Note 88 — Chapter III · THE HYMN OF CREATION

Compare Reitzenstein (“Die hellenistischen Mysterienreligionen,” Leipzig and Berlin 1910, p. 20): “Among the various forms with which a primitive people have represented the highest religious consecration, union with God, belongs necessarily that of the sexual union, in which man attributes to his semen the innermost nature and power of God. That which was in the first instance wholly a sensual act becomes in the most widely separated places, independently, a sacred act, in which the god is represented by a human deputy or his symbol the Phallus.”