James Weir
Religion and Lust
When called to account by his bishop, he excused his action by stating that such performances were common in his parish. These phallic observances occurred in Easter week, March 29-April 15, 1282.103
In Ireland, the female sexual organs seem to have been the symbol of phallic worship most in use. In the arches over the doorways of churches, a female figure, with the person fully exposed, was invariably so placed that the external organs of generation at once caught the eye. These figures were called Shela-na-gig, which in Irish means “Julian the giddy.” Sometimes these images were placed on the walls and used as caryatides. From this symbol the horseshoe’s power to ward off evil and bring good luck has been evolved. The people in olden times were in the habit of painting, or sketching with charcoal, drawings of the female genitalia over the doors of their houses to ward off bad luck. These drawings were necessarily rude, and probably resembled a horseshoe more than they did the object for which they were intended. In course of time, when the symbol had lost its original significance, the horseshoe entirely took the place of the phallic image.
Herodotus says that Sesostris, king of Egypt, was in the habit of erecting pillars in the countries conquered by his armies, on which he had the female genitals engraved in order to show his contempt.104 I think that the historian misinterprets the meaning of the pillars; the Egyptians were phallic worshipers, and these obelisks were, in all probability, altars to Priapus.
The beneficent influence of this particular phallic symbol has been well brought out in several classical stories. When Ceres was wandering over the world in her search after Proserpine, she came to the house of a peasant woman, Baubo by name. Baubo saw that the goddess was heart-sick and miserable, so she offered her a drink of cyceon (κυκεων). The goddess refused the refreshing mixture, and continued her lamentations. Fully believing in the virtue and efficacy of the symbol, Baubo lifted her robe and showed Ceres her genitals.105 The goddess burst into laughter and at once drank the cyceon.106 The same superstition appears in a celebrated book of the sixteenth century, Le Moyen de Parvenir. The author of the “Worship of the Generative Powers” gives the following instructive extract from this work:
Hermès. On nomme ainsi ceux qui n’ont point vu le con de leur femme ou de leur garce. Le pauvre valet de chez nous n’étoit donc pas coquebin; il eut beau le voir.
Varro. Quand?
Hermès. Attendez, étant en fiançailles, il vouloit prendre le cas de sa fiancée; elle ne le vouloit pas: il faisoit le malade, et elle lui demandoit: “Qu’y a-t-il, mon ami?” “Hélas, ma mie, je suis si malade, que je n’en puis plus; je mourrai si je ne vois ton cas.” “Vraiment voire?” dit-elle. “Hélas! oui, si je l’avois vu, je guérirois.” Elle ne lui voulut point montrer; à la fin, ils furent mariés. Il advint, trois ou quatre mois après, qu’il fut fort malade; et il envoya sa femme au médicin pour porter de son eau. En allant, elle s’avisa de ce qu’il lui avoit dit en fiançailles. Elle retourna vitement, et se vint mettre sur le lit; puis, levant cotte et chemise lui présenta son cela en belle vue, et lui disoit: “Jean, regarde le con, et te guéris.”107
Sir William Hamilton writes to Richard Payne Knight from Naples in the year 1781, as follows:
“Having last year made a curious discovery, that in a province of this kingdom, not fifty miles from its capital, a sort of devotion is still paid to Priapus, the obscene divinity of the ancients (though under another denomination), I have thought it a circumstance worth recording; particularly as it offers a fresh proof of the similitude of the Popish and Pagan religion, so well observed by Dr. Middleton in his celebrated Letter from Rome; therefore I mean to deposit the authentic proofs of this assertion in the British Museum when a proper opportunity shall offer.” Sir William goes on to relate how he found many phallic amulets, charms, etc., in the possession of the people, and then describes the votive offerings laid upon the altar at a feast given in honor of Saints Cosmus and Damianus, in a church called by their names. The offerings were waxen images of the phallus. “The vows are chiefly presented by the female sex,” continues he, “and they are seldom such as represent legs, arms, etc., but most commonly the male parts of generation. A person who was at this fête in the year 1780, told me that he heard a woman say, at the time she presented a vow, ‘Santo Cosimo benedetto, cosi lo voglio.’”108
This church was in Isernia, a little village about fifty miles from Naples, and away from the direct line of travel, hence its inhabitants saw little of the world, and therefore kept to their old customs longer than their more favored neighbors. Thus it happened that, even in the latter half of the eighteenth century, Priapus had his votaries almost within the shadow of the Vatican! These phallic rites were finally abolished by episcopal command.
One of the most common amulets or charms against jettitura, or the “evil eye,” the bête noire of every Italian, is a little coral hand. The middle finger of this hand is extended, thus representing the penis, while the other fingers are closed on the palm, thus representing the testicles. In ancient times, when a man extended his hand, closed in this manner, it was a gesture of insult and anger; to-day this gesture is only made in derision and contempt. The hand closed in this way, or, rather, with the thumb projecting between the first and second fingers (another very common phallic symbol or sign), was called a “fig”; hence, the old expression of contempt and indifference, “a fico for you, sir,” now modernized into “I don’t care a fig.”109
France, as well as Italy, had her phallic charms and her phallic saints. Priapus was a god to the ancients—to the people of the Middle Ages he was a saint. According to M. Dulaure, in the south of France, Provence, Languedoc, and the Lyonnais, he was worshiped under the name of St. Foutin. This name is derived from that of the first bishop of Lyons, Fotinus, to whom the people had transferred (as they have done to many other sainted individuals) the distinguishing characteristics of a god; in this instance, Priapus. At Lyons there was an immense wooden phallus, and the women were in the habit of scraping this image, and then steeping the wood-dust in water, which they drank as a remedy against barrenness. Sometimes they gave it to the men in order to stimulate sexuality or sensuality. At Varailles, in Provence, waxen images of the male and female sexual organs were offered to St. Foutin, and, since these images were suspended from the ceiling and moved by every vagrant current of air, the effect was sometimes very astonishing. “Témoin Saint Foutin de Varailles en Provence, auquel sont dédiées les parties honteuses de l’un et de l’ autre sexe, formées en cire; le plancher de la chapelle en est fort garni, et, quand le vent les fait entrebattre, cela débauche un peu les dévotions à l’honneur de ce Saint.”110
This worship at Varailles was identical with that of Isernia; the votive offerings were waxen images or models of the genital organs, while the saints differed only in name, not in character. At Embrun the worship of St. Foutin was a little different. The women at this last mentioned place poured wine on the phallus; this wine was collected in a bucket, and, when it became sour, it was used as a medicine for barrenness.
When Embrun was besieged and taken by the Protestants in 1585, this phallus was found among the other sacred relics, and its head “was red with the wine which had been poured upon it.”111 In the church of St. Eutropius, at Orange, a large phallus covered with leather was seized and burnt by the Protestants in 1562. Dulaure says that the sexual organs were objects of worship at Porighy, Viviers, Vendre in the Bourbonnais, Cives, Auxerre, Puy-en-Velay, and at hundreds of other places. Some of these phalli were recreated as fast as they were worn away by zealous devotees. They were so arranged in the walls of the churches that, “as the phallic end in front became shortened (by scrapings), a blow from a mallet from behind thrust it forward, so that it was restored to its original length.”112
In the public square of Batavia there was formerly kept a bronze cannon which had been captured from the natives. The touch-hole of this piece of ordnance was made in the shape of a phallic hand or “fig,” which I have described elsewhere. The barren Malay women were in the habit of seating themselves on this hand in order that they might become pregnant.113 An analogous custom was prevalent in France and elsewhere in Europe during the Middle Ages. This habit led to sexual abuses, and was finally condemned by the ecclesiastical authorities. Indeed, the Church inflicted severe penances on the women who were guilty of using phalli: “Mulier qualique molimine aut se ipsam aut cum altera fornicans tres annos poeniteat, unum ex his pane et aqua. Cum sanctimoniali per machinam fornicans, annos septem poeniteat, duos ex his in pane et aqua.”114 We see by this that nuns were more severely punished than were other women.
This use of the phallus is mentioned in the Bible, where it is bitterly condemned by one of the prophets: “Thou hast also taken thy fair jewels of my gold and of my silver, which I had given thee, and madest to thyself images of men, and didst commit whoredom with them.”115 Finally, it was the custom of the young girls of France during the Middle Ages (like the maidens of certain savage races), who were on the eve of marriage, to offer up to St. Foutin their last maiden robes. From the evidence here adduced, we see that phallic worship existed in some parts of Europe as late as the latter half of the eighteenth century, and that it was almost universal during the Middle Ages. According to Becan,116 Golnitz,117 and other historians, there were several other phallic saints besides St. Foutin who were worshiped in Belgium, Spain, Germany and other European countries; but, since their adoration was similar to that of St. Foutin, I do not think it necessary to give a description of it here. It has been shown conclusively that worship of the generative principle was in vogue among the Latins, the Greeks, the ancient Germans, the Saxons, the Danes, the Gauls, the Iberians, the Picts, the Celts and the Britons. It has been demonstrated, also, that vestiges of phallic worship existed in England, France, Italy, Spain and Germany during the Middle Ages. As late as the latter part of the eighteenth century wax images of the phallus were used as votive offerings in the town of Isernia, not many miles from Naples; the beribboned Maypole of our Mayday festival is but the flower decked phallus of the Roman matrons; charms against jettitura, “the evil eye,” little coral hands with the middle finger extended (in ancient days one of the most common symbols of Priapus) can still be purchased in the streets of Rome.118 “This worship” (that of Priapus) “which was but part of that of the generative powers, appears to have been the most ancient of the superstitions of the human race, and has prevailed more or less among all known peoples before the introduction of Christianity; and, singularly enough, so deeply it seems to have been implanted in human nature that even the promulgation of the gospel did not abolish it, for it continued to exist, accepted and often encouraged by the medieval clergy.”119
So very ancient was the inception of the worship of the generative principle that we have some reason for believing that even the cave-dwellers practiced this cult. It was stated in the Moniteur, January, 1865, that “in the province of Venice, in Italy, excavations in a bone-cave have brought to light, beneath ten feet of stalagmite, bones of animals, mostly post-tertiary, of the usual description found in such places, flint implements, with a needle of bone having an eye and point, and a plate of argillaceous compound, on which was scratched a rude drawing of the phallus.”120 Thus we see that, possibly, from the time of the cave-dwellers to almost the beginning of the nineteenth century, phallic worship existed in Southern Europe! From the Sagas, folklore tales, and myths of the Norse we have every reason for believing that it existed for almost as great a length of time in Northern Europe. That in Western Europe, before and during the Middle Ages, it flourished in a variety of forms, we have unimpeachable testimony.
In this brief outline of phallic worship I have endeavored to show that the worship of the generative principle has been universal; that it is still practiced by primitive peoples, and that vestiges of it lingered among certain civilized peoples until, comparatively speaking, a recent time. In order to show what a height of idealization and abstraction it had reached at a time when Greece stood at the head of the civilized world, I will close this part of my essay with the following quotation from Knight’s strong, erudite, and exhaustive treatise: “The ancient theologists … finding that they could conceive no idea of infinity, were content to revere the Infinite Being in the most general and efficient exertion of his power—attraction; whose agency is perceptible through all matter, and to which all motion may, perhaps, be ultimately traced. His agency being supposed to extend through the whole material world, and to produce all the various revolutions by which its system is sustained, his attributes were, of course, extremely numerous and varied. These were expressed by various titles and epithets in the mystic hymns and litanies, which the artists endeavored to represent by various forms and characters of men and animals. The great characteristic attribute was represented by the organ of generation in that state of tension and rigidity which is necessary to the due performance of its functions. Many small images of this kind have been found among the ruins of Herculaneum and Pompeii, attached to bracelets, which the chaste and pious matrons of antiquity wore round their necks and arms. In these the organ of generation appears alone, or accompanied by the wings of incubation, in order to show that the wearer devoted herself wholly and solely to procreation, the great end for which she was ordained. So expressive a symbol, being constantly in view, must keep her attention fixed on its natural object, and continually remind her of the gratitude she owed the Creator for having taken her into his service, made her partaker of his most valuable blessings, and employed her as the passive instrument in the exertion of his most beneficial power. The female organs of generation were revered as symbols of the generative power of nature or matter, as the male’s were of the generative powers of God.”121
CHAPTER III.
THE PSYCHICAL CORRELATION OF RELIGIOUS EMOTION AND SEXUAL DESIRE
That there exists a relationship between the cultivated ethical emotion, religious feeling, and the essentially natural physio-psychical function, sexual desire or libido, is a fact noticed and commented on by many thinkers and writers. The literature of the subject is, however, exceedingly fragmentary and disconnected, no author (as far as I have been able to determine) having devoted as much as one thousand words to the consideration of this very interesting psychical phenomenon. Hence, my data have been gathered from many sources, which are as diversified as they are numerous.
Beyond a question of doubt, man becomes religiously enthused most frequently either early in life, when pubescence is, or is about to be, established, or late in life, when sexual desire has become either entirely extinct or very much abated. Young boys and girls are exceedingly impressionable at, or just before, puberty, and are apt to embrace religion with the utmost enthusiasm. A distinguished evangelist declares that “men and women seldom or never enter into the kingdom of God after they have arrived at maturity. Out of a thousand converts, seven hundred are converted before they are twenty years old.”122
The Roman Catholic church is keenly alive to these facts, therefore requires the rite of confirmation to be administered, if possible, to its would-be communicants at, or before, the age of puberty.123
Of all the insanities of the pubescent state, erotomania and religious mania are the most frequent and the most pronounced. Sometimes they go hand in hand, the most inordinate sensuality being coupled with abnormal religious zeal. A young woman of my acquaintance, whose conduct has given rise to much scandal, is, at times, a reincarnate Messalina, while at other times she is the very embodiment of ethical and religious purity. Another young girl, in whom vita sexualis was about to be established, became religiously insane and had delusions in which she declared that she was in heaven and sitting at the right hand of God. She declared this over and over again, while shamelessly committing manustrupation! Krafft-Ebing calls attention to this relation between religious and sexual feeling in psycho-pathological states. “It suffices,” says he, “to recall how intense sensuality makes itself manifest in the clinical history of many religious maniacs; the motley mixture of religious and sexual delusions that is so frequently observed in psychoses (e. g., in maniacal women who think they are or will be the mother of God), but particularly in masturbatic insanity; and finally, the sexual, cruel self-punishment, injuries, self-castrations, and even self-crucifixions, resulting from abnormal religio-sexual feeling.”124
An example of the last mentioned self-immolation (self-crucifixion) is given by Berghierri, and is a remarkable instance of the interchangeableness of religious emotion and sexual desire in psychopathic individuals. The man in question, who had been intensely sensual, manufactured a cross, nailed himself to it, and ingeniously managed to suspend himself and cross from the window of his sleeping apartment.
“All through the history of insanity the student has occasion to observe this close alliance of sexual and religious ideas; an alliance which may be partly accounted for because of the prominence which sexual themes have in most creeds, as illustrated in ancient times by the phallus worship of the Egyptians, the ceremonies of the Friga cultus of the Saxons, the frequent and detailed reference to sexual topics in the Koran and several other books of the kind, and which is further illustrated in the performances which, to come down to a modern period, characterize the religious revival and camp-meeting as they tinctured their medieval model, the Münster Anabaptist movement.”125
Men, owing to their greater freedom, soon learn the difference of the sexes and the delights of sexual congress; women, hedged in by conventionalities and deterred by their innate passivity, remain, for the most part, in ignorance of sexual knowledge until their marriage. For this reason it happens that very many more women than men experience religious emotion. Young married men and women, who are in perfect sexual health, and who have not experienced religion before marriage, seldom give this emotion a single thought until late in life, when both libido and vita sexualis are on the wane or are extinct. Voltaire cynically, though truthfully, observes that when woman is no longer pleasing to man she then turns to God. A woman who has been disappointed in love almost invariably seeks consolation in religion. The virtuous unmarried woman, who has been unsuccessful in the pursuit of a husband, invariably turns to God and religion with impassioned zeal and energy.
Ungratified, or, rather, unsatisfied, sensuality very frequently gives rise to great religio-sexual enthusiasm. The circumcised foreskin of Christ, where it was and what had become of it, was a source of continual worriment to the nun Blanbekin; in an ecstacy of ungratified libido, St. Catherine of Genoa would frequently cast herself on the hard floor of her cell, crying: “Love! love! I can endure it no longer;” St. Armelle and St. Elizabeth were troubled with libido for the child Jesus;126 an old prayer is quite significant: “Oh, that I had found thee, Holy Emanuel; Oh, that I had thee in my bed to bring delight to body and soul! Come and be mine, and my heart shall be thy resting-place.”127 Francis Parkman calls attention to the fact that the nuns sent over to America in colonization days were frequently seized with religio-sexual frenzy. “She heard,” writes he of Marie de l’Incarnation, “in a trance, a miraculous voice. It was that of Christ, promising to become her spouse. Months and years passed, full of troubled hopes and fears, when again the voice sounded in her ear, with assurance that the promise was fulfilled, and that she was, indeed, his bride. Now ensued phenomena which are not infrequent among Roman Catholic female devotees, when unmarried, or married unhappily, and which have their source in the necessities of a woman’s nature.” (The italics are my own.) “To her excited thought, her divine spouse became a living presence; and her language to him, as recorded by herself, is of intense passion. She went to prayer, agitated and tremulous, as if to a meeting with an earthly lover: ‘Oh, my Love,’ she exclaimed, ‘when shall I embrace you? Have you no pity on the torments that I suffer? Alas! alas! my Love, my Beauty, my Life! Instead of healing my pain, you take pleasure in it. Come, let me embrace you, and die in your sacred arms!’”128 The historian remarks that the “holy widow,” as her biographers call her, is an example, and a lamentable one, of the tendency of the erotic principle to ally itself with high religious excitement and enthusiasm. Further along he says that “some of the pupils of Marie de l’Incarnation, also, had mystical marriages with Christ; and the impassioned rhapsodies of one of them being overheard, she nearly lost her character, as it was thought that she was apostrophizing an earthly lover.”129
The instances of religio-sexual outbursts in nuns and Roman Catholic female devotees who lead celibate lives are very numerous; I will, however, call attention to but one other: St. Veronica was so much in love with the divine lion that she took a young lion to bed with her, fondled and kissed it, and allowed it to suck her breasts.130 Throughout sacred literature, beginning with the Bible itself, religio-sexual feeling is very much en evidence. Hosea married a prostitute because—so he declared—God commanded him so to do. If Solomon’s beautiful song is typical of the Church and the Christ (as some theologians teach), then it is an unmistakable instance of religio-sexual feeling; religious emotion and sexual desire walk hand in hand through the measures of this impassioned verse. Circumcision, now eminently a religious ceremony, was, unquestionably, a sexual fetich and a phallic rite, which has been handed down from antiquity, when all the world were phallic worshipers! The very pillars set up by the patriarchs in commemoration of certain events were but rude images of the phallus, while not a few of the mysteries of the Holy of Holies itself were but vestiges of Chaldean and Egyptian genital worship!131
That a relationship between, and an interchangeableness of, these two widely dissimilar psychical operations, i.e., religious emotion and sexual desire, does exist, there can be no doubt.132 Now, what is the cause of, the reason for, this relationship? Mantegazza, Maudsley, Schleiermacher, Krafft-Ebing, and many others have endeavored, incidentally, to assign reasons for this relationship, but have, in my opinion, signally failed. Spitzka has tentatively, and without elaborating his idea in the least, suggested a theory which, I believe, solves the problem in every essential point. Says he in “Insanity,” page 39: This “alliance” (between religious emotion and libido) “may be partly accounted for because of the prominence which sexual themes have in most creeds, as illustrated in ancient times by the phallus worship of the Egyptians, the ceremonies of the Friga cultus of the Saxons, the frequent and detailed reference to sexual topics in the Koran and several other books of the kind, etc.” Dr. Spitzka does not enter into any discussion of the matter; he simply asserts his belief in the cause of the relationship, and then dismisses the subject without further comment.
Now, permit me, as briefly as possible, to designate the cause of the relationship between, and the interchangeableness of, religious feeling and sexual desire, which, as I believe, is to be found in the once widespread existence of phallic worship.
Some ten or twelve years ago, in an article on Suicide, which was published in the American Practitioner and News, I suggested (as a possible explanation for certain psychical phenomena) the existence in man of two consciousnesses, an active, vigilant consciousness and a pseudo-dormant consciousness. Again, in the American Naturalist, in an essay entitled “The Psychology of Hypnotism,”133 I reasserted this theory and, to a certain extent, elaborated it. I placed man’s active consciousness in the cortical portion of the brain, and his pseudo-dormant, unconscious consciousness (arbitrarily, be it confessed) in the basilar ganglia, and called this latter consciousness, “ganglionic consciousness.”
Recently, much has been written on the doctrine of duplex personality, notably by Mr. F. W. H. Myers, in a series of papers read before the Society of Psychical Research. Professor Newbold has also written very entertainingly and instructively on this subject. While not fully accepting the theory of “duplex personality,” i. e., active consciousness and subliminal consciousness (Myers’ name for the pseudo-dormant consciousness), as having been proven, Newbold says: “Of all the theories developed from the point of independence, Mr. Myers’ is the most comprehensive in its scope, is kept in most constant touch with what the author regards as facts, and displays the greatest philosophic insight.”134 According to the theory of duplex personality, many instincts, desires, and emotions have been crowded out of the active consciousness and have been relegated to the pseudo-dormant consciousness. This has been brought about by a “process of selection out of an infinity of possible elements solely on the grounds of utility.” Thus the cause for our horror of incest is hidden away in our subliminal consciousness; yet we cannot but think, with Westermarck, that this instinct is but the result of natural selection,135 the utility of the factor or factors occasioning it being no longer in evidence or required. Again, at certain seasons, man is seized with waldliebe (forest-love) and longs to flee from the haunts of men, and, with gun and rod, to revert, as far as possible, to the state of his savage ancestors. The desire is safely hidden away in his subliminal consciousness until favoring circumstances tempt it forth. It is not alone in “sleep, dreams, hypnosis, trance, and ecstacy that we see a temporary subsidence of the upper consciousness and the upheaval of a subliminal stratum”; there are many other states and many other causes for this strange psychical phenomenon.
I have demonstrated in the preceding pages that the worship of the generative principle was almost, if not wholly, universal; I have also shown that the beliefs, rites, and ceremonies of this cult made a lasting impression upon the minds of every people among whom it gained a foothold. Take the case of the ancient Hebrews. Notwithstanding the fact that they were tried in the furnace of Javeh’s awful wrath time and again; notwithstanding the fact that famine, pestilence, war, and imprisonment destroyed them by thousands; and, notwithstanding the fact that they were threatened with utter and absolute annihilation—all on account of this cult—they would not wholly abandon it. The words of the prophets become almost pathetic as we read, over and over again, that, although the kings did that which was pleasing in the sight of the Lord, “the high places and the groves were not destroyed.” Take the case of the Aztecs. Crushed beneath the iron heels of Spain’s hardy buccaneers, an utterly broken and conquered race, Cortez turned them over to the ministering care of his zealous priests. The prison, agonizing torture, and the awful stake succeeded, at last, in Christianizing them; they became children of Holy Mother Church! And yet, hundreds of years after this “glorious victory of the cross,” Biart finds the humble offerings of their descendants at the feet of Mictlanteuctli! The modern Christian Indian, in the deep shadows of the night, steals forth to offer up in secrecy a prayer at the feet of one of the phallic trinity! What matters it to the modern Aztec that his petition is offered to the ruler of Mictlan, the hell of his forefathers, instead of to the mighty Ipalnemoani, the Life-Giver?136 In his opinion, Mictlanteuctli represents the entire Aztec theogony, for has not his white priest kept the name of this god green in his memory? All the other gods have been forgotten; their personalities have been absorbed into that of the god of hell, for he has had advertisers in the shape of Catholic priests ever since the fall of the Aztec Empire! Take the case of the Peruvians. Although the Place of Gold and the beautiful Virgins of the Sun are not even memories to the descendants of the Incas, the religion which gave rise to them is not wholly forgotten; “phallic rites and ceremonies are to be observed interwoven with their Christian ritual and belief!” Take the case of the Roman Catholic devotees of Isernia, of Varailles, of Lyons, of hundreds of other places during the latter half of the eighteenth century. Priapus died when the first Christian emperor took his seat on the throne of Imperial Rome, and yet, hundreds and hundreds of years thereafter, we behold some of the mysteries of Eleusis almost within the shadow of St. Peter’s!