Modern Modesty
Ancient people happily venerated models of the male organ — the phallos or penis or lingam, the Greek, Latin, and Hindu names for it. Less venerated was the female organ, the pudenda or the yoni, the Latin and Hindu names. "Ithyphallic" images were images with an erect phallus from the Greek word "ithys", which means straight or straight up.

The phallic cult has spread over the entire world in all ages. Even still, there are millions of phallic worshippers today in India and other parts of the world.

It has been said that to deal with religion and omit the phallic elements is like trying to produce Hamlet without the Prince of Denmark. Phallic elements have had an extraordinary part in the development of religion, and it is prudery to ignore them. The cross is probably an emblem of phallic origin.

Yet, the church has made fairy tales of the past. Contrary to its dogmatic assertions, sex has been allied to religion through the the ages until modern times. What modern divine would write to ladies as St Jerome, the greatest ascetic of the fourth century, wrote to the aristocratic Christian ladies of his day? What theologian or preacher would now dare to draw an illustration, as St Augustine did, from the fimus infantis, or say that Priapus was deified propter magnitudinem instrumenti sui? Abelard, the most brilliant scholar of the Middle Ages, was castrated by the hirelings of a canon of the Paris cathedral. Saintly monks slept with saintly nuns to prove their self-control.

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. In some southern French towns, wax models of male organs hung in such bunches from the rafters of the church that when a wind blew, the worshippers complained the rattling disturbed them.

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.

Elsewhere, ancient phallic idols had been turned into Christian saints, and had become objects of intense veneration. 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. Scores of churches in Ireland had the image of a woman with exposed parts carved on the door for every woman and child to see. Some of these images still remain, yet the police will arrest anyone who displays the real thing.

Phallism In The Old Testament
Not long ago, and perhaps still, girls would wear a ring or a broach with the name "mizpah" on it, apparently believing the word to be a charm or an omen of good luck. It is explained in Genesis 31.


The Hebrew text has been discreetly translated, but the story is that Jacob, the chosen of the Lord, has fled from his father-in-law, stealthily, with all his goods. Rachel, the chosen of Jacob, has stolen her father's "images" (תרפים 'teraphim'), the crude phallic symbols to which Laban prays for the fertility of his cattle and wines. Laban follows in pursuit to recover his precious carvings, and Rachel sweetly sits on them, on her camel, and lies to her father, saying that she has her monthly period and could not rise. Laban is cheated, and he and Jacob raise up a stone pillar (מצבה mazzebah) — another phallic image and swear on it what they will do to each other if either misbehaves again. Mizpah! It is a look out point — a place that stands out!

Palestine was one great region of phallic cult, and the early Hebrews were as naïve and jealous in it as their neighbours. In the book of Exodus (25:10 to 27:19, and 36:8, to 38:31) there are two long descriptions of the "Tabernacle" or glorified tent, which was the Hebrew place of worship until Solomon is supposed to have built his wondrous temple.

Exodus is a fifth-century BC forgery, very obviously fabricated by the Jewish priests when they saw, and were envious of, the power of the Babylonian priests. Although this description is so minute and precise that readers of the Bible have, never had any doubt that it was written at the time when the Tabernacle was made, close examination shows not only that the material could not possibly have been obtained by Hebrews in the desert, but that the details of the construction are contradictory and the whole plan impracticable. It is a literary fiction by a priest.

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

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

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


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

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

The priestly writers of Exodus lived, as their language alone would suffice to show, only about 500 BC, though bits of more archaic language are embedded in their work. These archaic portions are two documents, cut into fragments and put in a piece here and a piece there, known as the Jahvist (J) and Elohist (E) documents. They might reflect traditions back to the tenth century BC, and chiefly appear in Genesis.

The English translation of the Old Testament, though gross enough in its sonorous language about whoring and fornication, really tones down the original. The Hebrew text itself had, in fact, been modified by the rabbis who expressly said that much of it required "modernizing," as we say, even two thousand years ago. The "revealed" word could not be too crude to meet the pagan eye of other nations.

Sometimes the translation of the text is fair enough but still conceals the original concepts of the people for whom the priests wrote. "Male and female created he them," (Genesis 1:27), yet the word nequebah (נקבה), which is translated "female," means "the thing to be screwed" (or bored), and that was the ancient Hebrew idea of woman. The story of the Fall is just as crudely sexual.

"The sons of God" had intercourse with "the daughters of men," and begot a race of giants and of people so wicked that God had to destroy nearly the whole race. It is all Babylonian myth. Notice, however, a very peculiar episode in Chapter 9.

Noah was drunk and naked in his tent. Ham had some reason to go in, "saw the nakedness of his father, and told his two brethren without." Perhaps any cheeky boy would find it amusing and tell his brothers, yet God's heavy curse fell upon the unfortunate Ham and his posterity forever! We are asked to believe that Noah and his offspring were incredibly prudish and sensitive about nakedness in the semi-barbaric period of the race. Centuries afterwards, David, the great Israelite king, danced naked before all the people and God, with no retribution. Prophets stalked the land naked, and were proud of it. But in the most primitive human society, there was a sexual delicacy equal to that of the most refined home in Boston!

The rabbis said that what Ham really did was to castrate his father, and consequently Noah dies in the next verse.

What one might plausibly claim to be to some extent a history of the Hebrews begins in Chapter 12.

In Chapter 24:2, Abraham calls his eldest servant and says, "Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh," by way of a solemn oath. Israel (47:29), even in civilized Egypt, calls his distinguished son Joseph to swear a solemn oath in the same peculiar way. The translation is euphemistic. The most solemn oath of the Hebrews was to swear with your hand on a man's testicles. The custom has persisted in the Orient until recent times, amongst the Arabs for instance, but must have been common generally among earlier people as the Latin words for those the male organs and for witnesses shows. Our words for the same things come from the Latin ones, so wonder why "testicles" and "testimony," have the same root.

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

Evidently, the Hebrew religion originally was phallus worship. It was saturated with phallic elements until the ark and its contents mysteriously disappeared in the fifth century when the priests fabricated a more sophisticated religion under the inspiration of Persia and Babylonia. The Old Testament, a second century scissors and paste compilation of earlier legends and fiction with original fiction added, tells us the situation.

The Phallic Stage
The cult of the god of love is in the most perfect harmony with our most powerful impulse. People really believes in the efficacy of the cult, but he also likes it. So the phallic cult has never been destroyed. The phallus grows larger, the orgy more frequent. Today it assumes new secular forms but sexuality can hardly have been more revered. In the most religious of Christians (like saintly nuns), it also assumed new forms.

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

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

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

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

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

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

Phallism Under Christianity
Christianity, when it got the power, abolished all public manifestations of a phallic cult. It was part of a reaction, felt throughout the Greco-Roman world, against the cult of sex. Apollonius of Tyana, Plutarch, Dion Chrysostom, Epictetus, Marcus Aurelius, Julian, Seneca condemned it, as well as the church fathers. The religions of Mithra, Serapis, and Manichaeus, 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 sex-pleasure, if not all pleasure, and because it did not care a cent about the social aspect of fertility and progeny. It cut the root of phallism, the individual love of pleasure.

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. 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.

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 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 cross was not phallic in the mind of the early Christians, but it originally had a phallic meaning. Cretans and Egyptians and others depicted it ages before the Christians. The Egyptian cross is more suggestive, and was originally a sex-emblem.

Christianity began to get power after the conversion of Constantine, in the fourth century. By the end of the fourth century all the phallic temples had gone up in smoke. By the end of the fifth century all the "pagans" (villagers) even had 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 replaces Mithra-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.

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 most orgiastic of the phallic cults, that of Dionysos, came to Greece from Thrace, which was then a part of primitive, barbaric Europe. 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 Sheila-na-gig, was often inserted in the keystone of the arch of the church-door — to avert the evil eye. One is exhibited in the Royal Irish Academy at Dublin.



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. 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 (a phallus). It is traditionally scoured every seven years. Every English village once had its "May-Pole," which was originally phallic.

The nearer we go to Rome, the worse it is.

At Isernia, in the Abruzzi, there used to be an extremely popular festival every year on the feast of Cosmas and Damian, saints of very equivocal 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 was obliged to interfere 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 was in the Middle Ages is best seen in France, where the Protestantism of the Huguenots called our attention to it.

When, in 1585 AD, the Protestants took Embrun, they found in the sacristy an object, reddened at the end by libations of wine poured on it by barren women, which the priests had from time immemorial represented as the phallus of St Foutin. The saint was said to have been the first Christian bishop of Lyons, and his cult spread over the entire region. Wax models of his celebrated organ were everywhere. Churches in the south of France had bunches of phalli hanging like candles from the roof. 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.

Who "St Foutin" really was we can guess from the cult of "St Guerlichon" (or Greluchon) in the Diocese of Bourges. The saint 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 very many places in France and Belgium the phallic cult survived in this way. St Ters in Belglum, St Giles in Brittany, St Rini of Anjou, and other famous saints of "the land of saints" grew out of old ithyphallic statues. That of St Arnaud wore an apron, which was lifted only for barren women. At Orange, in the church of St Eutropius, there was a wooden phallus covered with leather. It was greatly venerated and sought.

Rome officially stamped out the phallic cult, but quietly winked at it everywhere. Witchcraft was a Europe-wide result. The Flagellants of the Middle Ages — the crowds that went about scourging themselves from the thirteenth to the sixteenth centuries — were phallic. The dancing mania was an expression of the morbidly repressed sex-sentiment. The unnatural 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 St Catherine and St Teresa and the fearful self-mutilation of holy monks, were all outcomes of the attempt to repress sex.

All that we can say is that the ancient phallic cults were dead because the ancient phallic deities were dead, because Christians now naturally looked to God and Mary to remove their barrenness — as a rule. But do not imagine that this led to a purification of the sex-morals of Europe.