confined to any one race. It was the form of worship common to all primeval nations of the globe. ”

“ Fundamental as they are in our mental development, they enter into our general personality and become a part of our makeup. How is the motive expressed in sex worship a part of our motives and feelings of today? Superficially it does not appear to be present, but a little reflexion shows that it is there. It has become so much a part of us that we scarcely recognize its presence, the instinct to reproduce being common to everyone. ”

“ The varieties of phallic worship found in so many ages and among so many peoples show how man plumed himself upon the generative function and how he linked it with the god-idea. The "religious dedication of women," which gratified at once the lust of priests and the demands of ancient theology that the gods should have the best of everything earthly, is another testimony to the preoccupation of early man with sex in its relation to religion. ”

“ Now since in the above rites, where the increase of the food supply is the main motive, the entire development and symbolism centers about articles of food, and since in the phallic rites an entirely analagous development and symbolism centers about the generative organs, it is only reasonable to infer that the phallic rites have to do with the desire for children. In this we have the meaning of sex worship. ”

“ During the witch mania an overwhelming proportion of those charged with and executed for sorcery were women. As a matter of fact, women were more prone than men to credit themselves with possessing supernatural power. But the theological explanation was that the devil had more power over women than men. This was, obviously, a heritage from the primitive belief above described. [81]
Another way in which religion becomes closely associated with sexualism is through the widely diffused phallic worship. ”

“ The real significance of its use in religious worship is that it gives a marked expression to feelings that crave an outlet. And the lesson is that sexual feeling cannot be eliminated from life; it can only be diverted or disguised. Some expression it will find—here in open perversion resulting in positive vice, there in obsession that leads to a half-insane asceticism, and elsewhere the creation of the unconsciously salacious with an unhealthy fondness for dabbling in questions that refer to the illicit relations of the sexes. ”

“ In fact, the mysteries of sex have always exercised a profound influence upon the primitive mind. The savage's conceptions of the supernatural were largely colored by sexual fancies, which, however, is a peculiarity of all primitive religions. Consequently, sex symbolism is one of the oldest of our social heritages. As far back as we are able to trace, we find evidence of man's worship of the reproductive forces of nature.
Among the more primitive peoples, sexual phenomena were sanctified in their normal forms, literally and undisguised. ”

“ Worship of society and popular opinion is idolatry. The soul has no sex, no country, no place, no time. ”

“ When we contemplate the attitude which religious systems have ever held toward women, we are amazed that the Church has been upheld almost wholly by the female sex. The fact is accountable on one hypothesis only: that of the spiritual insight, which recognized in the story of the Holy Mother and the Child the One primordial, and indestructible key to salvation—the birth of the god-man through the recognition of the purity and joy of the perfect sex-union. ”

“ That charge against females which in the minds of some half-atheistical men is magnified into a stigma on Christianity itself, namely, that they are more apt to become religious than men; and that we find by far the greater part of professing Christians to be females, is in my own view one of the highest praises of the sex. I rejoice that their hearts are more susceptible than ours, and that they do not war so strongly against that religion which their nature demands. ”

“ LUCIAN.—The grand support of missionaries abroad and of established priesthoods at home, is the female sex of Christendom, without whose sustaining zeal no one of all the great stocks of superstition which now infest the world would stand for another century. Whatever may be the origin or absurdity of any system of theology, set up in any country, the timidity of the female sex stimulates them generally to cling to it with fervor and devotedness, without the slightest examination. ”

“ In its accomplishment, for all who have reached a reasonably human degree of development, the communion of bodies becomes the communion of souls. The outward and visible sign has been the consummation of an inward and spiritual grace. “I would base all my sex teaching to children and young people on the beauty and sacredness of sex,” wrote a distinguished woman; “sex intercourse is the great sacrament of life, he that eateth and drinketh unworthily eateth and drinketh his own damnation; but it may be the most beautiful sacrament between two souls who have no thought of children.” ”

“ We have mentioned women in every sphere and state of life, social and domestic, as endowed with confessedly heroic powers, and capable of attaining high and noble ends in the field of religion, of art, and of philosophy. One class of women, however, remains still to be noticed, and it is perhaps the greatest proof of the church’s universal and instinctive tenderness toward the sex, that among that unhappy class she alone has been able to make fruitful the call of God. ”

“ But enough is here intimated to cause the gentle heart of any Christian woman to compassionate the millions of her sex who are thus systematically debauched in their imaginations and affections by their very mothers, as they educate them thus to continue their own degradation and that of their offspring forever. How much such females need the Christian teacher, and what light the Holy Bible would bring to such homes, and what a contrast of loveliness, and purity, and goodness the story of our Incarnate God would be to such instruction, can be seen at a glance! ”

“ Why should the Christian and the Jew have always regarded as the one unpardonable sin the union in one human body of the distinctive physical and psychic earmarks of the two recognized sexes? Why should they have pitied and assisted the club-footed and the deaf-mute, but always endeavored to grind sexual cripples to powder under their heels?
There is indeed no worse crippling than the sexual. This is because sex, with all that it implies, is the principal physiological factor in life. Any abnormality of sex is truly the greatest of tragedies. ”

“ By declaring the essential unity of the sexes, the Bible bestows supreme honour upon woman, while shedding a dew, tender as the blessing of God upon her affectional nature. In matters of conscience there is no sex; consequently in the discharge of the duties of piety each is equally capacitated, and therefore equally responsible. Love on the part of husbands is made as binding as obedience on the part of wives ”

“ Polygamy and concubinage prevailed even in pious families in these olden times. The doctrine of vows, also, in the case of daughters, wives, and widows, proves the subordination of the female sex. It is Christianity that has raised women above the state of barbaric degradation, Mahometan slavery, and Jewish subjection, and assigned to them their proper place in society.
While the religion of Jesus elevates women to great consideration in the social scale, it imposes a salutary restraint upon human passions, and checks every approach to the assumption of an unnatural superiority. ”

“ Through all succeeding ages, they have been conspicuous for their works of charity and their labours of love,—through all the phases of persecution the women have suffered for their religious faith like the men; and it has been remarked that no woman ever put forward her sex as a reason for being spared. ”

“ Woman, as typified by the Virgin, was held up as the ideal of the world-heart. Mariolatry, the fine flower of feminine concepts became the special policy of the Roman Church, in shrewd concession to human, aesthetic impulses, and in a perpetual combat of male sexualism. Just as Christianity had darkened existence with the gloom and gore of the Cross, so the sentiment-of Mary-worship was to effeminize the social and sexual life of the male. ”

“ In olden times, if a woman met head-hunters, she could redeem her life by sexual surrender. Later, a maiden consecrated to the gods as a sacrifice might elect to redeem her life by dedicating her body for life to the sacred sex service of the temple; in this way she could earn her redemption money. The ancients regarded it as highly elevating to have sex relations with a woman thus engaged in ransoming her life. It was a religious ceremony to consort with these sacred maidens, and in addition, this whole ritual afforded an acceptable excuse for commonplace sexual gratification. ”

“ If society had some way by which it could bring about the satisfaction of these needs of these cultured girls, the latter could be saved from the shipwreck of life and be useful members of their community. In my own life I have proved that Christian conversion and absorption in the teachings of the Bible can not save one from innate nymphomania. I could suggest a means of salvation for these girls, but dare not. If only the leaders of thought did not prescribe an identic sex life for every daughter of Eve, although Nature has created them with such diversity along these lines! ”

“ This is a false position; and I presume has grown out of the never-forgotten distinction of male and female. The woman who goes forth, clad in the panoply of God, to stem the tide of iniquity and misery, which she beholds rolling through our land, goes not forth to her labor of love as a female. She goes as the dignified messenger of Jehovah, and all she does and says must be done and said irrespective of sex. She is in duty bound to communicate with all, who are able and willing to aid her in saving her fellow creatures, both men and women, from that destruction which awaits them. ”

“ Let her set to her seal, that Religion, however received by man, is a gift which she can never, with impunity, decline. When piety presents its claims to the sterner sex, they raise doubts, and questionings, and comparisons with other goods. But woman may not hesitate for a moment. So does instinct teach us the fitness of female piety, that even the irreligious of our sex expect, and require, it in her. ”

“ But with all the vile thought which the undeveloped mind has indulged in respecting the sex-relation; with all the man-made laws arrayed against it as though it were criminal, and the teachings of the Church denying its spiritual origin and perpetuation; with women selling it in the public markets for their physical maintenance, nothing less than the fact of the eternality and universality of Sex, as the divine fulcrum of manifestation, can account for the fact that the poor little bi-une Love-god is after all coming to be recognized as the hope and savior of Mankind. ”