Chapter II · PHALLISM IN ANCIENT RELIGIONS. (continued 2)

In conclusion, it must be said that Christianity itself is certainly not without the Phallic element. Reference may be made to the important place taken in Christian dogma by the “fall,” which has been shown to have had a purely Phallic foundation, and to the peculiar position assigned to Mary, as the Virgin Mother of God.205 It must not be forgotten, however, that, whatever may have been the primitive idea on which these dogmas are based, it had received a totally fresh aspect at the hands of those from whom the founders of Christianity received it.206 As to symbols, too, these were employed by the Christians in the later signification given to them by the followers of the ancient faiths. Thus the fish and the cross symbols originally embodied the idea of generation, but afterwards that of life, and it was in this sense that they were applied to Christ.207 The most evidently Phallic representation used by the Christian Iconographers is undoubtedly the aureole, or vesica piscis, which is elliptical in form and contained the figure of Christ—Mary herself, however, being sometimes represented in the aureole, glorified as Jesus Christ.208 Probably the nimbus also is of Phallic significance, for, although generally circular, it was sometimes triangular, square, &c.209 The name of Jehovah is inscribed within a radiating triangle.210 Didron gives an illustration of St. John the Evangelist with a circular nimbus, surmounted by two sun-flowers, emblems of the sun, an idea which, says Didron, “reminds us of the Egyptian figures, from the heads of which two lotus-flowers rise in a similar manner.”211 There is also a curious representation in the same work of the Divine hand with the thumb and two forefingers outstretched, resting on a cruciform nimbus.212 In Egypt the hand having the fingers thus placed was a symbol of Isis, and, from its accompaniments, there can be no doubt, notwithstanding the mesmeric character ascribed to it by Ennemoser,213 that it had an essentially Phallic origin, although it may ultimately have been used to signify life. There can be no question, however, that, whatever may be thought as to the nature of its symbols,214 the basis of Christianity is more emotional than that of any other religion now existing. Reference has been made to the presence in Hebraic theology of an idea of God—that of a Father—antagonistic to the Phœnician notion of the “Lord of Heaven.” We have the same idea repeated in Christ’s teaching, its distinctive characteristic being the recognition of God as the Universal Father—the Great Parent of mankind, who had sent His son into the world that he might reconcile it unto Himself. It is in the character of a forgiving parent that Christians are taught to view God, when He is not lost sight of in the presence of Christ, of whom the church is declared to be the bride. In Christianity we see the final expression of the primitive worship of the father as the head of the family—the generator—as the result of an instinctive reasoning process leading up from the particular to the universal—with which, however, the dogma of the “fall” and its consequences—deduced so strangely from a Phallic legend—have been incorporated.215 As a religion of the emotions, the position of Christianity is perfectly unassailable. As a system of rational faith, however, it is otherwise; and the tendency of the present age is just the reverse of that which took place among the Hebrews—the substitution of a Heavenly King for a Divine Father. In fact, modern science is doing its best to effect for primitive fetishism, or demon-worship, what Christianity has done for Phallic-worship—generalise the powers of nature and make of God a Great Unknowable Being, who, like the Elohim, of the Mosaic Cosmogony, in some mysterious manner, causes all things to appear at a word. This cannot, however, be the real religion of the future. If God is to be worshipped at all, the Heavenly King and the Divine Father must be combined as a single term, and He must be viewed, not as the unknowable cause of being, but as the great source of all being, who may be known in nature—the expression of his life and energy, and in man who was “created” in his own image.

Note.—M. François Lenormant, in the seventh edition of his “Histoire ancienne de l’Orient” (T. i., p. 91), after considering the traditions of a great deluge preserved by various peoples, concludes that “the biblical deluge, far from being a myth, has been a real and historical fact, which has struck the ancestors of at least the Aryan or Indo-European, the Semitic or Syro-Arab, and the Hamitic or Kouschite races—that is, the three great civilised races of the ancient world, before the ancestors of these races were separated, and in the Asiatic country which they inhabited together.” The authority of M. Lenormant is great, but preference must be given on this point to the arguments of M. Dupuis, who, in his “Origine de tous des Cultes” (T. iii., p. 176, et seq.), has almost certainly proved the astronomical character of what he terms the “fiction sacerdotale,” which, however, may have originated with the common ancestors of the three races referred to by M. Lenormant.