" . . . and thou shalt love the Lord thy God with all thy heart, and with all thy soul, and with all thy might."

CHAPTER I
FAR AWAY AND LONG AGO

I
FAR away and long ago a gibbon slid down a tree. Once on the ground he did not feel like climbing up again. Life seemed so much better below than above; only he realized he had to change a thing or two in his mode of living. He had to walk erect, for instance, rather than crawl on all fours. He had to perfect as well the use of his anterior limbs and to make hands out of them. And so it was that when the gibbon raised his head toward heaven and stretched his arms forward, he himself came to proceed forward as well. He was started on the way to human form.

It was then that the animal that was once gibbon or akin to the gibbon ventured out on its big climb again, not on the branches of a tree, but on the rungs of the ladder of civilization. Man burned the animal bridges behind him, for he saw no other way of living but to make the best of whatever humanity he possessed.

Today, if you see an aeroplane soaring in the sky, you may know it is all due to that enterprising gibbon that slid down the tree. Had he been content to remain swinging on the branches, that which today passes for mankind might have been just another form of gibbon.

II
Once humanized, the gibbon was driven further toward humanity by the lash of Dame Care. Because he was defenceless against the storm, he betook himself to the shelter of the rocks and caves. Because he was not equal to the demands that his new environment set up for those who would survive, he developed tools and implements. Because he was afraid of the prowling beast, he cultivated a taste for sociability. He took to wandering with his kind so that, with the help of others, he might conquer his foes against whom he was powerless alone. And because he lived in groups, he acquired a desire for the approval of his fellow creatures and was forever trying to outdo himself in every prowess his particular group considered worth while.

It was Dame Care that forced the humanized gibbon to trudge along the path of progress, but there were two other mighty forces that drew him to the great kingdom that was to be his. They, too, were his constant companions, leading him into the great spiritual world that he was to inherit. They made his life bearable in moments that were most trying; they added a drop of exaltation to his cup of drab existence. They were the prizes that were held out to the little school-boy of civilization, to be his when he made the grade. They were the pillars of fire in the darkness through which the gibbon walked into the promised land of humanity. They were: LOVE and RELIGION.

III
Both were doubtless very crude ere man first consciously called them by these designations. Love was probably only a physical overpowering of the female in a passing moment of passion, or winning her favor by appearing at an advantage in comparison with his fellows. Or perhaps it was, as it sometimes is today, a case of barter. He may have thrown her a banana or a nut, for which she, in return, received him in her chambers.

And religion was probably equally crude in the beginning. It was a mixture of fear and bribery. The strong fellow was dangerous in life and so he was in death. For, although his body returned to nothingness, his double, or soul, did not die but became even more powerful now, unbounded, as it was, by space and time. The man who was a devil when living became a demon after death. There was only one way of fighting him and that was by magic, but even magic was not always effective. It was rarely so in the case of the very strong demons. So it seemed more sensible to appease the evil spirit, to do it homage and to present it with the things it had liked when it was merely human. Religion may have had its origin as humbly as in bribing off the pernicious soul of some rascal in the tribe.

Still, there was something inherent in these prehistoric experiences of love and religion that potentially contained all the elements of which this rare fabric has been woven through these many thousands of years. Crude as the beginnings were, they contained the makings of the great phases of life that these forces came to be.

Even when love was a brief, physical, sex hunger, it embodied something more. Man was the first animal to abolish the rut or sexual season. Early man, like man today, was potentially ever ready to mate. He was already possessed of a conscious memory and an active imagination. As he lay basking in the sun after a satisfying meal, his memories probably wandered over his sex experience of the previous day, dwelling upon the particular female that had afforded these pleasures; possibly upon her cooperation in the attempt to make them more gratifying. He may have felt a certain amount of gratitude toward her, as an intelligent animal might, or he may merely have felt kindly disposed toward her, as we usually are today toward people who have shared with us some joy or happiness. In his fancy he may have been reliving with her these intimacies. In short, promiscuous as the original sex life of man was, cruelly and brutally as it may have expressed itself, it still contained the trace of an attitude toward the object of his desire. There was no suggestion of such an attitude toward the meat that stilled his hunger, or the water that quenched his thirst. Out of this attitude grew love, even such great love as that between Abélard and Héloïse.

Similarly, the warding off of evil spirits, which may have constituted early religion, was an expression not only of fear but of awe as well. What man is forced to fear interminably will necessarily rise in his estimation and become an object of awe and adoration. It was true in the past—physical strength was idealized in the primitive world, and the might that induced fear was admired and envied. It is true today—man's own self-respect demands that whatever he sets above himself, shall grow to superior proportions, that whatever he subjects his own personality to, shall become idealized and raised to the plane of the superhuman. This explains the metamorphosis of a man to a god—hated and despised by his tribe in life, he becomes a deity for their worship after his death.

Once the demon became an object of awe and reverence, he was idealized, at least in part. He took the form of man's wish-content. All that man wished to be himself, he projected into the object of his reverence. Naturally, he sought, as he does to this day, to follow his idealized personality, not only to do it homage, but to emulate it as well. As man turned the demon into a god he learned to walk humbly before it. Thus, crude, primeval fear that lurked in the human heart before the dawn of the gods already possessed the basic elements that enter into universal religious experience.

IV
Now the two, love and religion, have been inseparably intertwined all through the history of mankind. We are all aware of the element of religion in love. The very religious term "adore" is a prime favorite in love's vocabulary. We all know of the implicit faith of lovers, how blind they can be to the flagrant faults of the beloved. We also know how all-pervading and overpowering love may be. Like religion, it may bring one to the loftiest heights of bliss and to the depths of despair, so that he may sacrifice everything for it, even his very life.

To a much larger extent, love has been identified with religion. The fervor of religion seems naturally to induce the ecstasy of love. Pagan religious rites generally ended in open sex orgies. Whatever behavior bonds on the sex impulse existed within the tribe were lifted for the moment. Sex indulgence that was so taboo as to be punishable by death was permitted in religious worship and was entered into with a vengeance.

The Greeks and the Romans followed the pagans in the worship of fertility gods. To this very day, millions of people practise circumcision as a religious duty, a symbolic signature of a covenant into which their forefathers entered with their God, a signature of an undoubtedly erotic meaning.

The religion of western civilization is based on a mystic conception of the union of a human virgin with the Spirit of God. Carnal love has become unworthy, profane, and in its place must be substituted spiritual love for the divine being. Spiritual love, but love nevertheless. Suffice it only to mention the evangelistic revivals with their sudden conversions, which psychologists are wont to compare with sexual ecstasy, and the highly erotic symbolism in modern religion. The more one studies, not religious dogma or philosophy, but religious living as it is experienced by people all over the world, the more one is bound to nod assent to the sign often seen on the windows of missions: "God is Love."

V
How did love come to religion? Is there a clear distinction between the experience of love and that of religion? How has love fared within religion these many thousands of years of religious development?

There are a number of ways in which man today may look upon religion. He may conceive o; it as truth divinely revealed to him by his Maker, as is believed by the faithful. He may look upon it as mere superstition, a projection of man's subjective mind—a dog as it were chasing his own tail, taking it for something foreign to him—elaborated according to the theory of Sigmund Freud. He may see religion as an innate tendency, the functioning of a special instinct, the interpretation advocated by Professor E. D. Starbuck to the utter dismay of Doctor John B. Watson. Again, he may be psychologically more cautious and, instead of viewing it as the result of a special innate tendency, take it as an outgrowth of other instinctive reactions, such as the herd instinct, agreeing with Trotter; or the sex instinct, following Schroeder; or, like McDougal, he may make religion the focal point of several instinctive tendencies, such as awe, admiration, and reverence. He may even agree with Thouless that religion is not so much a thing in itself as a mode of living. This view makes it the outlet supreme for man's all-instinctive craving, the expression of all the urges in his heart, a channel into which he may pour all that is burdening his soul.

However one looks upon religion, he cannot avoid the issue of love, love ever present, ever stirring, ever coloring the very essence of true, devotional, and exalted religious experience.

This book will undertake to trace the path of love in religion. It will follow the stream from its very source, down all its tortuous windings through the centuries: crude sex passion, physical love, love refined and idealized, and love sublimated and esthetically symbolized. In doing so we may find it necessary to digress here and there in the dimly lighted past. We may have to wade through what to some may seem muddy waters. Still, it will all be for love and religion. Instead of discouraging, it should be a source of lofty inspiration and esthetic intrenchment. Ours will be a course following the light out of the darkest forest, as it grows ever higher, clearer, purer, and more beautiful.

sursa:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/sex/tsf/tsf03.htm

Juicy Pussy

IN LOVE
I
ERE love was born and faith came into the world man was already there. Wild and woolly he was, crude and beastlike, yet the progenitor of a specie that was to produce civilization and culture, romance and art, love and religion. He was there when Europe was still covered with ice and the mammoth roamed over the land. If we had called on him, we would have had to seek him out in the crevices of some rock, cold and hungry, in hiding from the terrific forces of an environment to which he was hardly equal. What did this crouching, recoiling Old Anthropology Adam think of Love and God?

His means of expression was necessarily limited; he existed long before there was an alphabet or any attempt at written record. In fact, even verbally we could not have gotten much out of him. His words were few and as indefinite as the thoughts forming in his brain. And yet, this Old Anthropology Adam, living in inner and outer darkness, felt the urge to express himself and found his medium in art.

Were we to call upon him in a happier moment when he had caught his fish and trapped his prey, when he had had his fill and napped off the process of digestion, we might have found him drawing upon the walls of his cave the outline form of the mammoth, or painting the lion in fast colors upon the roof of his dwelling. Old Anthropology Adam was engaged in art.

What made him decorate the walls of his cave with drawings and paintings? Was it a vestigial sense of the beautiful that possibly came down the animal line with him? More probably he was little concerned with beautifying his abode. He may have drawn the lion not so much to put it on the wall as to get it out of his head. He may have been the true artist, pursuing his art for art's sake.

For Old Anthropology Adam was already possessed of a memory and an imagination. In idle moments he had been recalling the things that had happened to him on the previous day. He had been dreaming of his desires and wishes. Such activities served him as a mental stimulus, creating surplus energy that had to find an outlet somehow. For man's mind ever seemed to be like a container of a more or less definite volume. Too full, it ran over and out into the world. Thus it was that Old Anthropology Adam came upon the medium of art, finding it most appropriate to convey his thoughts plastically and in line upon the screen of space before him.

II
Having found our way into the province of the primitive mind, we might now explore it a little. Old Adam was a realist to the core. In his art he portrayed objects of his immediate environment. He presented them as faithfully as his primitive technique would permit. And critics have marveled at his ingenuity in overcoming technical difficulties.

Yet we very soon find him going in for symbolism. He not only presents an imaginary object to the eye, but he gives it a meaning. He intentionally rejects certain details and exaggerates others, emphasizing those that are apparently most important in his eyes. Old Anthropology Adam not only gave us his environment in his art, but himself as well, his own personal interests and urges, his dreams and desires, his very soul.

Now, what was on the mind of primitive man as expressed in his art? What was the motive that overfilled his being and sought projection into the outer world? It was love, sex, revealed to him in its concrete, physical form. When he drew the figure of an animal, his interest was centered on the parts that harbored the prime force of nature. When he was representing the human form, he took pains to render these same parts elaborately, in great detail and out of proportion to the entire body. No attempt is noticeable to delineate the limbs carefully or to represent the head realistically. All his attention was centered on the embodiments of that great life-bringing power in nature.

The impression obtains that primitive man used the body as a background for the generative organs, which he took for the chief detail, the leit-motif. Whatever Old Anthropology Adam was concerned with in his art, his attention was focused on the sex of it. Sex was the prime mover of his life.

In this respect, the artist did in his art only what the singer did in his song and the dance master in his dance. The songs of primitive man concerned themselves with hunting, fishing, and driving spirits away. But far more than with these, were they concerned with sex. Similarly, the dances of primitive man may have represented war and the hunt and death, but, in most cases, they took on a sexual meaning in the course of execution. All other

Primitive man's crude portrayal of the creative force dances seem to have been merely a warming up for the chief dance of the primitive community, the dance that was the exaltation of the tribe, the sacred climax of every important ceremony, the dance that was highly suggestive and imitative of mating, culminating in rank sexual orgies.

III
What was it that made sex the center of primitive man's thought, the prime motive of his imagination? Was he conscious of it as the life-giving force throughout nature? He may have been, for he realized his dependence upon the regeneration of nature, upon the green of the fields and the young of the animals for his sustenance. Again he may not, for he was not aware of any relationship between the occasional moment of pleasure with a woman and the offspring so many months later.

It is most probable that Old Anthropology Adam dwelled so much upon sex because it was pleasurable. His drab life offered little bliss and the sex emotion was his chief source of joy and exaltation. All other animals had a rather mechanical sexual life. Generally their mating instinct was inactive; their existence consisted chiefly in feeding, resting and physical play. This stretch of sexual inactivity was crossed by a definite season of hypersexuality. Then their entire organism was highly attuned, susceptible to the least attraction of the opposite sex and driven into courtship and intercourse by the lash of a force as incomprehensible as it was uncontrollable. In man these periods of rut were dissolved in an indefinite, general sex activity. This activity was the great diversion in his life except when it was submerged by fear or struggle. Frequently it was also associated with physical contests, as fighting or racing for the female, which added even greater zest to his loving. Is there any wonder, then, that his mind should dwell on it in his idle moments and that it should be the chief content of his memories of the past and imaginings of the future?

The attitude of primitive man toward sex was not at all like ours. He could never have understood our secretiveness about it or our reserve in speaking of it. Old Anthropology Adam was not in the Garden of Eden, yet he went naked and knew it not. There are many primitive peoples today that go about entirely naked. Among others, only the married women go unclothed, bearing their nudity as a mark of their marital state, just as our married women wear the wedding ring. Early man had no secret part in his organism nor was he ashamed of any one of them. His attitude toward his own body may be gleaned from the lullaby the Nama-Hottentot mother sings her babe:

You child of a strong-thighed father,
You'll press yet strong oxen between your thighs;
You that have such a powerful organ,
You'll bring many and strong children
Into the world.

Proud of his sexual apparatus, primitive man could not be ashamed of its function. To him sex was as natural as eating. He ate in public anytime, anywhere there was food and he was hungry. So did he satisfy his sexual appetite. The Latin poet, Horace, described this stage of man's love in his own inimitable manner when he said: "He jumped in beastly fashion at the first best female that came his way." The great modern ethnologist, Bachofen, reiterates that originally man "satisfied his natural instinct like the beast without lasting bond with the particular female and before the eyes of all."

There are still those who disdain to think that such was the origin of the love of man. They would rather have him spring from more noble stock that was monogamous by nature. Only in time did he fall and degenerate into the state of promiscuity we find him in, in the past or present. Westermarck is one apostle of this monogamous faith in man and he musters considerable evidence in support of his theory. Still, the consensus of opinion among anthropologists today is that originally man was promiscuous in the exercise of his sexual function. Greek and Roman historians speak of races living in promiscuity in their day. Modern travelers have found tribes in Australia and elsewhere, who in their sex life know neither family ties nor privacy, neither constancy nor consideration.

Moreover, the environmental life of primitive man was conducive to promiscuity. The tribal group lived in a circumscribed space. It was no more safe or convenient to go off to a place where one might not be seen than there was a conscious urge to do so. Old Anthropology Adam may have been returning home after a long day of hunting, weary in body and heavy of heart. What could be more pleasant to him than grasping a female and drowning his troubles in the joy of union with her?

The female was at hand and she dared not refuse. In his moment of passion little thought did he give to the presence of others, nor would he shrink from exercising his sexual function before them if he did. What one man did another would do. Imitation was the spark that set man's heart a-burning. What to us should be a strictly private affair became a social function, a group experience. And whenever the sexual function is exercised by individuals in a group, an exchange of partners will follow. It is true today in the so-called "wild parties," and in the orgies of religious sects.

The exercise of the sexual function in the presence of others only added fire to its flame. It intensified a passion already overwhelming the primitive being. It brought additional joys to a signal pleasure in a life of bleak existence. As it was, in addition, free from all restrictions, we need not wonder that Old Anthropology Adam set his mind upon sex. In time, it overran his entire personality. He projected it out of his self in art and dance and song.

He shouted it forth in his speech; for the sounds that escaped him during his mating formed the basis of his language. And old, idealistic Plato tells us that even thinking was a sublimation of man's sexuality. That is why in most languages the word "conceive" has the two meanings of thinking and becoming pregnant. Sex became the way of man's living.

IV
But the very fact that the sexual function had been exercised openly in the social group caused it in time to be limited and circumscribed. Once sex became a social activity the group took it in hand to make it serve the social unit rather than the individual. Inhibitions were imposed upon the mating instinct not to add to man's pleasure or to make it more orderly and improved. They were there to save man's physical energies for the greater tasks of the tribe in war and peace. They were there to whet his appetite for victory, which would bring the women of the enemy as its reward. They were there to drive man on in his daily grind, for at its close the great accumulated hunger would be satisfied. Harnessing the individual more closely to the work of the social unit, the latter found it imperative to curtail his sexual life.

Thus the sexual function was limited, and any break of the bonds upon sex spelled ill for the entire group. A sexual act committed against the accepted code of morality was in olden times thought to hurt the tribe by causing sterility of the crop, since it offended the fertility gods. To this day in some parts of Europe, adultery is said to bring about a fatal epidemic to children and when infant deaths increase the morality seekers have an easy hand.

Time and experience gave birth to such concepts as incest, which forbade intercourse between mother and son, father and daughter, brother and sister, and other blood relations, varying with different people. Exogamy came into being, by which the males of one group were forbidden sexual union with the females of the same group. Marriages of various sorts—beginning with group marriages and ending with modern monogamous marriage—limited sexual union with a woman, first to a group, then to members of a family, like father and brother of the male, and finally to a single male.

Out of the chaos of promiscuity grew our complicated solar system of kinship, family relationship, and monogamous marriage—as complicated, for instance, as the Mosaic law that one may marry his niece but not his aunt. This remnant of antiquity is still reflected today in the pseudoscientific theory of consanguineous marriage, for which modern eugenics can find no justification.

But this growth did not take place without pains, nor has it yet reached its completion. We all know of the desperate fight against incest by the servants of Jehovah. Even at the present time, incestuous relationship is not so rare, as the records of criminal courts in any land will show. Methods of escape from the rigid rules were evolved—sort of a back-door entrance, either in space, delimiting definite places, like the Bais or Young Men's Barrack, where all was permitted; or, in time, like festive occasions, when again all bonds were loosened. Gradually these back doors were closed upon the hinges of civilization. Still, man's heart has not changed. We occasionally hear of an exchange of wives between families, recalling tribal or clan marriage, and a monogamous marriage is in many places almost as often honored in its breach as in its fulfillment.

The repression of any innate tendency brings in its wake the desire for some escape. So it was that sexual prohibition gave rise to an erotic tendency in religion. When Old Anthropology Adam found his sexual desire fenced in by social customs and tribal taboos, he, too, sought a way of going around these inhibitions. The hand of the group weighed down too heavily upon the individual for him to try to break the law of the tribe. It was the group that made the taboos; it was up to the group to raise these taboos temporarily at various times. Hence, on all religious occasions, whenever primitive man returned from the hunt or the stream, whenever the tribe gathered for an important event, the taboos w ere wholly or partially raised.

He may have been in a joyous mood celebrating the advent of the springtime, thankful for a successful hunt, exultant because of a victory over an enemy, proud and happy at the birth of a child, or even depressed and saddened at the death of a favorite member of the tribe. But no matter what the cause, each of these occasions gave rise to a very definite display of emotion in an appropriate dance; and, again, no matter what emotion called it forth, the ceremony ended in an orgy in which all bonds were cast aside, all previous joys or sorrows forgotten, while, for a few short hours, love and sex furnished the bliss and exaltation that the primitive heart of Old Anthropology Adam craved.

Even to this day when the Buriats of Asiatic Siberia have a holiday, bonfires are lighted near the villages, around which men and women sing prayers and dance their monotonous nadan. Every once in a while a couple leaves the circle and disappears in the dark woods near by. After a time they return to the dance, only to disappear again, but with different partners.

Thus, Old Anthropology Adam looked to sex for whatever exalted joys life had in store for him. In the enjoyment of this pleasure he had been very early inhibited and hemmed in. This impressed sex even more strongly upon his mind. It was not only the thing he wished most, but also the point where his desire was crossed. Moreover, sexual experience has always been man's outlet for his other pent-up emotions. Suppressed rage, swallowed pride, hidden fear, all could be relieved in an orgy of drenching sexuality. Hemming in the sexual impulse meant not only penning up man's greatest passion, but also closing the outlet for his other emotions. Modern man must either sublimate his suppressed energies or develop a psychosis. Old Anthropology Adam faced the problem by a double-headed solution. He went in for blood-letting, raising all bonds from time to time as a soul cleansing, and for sublimating his desires in symbolism in his art and other products of his mind—above all in religion. The cruder he was, the more anthropologic he was, the oftener were his blood-lettings and the more simple his symbolism. As he climbed the ladder of civilization, the open outbursts of sexuality grew fewer and his symbolism became more highly involved.

At first, these symbols were merely realistic portrayals of the generative organs. Later, man began to embroider them in his mind—they became something intricate and fanciful. Simple and natural sexual union was clothed with ideas and mental images. More and more it became a thing of the imagination. As these ideas grew, the act itself dwindled in importance, until it was only a ritual.

sursa:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/sex/tsf/tsf04.htm

“Iubirea nu inseamna doar trup, din moment ce are in vedere sentimentul, si nu este doar spirit, din moment ce se consuma intre doua trupuri” - Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Elogiul filozofiei si alte eseuri)

I
Old Anthropology Adam lived in a world of fears. His great-great-grandfather, the gibbon, swinging in the tree had been much happier and comparatively free from worry and fright. The gibbon did not know enough to be afraid. Modern man knows better; he has learned to discount his fears. Primitive man was caught in between. The babe may crawl right into the ocean, not knowing enough to fear the waves. The little child will play on the beach and enjoy the sight of the water, but will run back in horror when the foam of the waves touches his feet. The older boy knows just how far into the ocean he may safely go. Old Anthropology Adam was like the child in his attitude toward the great world about him.

Many things might put terror into the heart of primitive man. There was the blinding flash of lightning across the storm-darkened heavens, followed by the deafening crash of thunder. There were the powerful waters washing away everything before them after the cloudburst. There was ominous night with its strange, screeching sounds coming out of the bush, or echoing in the forests. There was the wail of the wind sounding like the moan of a friend when that mysterious something happened to him—something that made him no longer able to walk, one who would soon lie listless and be carried away to the hills, a prey for the vultures and wild beasts.

For here another mystery was impressing itself upon the dawning mind of Old Anthropology Adam—death. It is a mystery to this very day, in many cases even to medicine. Its puzzling strangeness, coupled with sorrow and grief, overwhelms one still when it occurs in his immediate environment. It was even more of a mystery to primitive man, since it often occurred violently, and the quick transition from a healthful life to sudden death was shocking indeed. Neither was it quite conceivable that the big chief who was the terror of the land might suddenly become as powerless as the slain bison. What, he wondered, could it be that made a person lie down and be almost nothing at all?

The very same person that became nothing at all may have been seen later, quite as he was before—in dream or delusion. His very dreams filled Old Adam with awe and astonishment. How could he lie down to rest and, while he was lying there, go hunting, trap an animal, and feast on its meat? Even today, in the very moment of waking, many a man finds himself grasping for the object of his dream as if it should be there in reality. Is there any wonder, then, that primitive man should be puzzled over what had become of the food he had been dreaming of? Like the child, Old Anthropology Adam confused his imagination with his experiences, his dreams with his realities. Yet the two did not tally at all. What was this stuff that dreams were made of?

All these mysteries that worried the groping mind of primitive man could be allayed by the single idea of "doubles." Such an idea may have been suggested by the shadow of himself which he saw on sunny afternoons or moonlight nights. There was actually a "double" of himself, following him wherever he turned. There was, then, the man one could see and get hold of, and his "double" that one did not always see. But it was there just the same. Now as Old Anthropology Adam was lying asleep under the tree or in the cave, it was not he, but his "double," that was hunting and feasting on the prey. Therefore it did not do him much good when he awoke. For it was only when he was together with his "double" that he was himself and things went well. Once his "double" left him, he might fall asleep or become ill, and if the "double" did not return, he might come to be nothing—that is, dead. It was for this reason, too, that one could see a person even though he was dead. One did not really see him, but his "double," and "doubles" persist forever.

This "double" idea was extended, not only to humans and animals, but to everything in nature. It was before the time that primitive man learned to consider himself the crown of creation. It was still the day when he did not have the consciousness of being singled out from his environment. Like the child of today, he drew no line between himself and the world about him. He was "double"; therefore, all things were "double."

As Old Anthropology Adam went about building up this idea of "doubles," little did he realize how much trouble it was going to cause him. It proved a sort of boomerang. Relieving man of some of his fears, it came to add many others. Take the case of a very formidable enemy. The enemy died. Instead of being relieved by his death, Adam's woes increased tremendously. He might have been able to cope with his enemy living; but he was not equal to the "double" now that it was liberated from the body and thereby unlimited by space and time and physical barriers. The "double" might be visible or invisible; he might be here and there and everywhere within a second. He could strike and do all sorts of mean tricks in the world of darkness in which he operated. The "double" thus became a ghost, and the ghost of an evil man, of a deadly enemy or a cruel chieftain, was a demon. And there were also the demons of nature, such as thunder, hurricanes, and forest fires.

To be sure, there were also good "doubles," favorable ghosts, such as the "doubles," of one's beloved or of the friendly forces in nature. But the harm that the demons might do one by far overshadowed the good that one might expect from the friendly spirits.

Harsh, cruel and menacing as the environment of Old Anthropology Adam was, it became still harder and even more threatening because of the "doubles," ghosts and demons, that thickly populated it.

II
Man has always found remedies for his ills, whether real or imaginary. The remedies are on the same plane and appropriate to the ills. Old Anthropology Adam may not have been very cunning; but he knew how to play off one "double" against another. If there were "doubles" that could come down in the night to do harm to one's cave or hut, there was a rattle—with a "double" as well—of which the threatening "double" was quite wary. Get after the demon with a rattle and he would take to his "double" heels. What was it in the rattle that drove off the devil? Something inherent in it which was as real as the demon, and for all that, the rattle was a rattle and no more. Its power to charm, its mana quality, did not distinguish it from other objects used in the hut.

Of course, to us there is not much sense in driving off spirits with rattles. Neither do we see any reason to worry about what a spirit may do. But to those who stand in awe of spirits, the rattle may be a powerful charm. Even to this day in eastern Europe, the peasants expel the devil with incense. If a rattle will drive off a demon and incense will chase the devil away, why should not a horseshoe bring good luck? Certainly luck is as evasive a phenomenon as a spirit, and the iron of the horseshoe as tangible as the rattle or incense. It is all the same phenomenon which is called mana, and so many of the "initiated," civilized people who ridicule the mana of Old Anthropology Adam will take very seriously their own superstition of a horseshoe, or of Friday the thirteenth, or of a broken mirror, which is sure to bring bad luck since the breaking has liberated the spirit, that is, the "double" that dwelled therein.

Thus, Old Anthropology Adam found in mana one way of counteracting the multitude of untoward forces in his world. Another way of dealing with the world of animal wills and "doubles" was to charm them, just as one charms a snake. You get them to do your bidding by simply knowing how. The spirit of water may withhold the rain, wishing in his anger to dry up the world, to parch and destroy it. But when the wise man, the shaman, the medicine man, the magician, comes out and throws up sand to the sky and the sand comes down like rain, then the spirit of water must give up the rain. This magic way of dealing with natural forces and spirits is a kind of activity-mana. Apparently it is a form of persuasion that cannot be refused. Again, one may question the logic of it—compelling the spirit of water to give up the rain for such a small reason—yet it is no more illogical than the very belief in a spirit of water that withholds the rain.

Mana, or magic, is a quaint way of dealing with supernatural powers, hardly conceivable to modern man. It is so old that its origin lies side by side with that of man himself. Its sense or motive is hidden from us. We can see in it only the product of a mind groping alone in the haze of muddled thinking. To us, it is a single-handed mechanistic method of coping with an unequal opponent, but without this weapon man might have succumbed beneath his burden of fears.

As social life developed among humans, man was no longer so helpless. He acquired new ways of dealing with other beings within his social group and he carried over some of these into his relationship with the supernatural. Instead of depending on sheer, senseless mechanics, it occurred to him that he might obtain the desired result in a more natural manner. He might deal with the supernatural in much the same way as he dealt with his fellow men. He might impose upon the "double" by threat or win its favor by offering gift or compliment.

This is a social relationship entered into with the "double." It involves an emotional attitude toward the supernatural power. At first, it was crude and mercenary. There may have been neither adoration nor humility in it, but it was the making of religion. Once man entered into a relationship with the supernatural, the affinity was bound to grow in importance and omnipotence as man became more and more dependent upon it. He was started on the way to faith and god. Humble indeed was the beginning of his religious sentiments, but humbler still was the beginning of his gods.

And this is the story of how Nathuram, the rascal, became a god:

Nathuram was a rascal, that everybody knew, although no one had ever learned who he was or where he had come from. Apparently he wandered down from the hills and kept himself in the woods of Rajputana. No sooner did he arrive than he was heard from in an unsavory way.

First it was the wife of Surenda. She was returning from a visit and was stepping sprightly along the road to Marwar, when she felt something spring at her, gasping in a dreadful way. She thought it was a snake, or perhaps a monkey gone mad. Then she saw the dark eyes, burning like coals in the swarthy head, the large hand with its iron grip dragging her after him into the woods.

When Surenda's wife emerged from the woods, she uncovered her head and walked, not in the middle of the road, but at the side—the path of sinners. Weeping, she reached her husband's door and prostrated herself before him.

Then it was the wife of another, and yet another, until one day, there were as many as five women who had been caught by Nathuram and made victims of his passion. There were many expeditions sent into the woods to capture him, but he was not to be caught.

Finally a little girl of the tribe, the daughter of a priest, was seized by Nathuram and kept for a whole day in the woods. She fainted on her father's doorstep, unable to tell of the torture and the violence that she had undergone. But no telling was necessary. Just one glance at the poor little maiden and they knew—Nathuram.

So all husbands and fathers took an oath that they would not return to their huts until they had caught Nathuram, living or dead. And they got him along the side of a stream as it ran down a short but steep hill. And as they beheaded him, the head of the rascal rolled down the hill, winking one eye and wearing a strange grin. It finally fell into the water, but still it winked and still it grinned.

Wives were safe in Rajputana and so were young girls, and all was quiet again. But no quiet knew the souls of the Rajput. The men could not banish from their minds the wink in dead Nathuram's eye and the grin on his face. And the women folk of Rajputana were awakened at night by dreadful dreams and nightmares, all brought about by the dead rascal Nathuram. They could almost feel his breath and his grasp about their waists.

And so again the wise men of Rajputana met in council and decided to placate the angry spirit. A feast was prepared in his honor, in which a figure representing him was carried down the hill to the bank of the river, and songs were sung, telling of the powers and superhuman virility of Nathuram, that all the women of Rajputana could not satisfy his sexual hunger.

Seasons came and seasons passed. The young of Rajputana grew old, and the old were no more. New young folks, who had not witnessed the execution of Nathuram, filled the huts. They knew of him only by hearsay. Nathuram's spirit, too, apparently had grown old and less bothersome. No longer did he worry the memories of the men, nor disturb the sleep of the women. Yet the feast of Nathuram continued to increase in importance in its place in the life of Rajputana.

Both men and women liked the songs about the things Nathuram did, and all enjoyed the dances showing in action the life of Nathuram in Rajputana. These dances were executed by the women around a huge figure of Nathuram, a nude monster of sexuality. Time wore off the ill feeling that the people of Marwar had borne toward the former rascal. He was now the God of Fertility; barren women looked to him for deliverance from their sterility, and on the night the bride first visited her husband, an image of Nathuram was placed beside her on the couch. Nathuram, the rascal, had become the god of Marwar.

III
With so many opportunities for god production and the ease with which the gods took root in the mind of primitive man, it is not at all surprising that Old Anthropology Adam had a great many of them. Whatever played a part in his life was food for his thought and cause for mental speculation. If it was strong enough to stir his soul and overshadow his whole being, he carried it right up to the mountain of the gods.

There were gods for the sun and the moon and the stars; there were gods for the woods and for the river and for the fishes that swarmed therein. And there were people who became gods. In some places, when a man died, an image of him was made and placed along with other divine images of the household—the initial step in the development of ancestor worship.

At first, the god of birth was only one among many on the mountain of the gods. But many factors were driving this divinity to the head of the divine family. True, it did not have the advantage of the first and considerable start the gods of fear had. But these latter were bound to lose as man grew less afraid of his immediate environment, when his fancy ran along more pleasant channels. In fact, the very god of fear was building a temple for the god of birth and generation. For fear was a strain upon man's soul and he had to find relief somewhere. This was afforded him by the god of procreation. Even now, people living under great strain seek relief in sexual activity. All the energy collecting under the strain was released in the channel of sexuality.

Then again, the god of birth and fertility was associated with another great force in the life of Old Anthropology Adam: physical hunger. He wanted to eat, and the hunger for food was as potent as the desire for the life upon which the fear gods were rasping. Birth of the young of animals meant additional food; besides, it was easier to trap the young animal. The generative force was also the harbinger of spring, when life generally eases up, when the first signs of abundance are manifested. The life of primitive man was chiefly a physical matter and it was the creative force that supplied his needs.

There was still another element in the selection of the generative force as king of the gods. Birth was the opposite of death. The sorrow that came in death was relieved by the joy that a new birth ushered in. The more man pondered over death, the more his thought turned to birth, making it the chief encouraging event in his life. The fact, too, that the father of the clan or family was also the progenitor, or birth giver, added import to the god of birth, just as the god of birth gave prestige to the birth giver in the family. One reacted upon the other to their mutual benefit.

Another element that made for the supremacy of the generative divinity was the order of worship. Man served his god in accordance with the function over which the god presided. Putting on masks, making a terrible racket, moaning, shouting, shrieking, all served to let off energy in the service of any divinity. But the erotic dances, representing the activities of the birth god, the songs that we today would call obscene, and the physical union of the sexes that became a definite part and the climax of the services to the fertility god, made this particular service a source of unusually pleasurable excitement and exaltation. Not only was the birth god gradually growing in importance through the realization of his powers in the minds of the people, but the very service that the people offered to this god enhanced his value and his importance in their eyes. The god became associated or "conditioned," as the Behaviorists today would say, with the most supreme moments of happiness and joy in the life of the community.

Finally the god of birth came to be served at the most opportune moment—the time of spring. Love came into religion when loving was in the air. Today, "in the spring a young man's fancy lightly turns to thoughts of love." There is a response in the physical organism of man to the great regenerating changes that occur in nature. That is the time when humanity revolts against the bonds, when "freedom rings," and man seeks to escape the prohibitions that social customs have developed about his love life.

So in time, the worship of the generative force in nature came to overlap all other forms of worship and the god of fertility was the leading god on the mountain, in fact, if not in name. The service to the god of generation spread beyond the limits of his temple and into the provinces of other gods. Whoever the god was, or however he was served, the service was an overture, or a preparation—a sort of warming up for the real ceremony which was to follow, the ceremonial dances and songs and other expressions of the sexual emotion that came into the religious sphere through the gateway of the god of birth.

Old Anthropology Adam realized intuitively what is so obvious to us today: that the emotion of love and the sentiment of religion have very much in common; both are to a large extent indefinite, general sensations, arousing the entire organism and ending in an approach to ecstasy; both are ways of escape from an oppressing environment, a means of relieving mental strain. No wonder then that the two have become intertwined and that all other gods partook of the sacrifices that Old Anthropology

Adam so generously offered his god of fertility—his god of love.

. . . . . . .

There is a legend that has always captivated the fancy of men and women in all parts of the world. It is the story of the Sleeping Beauty.

A beautiful princess of the blood and of spirit is forcefully held captive in the tower of a castle guarded by dragons or men of evil. In time, a youth appears on the scene, a young prince charming who slays the dragons or evil men, and liberates the princess. Of course, the two fall in love with each other, marry in royal fashion, and live happily ever after.

Some such relationship exists historically between the emotion of love and the sentiment of religion. At first, love was royally free, without bonds, barriers, or restrictions of any sort. In time, organized society laid its hand upon the free exercise of the love passion and imprisoned it. A number of taboos, like dragons, were woven about it. Love was forbidden with certain persons, as incestuous love. It was forbidden with many persons at once, as promiscuous love. It was forbidden in free and open spaces, before the eyes of the people. Love was forbidden altogether unless men ran the gauntlet of capture, barter, or bans. There were ample reasons for all these barriers thus placed in the path of love. Yet they oppressed the spirit of man. His whole being rebelled for his thwarted sex instinct.

It was then that Prince Religion came to liberate the imprisoned Princess of Love. Religion, born of fear and nursed in darkness, raised itself by fusing with love. What was forbidden in ordinary life was allowed in the life of religion. Bonds were broken and taboos raised, once people entered into the temple of the gods. What was desired in lust was sanctified in song and prayer. That which was kadosh, taboo, unaccessible, forbidden the very touch or the slightest approach, was purified and elevated to supreme duty by the magic wand of faith. The very mother-in-law, who was not to appear under the same roof or tree with her son-in-law, who must flee at sight of him, could be had for wife as the dessert after a religious feast. The other fellow's wife, union with whom could be had only under sure forfeit of one's life, could be secured at the motion of one's finger during the incantations of the priest. All this only served to strengthen even further the bonds between love and religion, culminating in a marriage that was to be both happy and lasting.

sursa:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/sex/tsf/tsf04.htm

In his own image
He created his god

I
THERE is a sacred corner in every dwelling—even the humblest—in the East. Whatever the hut may lack—and it will be lacking in most modern comforts of the home—it will not be without its little shrine. There is sure to be an icon, an image of a saint, graven or in paint, standing on a plain triangular piece of board which is set in between two walls of the house.

Before it there is ever a light burning. The woman of the house will not fail the shrine. The last morsel of bread may be gone from the larder, but never the last drop of oil or piece of tallow to keep the fire burning before the eyes of the saint, who, in turn, will never fail the family of the house. Times may be hard, life scarcely bearable. Starvation, illness, death itself, may stalk within, but dark as it all may be, the family is never without the consolation and hope that the graven image brings. In the humblest dwelling of the East there is always a light—a light that never fails, physically or symbolically.

There is an eternal light ceaselessly burning before the Holy Ark of the synagogue, there is a light over the altar of the church, there is one illuminating the crescent of the mosque. Similarly, there was a light upon the hearth in ancient times. Whenever man had a light within him, he lit a fire outside of him. So long as there is faith in the world, so long will the light kindled many thousands of years ago never fail.

The universal, eternal light is symbolic of universal, eternal life. Primitive people seem to have felt it, somehow. It dawned upon them as they produced their fire, rubbing together two pieces of wood, one laid upon the ground and the other held vertically upon it. This action being so suggestive and the result analogous to life, the two sticks have been associated with the two life forces and their use has almost universally received a sexual interpretation.

Somewhere, somehow, life began. Whether it was by the word of God: "Let there be" and it was; whether it came flying across space from another planet; whether it began as an accidental chemical mixture; however life came into the world, it has never ceased to be. Living objects perish, life never dies. The life of an individual comes to an end; families die out, tribes, races; but the human species lives on, the stream of life never stops. It flows on and on forever, from its inception in the formative period of our planet, through its tributaries of the countless species of living forms—plants or animals.

When living things were small, consisting of a single microscopic cell, life was continued by growth. The amoeba grew so big that it split in two; it exchanged its single old age for a double life of youth. An amoeba could be destroyed but it would never die.

This tiny bit of life grew larger and, in time, when it split, the two parts stuck together instead of separating. It was no longer unicellular; it became a group of cells working together. Then specialization set in. Some parts of the animal undertook its locomotion, others did the digesting, still others concerned themselves with continuing the life that was in the living being. These were the sex cells. Their function was to perpetuate the light of life so that it might never fail.

At first, their work was simple; they merely grew into another being. Again specialization set in—the sex cells developed variously, becoming male and female. They must now be united before a new creature could come into existence. But they still grew on the same body. In time, the organism had only one kind of cell, either male or female. So it was that out of sex emerged the sex cells and out of sex cells came the sexes.

Prometheus stole the fire from the gods and brought it down as a gift to mankind. That fire is still kept burning and will ever go on warming and enlightening the world. Venus sprang from the foam of the sea and is forever serving those who are in love; so life sprang from among the streams and mists of the deep, when the earth was in its formative state, and is now being continued to the end of time by the agency of sex.

II
When Old Anthropology Adam let his mind speculate on sex, he did not see it as the continuity of life. This latter idea is of more recent date, having been borne in on the waves of evolution. It is still rather new to the man in the street. To Old Adam, sex was a force bringing new life. A baby was born in the tribe, an offspring came to an animal in the herd, new blossoms appeared upon the branches of the tree, presaging new fruit. There was someone behind all this, some mysterious force giving life. Like all great forces in nature it was a god—a god unseen—the god of sex and birth.

How did primitive man conceive of this new god? His concept of the sex divinity follows a course similar to the course of the development of sex in nature. This new god was originally neither male nor female, but just sex. It was the generative force, not the generator or reproducer. He conceived it as the sex organs, the lingam and yoni in union, minus the bodies. There was little or no regard as yet for the individuals who bore these organs.

In India, a smooth, round stone, rising out of another formed like an elongated saucer, suggestive of the lingam and yoni in union, represented the powerful divinity, Siva. A favorite god in Southern Celebes is Karaeng lowe. He is a powerful spirit figured under the form of the lingam and yoni in union. In Celebes, too, images of the generative organs are found on the posts of houses raised in honor of the fallen warriors. The Brahmans represent this union by a cylinder hanging from a vase which is set into a pedestal. The vase represents the goddess, the yoni, and the cylinder the god, the lingam. Cakes kneaded in the form of the lingam and yoni were eaten at the marriage rite of the Greeks. The Bayanzi in the Congo basin mold these images out of clay and adorn them with feathers.

Representations of the lingam and yoni were current all over Europe. As late as the sixteenth century these figures, made of wax, were offered to Saint Foutin at Varailles in Provence, France. They were suspended from the ceiling of his chapel and were so numerous that when the wind stirred them, the lingam struck against the yoni, to the apparent disturbance of the faithful at their devotions.

III
Later, man came to seek his god of generation, not in the union of the sex organs, but in these organs themselves. He deified the male or female in man and animal. An old Egyptian legend offers an explanation of how the lingam came to be worshipped: Isis and Osiris were powerful gods of the Egyptian hierarchy. They were brother, and sister. They were also husband and wife. When Osiris was murdered by Typhon and his body cut up and scattered in all directions, Isis went about collecting the parts. She found all of them except his lingam. For a long time she continued her search, but never did she come upon a trace of it. So she finally caused a wooden lingam to be made and this image she held as very sacred. That is how the lingam, in wood or stone, came to be so common in Egypt.

Now, man has always sought to elaborate his house of worship. Pyramid, pagoda, or steeple, do not primarily serve a utilitarian purpose. They are there to lend glory to the divinity and to impress the onlooker with the sacredness of the place. In like manner, Old Anthropology Adam elaborated his figures of lingam and yoni, not only with artistic decorations, but with bodies of tremendous proportions and striking appearance. The lingam and yoni remained the miniature representations of the generative divinity; the male and female figures came to be the full images of the gods of fertility.

Here again the evolution of the generative god followed the development of sex in nature. As man came to clothe his sex god with the human form, he had one individual contain both sex organs. Janus of the Greeks was not only double-headed, but also double-sexed, hermaphroditic, like a plant that produces both stamens and pistils in the same floral envelope. Siva, the great god of India, is the

Reproducer. He was originally a single substance; but of his own free will he divided himself into male and female.

We find a similar development in the story of Purusa, the Soul of the Universe. At first, Purusa was alone. "He did not enjoy happiness, he desired a second being. So he caused himself to fall asunder in two parts. Thence arose a husband and a wife. From them men were born. But she reflected, 'How does he, after having produced me from himself, cohabit with me?' So she became a cow, but he became a bull; from them kine were produced. Then she became a mare and he turned himself into a stallion. From them the whole family of animals with undivided hoofs were produced. In this manner, pairs of all creatures, whatsoever, down to ants, came into the world."

But the hermaphroditic gods were only a transition in the development of the individuals, male and female gods, and, as such, they were short-lived. They persisted into classical times, but only under the veil of mysticism for exotic natures. Creating his gods in his own image, man began to conceive of them as male or female, like the men and women serving them. We now have male and female gods.

The Ewhe of West Africa make an image of red clay which rudely represents the human figure. "It is generally male, rarely female, and always entirely nude. It is always represented as squatting down and looking at the lingam, which is enormously disproportionate. When female, the figure is provided with long pointed breasts and the necessary adjuncts."

In the Babar Archipelago, there is a festival, Upu-lero, in honor of the sun. "An emblem of the generative force of the sun is erected in the form of a standard flying a pennant of white cotton almost five feet long. The pennant is cut in the form of a man, and fastened to it, a lingam and scrotum, an apt suggestion of the orgies enacted below."

At every turn, we run into more of these male and female gods. In the forests of central Africa, there are little rustic temples made of palm-fronds and poles. Within them male and female figures, nearly life-size, with overemphasized sex organs, represent the generative principles.

The Roman god, Priapus, was represented in passion, and every bride of Roman aristocracy was supposed to sacrifice her virginity to him. To quote Saint Augustine: "This custom was once regarded as very honest and religious by Roman women, who obliged the young brides to come and sit upon the masculine monstrosity representing Priapus." The Babylonian goddess, Mylitta, or the Greek Aphrodite was represented as a naked woman, the acme of allurement, according to the tastes and standards of the times in art and love.

There is a beautiful legend symbolic of the evolutionary way in which man created his god of generation: The sky was the father and the earth was the mother; the two were forever lying in union, the sky weighing down upon the earth. Whatever offspring resulted therefrom were smothered by the weight of the father. But one day, one of the sons managed to work his way out, so he pierced the sky with his spear, raising it high above the earth. The pair were separated, but they were no longer fruitful. Another son, realizing the cause of the parents' sterility, carne and married them according to the rite of the tribe.

Once primitive man conceived birth and generation as a divine process, he naturally looked upon the male and female gods as its joint agents. Consequently, when he was desirous of regeneration, it occurred to him to marry these gods, so that universal birth might follow the divine union, just as the birth of children follows the union of man and woman.

Testimony of this survives. At Calah, the old Assyrian capital, the marriage of the god Nabu appears to have been annually celebrated on the third day of the month Iyyar, which corresponds to May. The marriage of Zeus and Hera was performed annually in various parts - of Greece. Among the Bambara of the Niger Basin in West Africa, the male and female idols are believed to couple at the time of the annual sacrifices offered before the rainy season. This marriage of the gods may have been accomplished by imitative magic. Without appealing directly to them, or participating in their life, man could perform an act which would be a suggestion the gods were bound to take. In other words, he could marry the gods by marrying himself. Human copulation would bring about copulation of the generative gods, wherever they might be, and thereby bring fertility to the world.

Suggestion was also resorted to by the people of Central America even to the time when the white men first visited them. When planting time came, they were extremely anxious that the sowing of the seed be done in a most auspicious hour for generation. Four days previously, therefore, the men separated from their wives in order that on the night preceding the planting they might indulge their passions to the fullest extent. This intercourse was even enjoined upon the people by the priest as a religious duty, in default of which it was not lawful to sow the seed. Certain persons are even said to have been designated and appointed to join in sexual union at the very moment when the first seed was deposited in the ground.

Even today in some parts of Java, when the season of the blossom on the rice is at hand, the husbandman and his wife visit their fields after dark and unite for the purpose of promoting the growth of the crop. It is a form of mana, a magical way of getting the generative divinities to do likewise and to bless the world with fertility.

Sometimes the suggestion is extended through persons who seem already to be in favor with the generative gods.

Having received the blessing of the fertility divinities, they are in themselves fertility gods in a small way. Among the Baganda of Central Africa, the birth of twins is the sign of a godlike power of fertility. Some little time after the twins are born, a ceremony is performed which is supposed to transfer the fertility powers of the parents to the plantains. In this ceremony the mother lies down in the thick grass near the house and places a flower of the plantain between her legs. Then the husband comes and brushes the flower away with his lingam. After this, the parents may go through the country, performing dances in the gardens of friends and favored people, spreading the abundance of their fertility powers.

IV
If man arranged the marriage of the gods we should not be surprised to find him inviting himself to the wedding and participating in it. A ceremony of this nature survives among some of the tribes of Africa. The inhabitants believe in the sun as the male god and the earth as the female. Once a year, at the beginning of the rainy season, the marriage of the two takes place. On this occasion, pigs and dogs are sacrificed in profusion; and the men and women indulge in saturnalia. During the ceremonies the sun is supposed to come down into the holy fig tree to fertilize the earth. To facilitate his descent, a ladder with seven rungs is considerately placed at his disposal. It is set up under a tree and adorned with carved figures of the birds whose shrill clarions herald the approach of the sun in the east. For all that, the marriage of the sun and earth is too abstract for the primitive mind. Consequently, this mystic union is dramatically represented in public by individuals taking the parts of the divinities, amid song and dance and by real union of the sexes under the tree.

The Oraons of Bengal celebrate the marriage of heaven and earth by remarrying their village priest and his wife. After the marriage ceremony, all eat and drink and make merry; they dance and sing frank love songs and finally indulge in the wildest orgies with the sole object of making mother earth fruitful.

Similarly, long ago the marriage of the sky god Zeus to the grain goddess, Demeter, was represented by the union of a priestess of Demeter and a hierophant. The torches were extinguished and the pair descended into a murky place, while the throng of worshippers awaited in anxious suspense the result of the mystic union, upon which they believed their salvation depended. After a time the hierophant reappeared and, in the blaze of the night, silently exhibited an ear of corn—the fruit of divine marriage. However, their intercourse was only dramatic and symbolical, since the hierophant incapacitated himself by the application of hemlock.

Sometimes only one of the gods needed to be thus substituted as the other one was already concretely represented in animate or inanimate form. When the natives of Bengal marry their male god to the goddess of water, they make an image of the male in wood and immerse it in the water. In this way the two are united and the well which has been thus consecrated will ever be an abundant source of water.

The Indians of Peru had a god in human form done in stone. This idol they would wed to a beautiful maiden of fourteen years. All the villagers took part in the ceremony, which lasted for three days and was attended with great revelry. The girl thereafter remained a virgin and sacrificed to the idol for the people.

Not always, however, did the consort of the god remain untouched in her marriage. The Akikuyu of British East Africa even today worship the snake of a certain river and, at intervals of several years, they marry the snake god to women, especially to young girls. For this purpose, huts are built by order of the medicine men who consummate the sacred marriage with the credulous female devotees. If the girls do not repair to the huts of their own accord in sufficient numbers, they are seized and dragged thither to the embrace of the deity. The offspring of these mystic unions are fathered by the god, and there are many youngsters among these people who pass as children of the divinity.

In the temples of Egypt, a woman slept near the image of Ammon as his "divine consort" and was said to have no intercourse with a man. It was the queen herself usually, since the kings of Egypt were actually begotten by Ammon, who cohabited with the queen in the assumed form of the reigning pharaoh. In Babylon, a woman was kept in the lofty temple of Bel as his wife. This is how the temple priestesses came into being. In India today, where prostitutes are attached to a temple, they are first married to a god.

It is not altogether unusual for a priest to represent the god in his conjugal activities. In tribes where virginity is sacred, it is the god who is to deflower the maidens. He operates through his priests, who charge a fee for this divine service. Poor girls who cannot afford the fee may grow into spinsterhood, since no one will marry them unless they have been deflowered in the temple. A vestige of this rite we could find in Europe down to quite modern times in the so-called jus primae noctis, the right to the bride for the first night, which belonged to the lord of the manor. Every maiden living on his land was to offer herself to him before she joined her husband. Sometimes he would relinquish this right for a price; at others, he would insist upon it.

Not every marriage of a human with a god ended in happiness. Sometimes it was fatal to the maiden--like the bee, once he mates with the queen, he must die. So it is in the Maldive Islands, where the Prince of the Sea is worshipped. On the shore, close to the water, there is a temple with a window looking out upon the sea. Every month lots are drawn and he upon whom the lot falls must give up his daughter to be married to the prince. She must be a young virgin. After being adorned in many ways, she is taken into the temple and left there for the night. When she is found in the morning, she is a maid no longer—and dead.

V
The substitution of an image or a human in the marriage of the gods for one of the partners served to separate the divinities by sexes in the minds of the people. If the human being was married to a god, it was, to be sure, to represent a divinity; the emphasis, however, was not upon the god present by human surrogate, but upon the one that remained in its full mystic glory. When a woman was married to a god, it necessarily became a worship of the god. When a man was married to a goddess, the emphasis was naturally on the latter and the services by degrees came to be the worship of the female principle.

In time there grew up a multitude of gods of fertility, representing the male and female principles. At first, the same fertility god may have served the purpose of all living beings, plants, animals, and man. In time, even here specialization set in, although the boundaries were never clearly drawn. There were gods that brought the spring and saw to the fertility of the fields. There were those that looked after the reproduction of animals. Others were concerned with fertility among humans, while still others fanned the flames of passion and love.

As the custom of marrying the gods became universal, coloring the entire religious experience, other divinities also assumed, in time, a sexual meaning. Gods sprang up out of the sexual experience of man or were sexualized with all the erotic paraphernalia carried over from the worship of the generative divinities. Faith became love.

Old Anthropology Adam long walked in the darkness. When we first hear of him we find him already carrying a torch of light to blaze his way. It is a torch of light and fire, the eternal fire, the fire that never fails—the fire of love. Within this flame the base metal of crude religious belief has been refined and forged into the beautiful institution of the present day, and this same refining process has, in turn, purged the fire itself.

Just as sex deepened the religious emotion, added joy to the religious experience, and lifted it up to ecstasy, so did religion add to the crude sex experience the element of spirituality, adoration and devotion, that made love the great erotic and overwhelming spiritual experience that it is today.

sursa:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/sex/tsf/tsf05.htm

“Iubirea nu inseamna doar trup, din moment ce are in vedere sentimentul, si nu este doar spirit, din moment ce se consuma intre doua trupuri” - Maurice Merleau-Ponty (Elogiul filozofiei si alte eseuri)

I
As you look upon the map of Europe, you notice a strip of land hanging down like an old man's whiskers into the Mediterranean waters. This is the troublesome Balkan peninsula, mother of many conflicts, including the last great war. Further down, the whiskers grow thin and scattered, splitting up into tiny bits. This is the land of the ancient Greeks, the clever people who stood at the gateway of the continents, collecting all that came out of the East and sending it forth into the West, retouched a bit here and there, with the attached label "made in Greece."

Among the numerous things the Greeks collected were also gods. Many a Greek divinity when scratched will be found to hail from some country back east, or from an island in one of the seas not far off. It may have seen better days on the banks of the Nile, in the streets of Babylon, in the bushes of Ethiopia, or in Cathay. But its locks were evenly trimmed and its nose straightened à la Greek.

Like all good collectors, the Greeks had a sense of order. They could not let all these gods roam aimlessly about Hellas. So a mountain was dedicated to the folk that were divine, where they might live their own lives with as little interference in the affairs of man as man deemed necessary. All gods were delegated to Mount Olympus.

Once on the mountain, they went about their lives much the same as the humans in the valley below. There, god struggled with god for power or love, the 'vanquished undergoing torture or eternal imprisonment. There, they loved and suffered, their hearts eaten away by jealousy; there, they also loved and were happy, basking in the sunshine of bliss. On Olympus they were born, grew up, begat children, and there, some of them perished, like the mere humans at the foot of the mountain.

Fate and luck played their parts above as well as below. Some of the gods, for all their divine presence, cut no figure at all, while others dominated, not only their immediate family, but the very length and breadth of Olympus. There was Hera, mother of gods, not much of a figure in the feasts and festivities on the mountain, yet a kindly creature, in whose arms her many children might find peace and protection. Yonder was Aphrodite, charming in her beauty, sprung from the foam of the sea when Poseidon was good naturedly at play. There was Pan, the merrymaker of the divine dwelling-place, stirring the heart with love and laughter. There was chaste Artemis, athletic goddess of the hunt; Hermes with his winged feet, fleet messenger of the gods; and the swart and limping Hephæstus, their mechanic, hammering out the heavy armors on his smoky forge. And there was Pallas Athena, goddess of wisdom and learning, sprung fully armed from the head of Zeus, best loved of all the gods and goddesses, but most cherished by the intellectual Athenians.

One could go on indefinitely naming the worthies among the gods, not to mention the lesser lights sauntering about and in between the mighty on the Mount. Yet, to one who knew his way among them, they were not so numerous after all. Many were the names entered on the Divine Register and many the passports held by the Keeper of Records of individual divinities. Yet, in their essence, many were much the same, changing only with time and locality. Gods like Fascinus, Tutunus, Mutinus, Liber, Bacchus, all bore different names; but they were all one god. They were the same as Priapus, a naturalized citizen on Olympus, having been born in Lampsacus on the Hellespont.

Once we leave Hellas and wander about lands and continents peopled by man and god, the aliases among gods are by far greater than among men. The very same lady, fanning the embers of love in the hearts of humans, whom we know as Venus, was called Mylitta, or Milidath, by the Assyrians, which to them meant genetrix, mother. To the Persians she was Anahita, and the Arabs called her Alitta. The Chaldeans knew her as Delephat, the Babylonians as Ishtar, the Saracens as Cobar. In the Bible we read of her as Assera, or Astarte. Wherever she was and whatever her name, she was female, young, beautiful, desirable, guarding over the passion of sex and over the sentiment of love.

Thus, setting out on our venture among the gods, we must be guided neither by name nor by origin. Our criterion should be the function of the divinity—the thing he was supposed to do for mankind, in return for which he was rewarded in worship.

II
Many were the favors that the worthies on the Mount were bestowing upon man below. Whatever he found in the world about him, whether it was a ready cave or a ripe fruit, man took it as a gift from the gods. All that he got by his own effort was also accredited to the divine powers. Were they not guiding him along the path of success, steadying his bow and properly setting his net? Pious people today see "the finger of the Lord" in many things happening about them. Old Anthropology Adam was even more god-intoxicated. His world was absolutely god-controlled.

Man may ever have been the ungrateful creature he is now reputed to be. Yet he was never an ingrate to his god. He always returned full value in worship, prayer, and sacrifice for the favors that the higher powers bestowed upon him. If Zeus had ever called the gods and people together for an accounting, the final balance would have shown a divine indebtedness to mankind, rather than the contrary.

Among all these divine gifts there was one that man even more fully appreciated; one might say, over-appreciated. It was that awe-inspiring power that ushered in new life, birth, generation. Whether it was a new stalk breaking out of the black soil, the first quiver of a new leaf upon the limb of a tree, the thud of a new born dropping in the herd, or the first cry of a babe on the bed of hides in his cave—it delighted man's heart. It overwhelmed him with its shroud of mystery no less than with the boundless joy he felt, yet could not explain.

Standing there at the scene of regeneration, Old Anthropology Adam had neither benefit of priest or of sacrament, nor the thought or the knowledge of religion as such. Still, there he was, a worshipper before what was to be later revealed to him as "divine presence." He was awed, mystified, rejoicing, adoring. Above all, he was exalted, well on the way toward the state of ecstasy, in which his heart seemed to be melting away in happiness; a state man was later to conceive of as entering into communion with the "all", the cosmos, the universe, God.

Of all that man received from the hands of the gods nothing was so highly prized as the gift of love and none was more readily and with greater exaltation repaid in its own kind. The generative god served man via sex; man worshipped him in return sexually. The god whose will it was to bring abundance to the earth would be glad to see man, his humble servant, seeking in his own small way to enhance abundance about him. The power whose function it was to cause births through the union of the sexes would feel flattered to see humans in union. It was a way of realizing the will of the god among men. It was akin to our belief that a righteous God would have righteousness prevail in human society—a realization of the Kingdom of Heaven upon earth. Sex worship thus became the appropriate recompense, reward, blessing—however one may designate the religious attitude—for the revered god of love and procreation.

Like all forms of religious service, the worship of the creative power was not only pleasing to the god, but it also enraptured man. It carried with it the usual pleasures accompanying the exercise of the sexual function. Furthermore, by its fusion with other mental components entering into the religious attitude, passion became fired and all-embracing. Grief and pain often intensify passion; fear, awe, and devotion are oil on the flame of love.

Still, sex worship did for man even more than that. It was the redeemer of his imprisoned soul. It provided an outlet for those sexual passions which the race had known in its infancy, but which later had apparently been driven out of heart and mind. Memories of them may have lingered on, as they had not been entirely effaced from the earth. At all events, the desire was there, smouldering beneath the heap of suppressions.

Once, man was a free agent sexually. He could mate with any female that came his way. Now, he was in chains. Sex worship came to break the fetters and, if only for a brief space of time, to bring back to man the freedom that had been his. What was forbidden at large in the bush not only was permitted, but, in fact, became a duty in the temple of the gods.

III
When, in the temple, man was free to do as he pleased sexually, he pleased to do it with all the freedom possible. Venturing far out across land and sea to India, we come upon a people, Kauchiluas by name. On the day of a festival we may follow them along the crooked path through fields of corn until we reach the woods. Further, we cannot go. Beyond, it is only for their own and for the initiated. Yet we do know what is happening there.

The Kauchiluas enter the temple individually. Here the sexes separate, the males proceeding further inside, while the females remain for a few minutes with the priest. They remove their bodices and deposit them in a box held by the divine representative, each receiving a number or check for the bodice deposited. Presently they join the males and the service is begun.

There is song and prayer and dance. As the ritual advances, hearts beat faster and eyes dilate in the glimmer of the burning fire in the front. Then the priest marches about the temple with the box of bodices offering it to each male, who takes one. The woman who has the number corresponding to that garment thereby becomes his partner for the remainder of the service. She may be a stranger, a young girl, or an old woman; she may be his own sister, or his very mother. Whoever she is, it is her most sacred religious duty to join with him in the fulfillment of the last sacrament of the worship—the union of the sexes. This rite is exercised in communion within the temple and is accompanied by shrieks and wild exercises of an orgiastic nature.

This service was engaged in by all present, by the most devout and pure-minded women, by persons who were otherwise as modest and chaste as any group of men and women today. To them, this promiscuous union was a sacred and solemn observance; yet, while it lasted, it was an overwhelming passion of sexual fury.

The bodice of the Kauchilua woman was the magic wand that converted an act strictly interdicted as a deadly sin into a sacred duty. There, in the temple, all the veneer that social custom had placed upon the exercise of the sexual function was removed. Accompanied by prayer and song, they reverted to the original form of sex relationship, absolute promiscuity.

The Kauchiluas were by no means the only people to dispose of all their sex taboos in worship. There were many such cases in all parts of the world. It was the same at the sacrifice of the Cartavaya to the Indian god Krishna. Again, it was a feature of the Soma-sacrifice in the Vedic ritual. Among the Nicaraguans, who were otherwise a people unusually strict in sex matters, the women could choose any man they might wish in their annual festival. In the frenzy of religio-sexual excitement, their choice was neither discriminating nor limited. In fact, the more strict a people was in matters of sex, the more likely the individuals were to break out in orgy at their worship. This we see in the story of the tribe of Tarahumare.

Here we have a peaceful, orderly, and reserved people. Whether dancing or singing they never lost their decorum and ever behaved with great formality and fitting solemnity. In fact, their self-control so impressed the traveler, who first came upon them, that he did not hesitate to state that "in the ordinary course of his existence, the uncivilized Tarahumare is too bashful and modest to enforce his matrimonial rights and privileges; and only by means of the national drink tesvino is the race kept alive and increasing."

Yet there was a place in their ceremony when formality and solemnity gave way to what the writer quoted above describes as "debauch." For this very drink of tesvino was an essential part of the worship. It was generously imbibed at the close of formal services, and, as the intoxicant was becoming effective, men and women entered into open promiscuous sexual relationship in which they engaged until well nigh dawn.

Without tesvino, religious worship could not dissolve the chains of sexual constraint for the Tarahumares. Among other primitive peoples, it also failed in this liberating function in at least one respect: incest. Promiscuous as the worshippers in the temple were, they still observed the taboo on incestuous relationship. Contact between parent and child persisted in the orgiastic rites of secret sects past and present, but it was banished from the temple of the gods. However, all other forms of sexual promiscuity as a feature of religious worship continued for many thousands of years.

IV
Sacrifice is one element that early found its way into the worship of all gods. Its origin was humble indeed. It may have been a bribe to a menacing god to stay his hand, a gift to a supernatural power to secure his favor, or a reward to an obliging divinity who did man's bidding. Again, it was sometimes just a fine for an act displeasing to the gods, imposed upon a person by his own guilty conscience. However it originated, the concept of sacrifice grew with the human mind. It gathered intellectual and emotional values as it rolled along the path of human progress.

As fear gave way to love in the heart of primitive man, and he came to adore his gods rather than to look upon them in dread and horror, sacrifice began to take on a devotional aspect. The dominant note became that of homage. Just as the lover enjoys bringing a gift to his love and is exalted by the very act of giving, so is the devotee happy to offer what is nearest and dearest to him to his god out of sheer love for the divinity.

In the worship of the generative divinities sacrifice also came to play its part. Here, perhaps even more than in the worship of other gods, it secured a hold upon the people to an overwhelming extent, more for what man got out of it directly than for what the gods might offer in return. For sacrifice in sex worship came to be another outlet for the collected sexual energies of man, diverted from their natural course through the numerous social inhibitions.

Although the sacrifice to the gods of generation was to be sexual, it could assume several different forms. It could be the product of the sexual union, the firstborn. Like the lover who brings his beloved a gift and is himself first treated to it by the grateful recipient, primitive man offered to the generative god the first gift of new life received through his influence. The firstborn was also the thing man waited for so long, the object that was most precious to him. In many a corner of the world, the firstborn—whether crop or fruit or animal, not even excluding human—was sacrificed to the divine being. The Phœnicians offered the dearest child, the firstborn, to propitiate their god. In Exodus we read that "All that openeth the womb is mine," and in old Judea the firstborn was commonly considered an object for sacrifice. Even today the firstborn Jewish child, if it be a son, rightfully belongs to the descendant of the tribe of Levi, the priesthood of the temple. The father has to redeem the firstborn from the cohen. Thirty days after the birth, a ceremony is performed which is called "the redemption of the son" and in which the father gives the cohen anything of value. The latter receives it in lieu of the boy. After the transfer is made, there is a jolly party and a feast according to the means of the parents. In practically all cases the cohen returns the ransom before he leaves the house.

Just as the fruit of the sexual union was offered in sacrifice to the god of fertility, so did the agents in this process, that is, the organs of procreation, also become material for sacrifice. Both foreskin and hymen are the appropriate parts to be rendered to the divinity. The hymen is the guardian at the gateway of generation. Its presence is a sign that no generative services have as yet been brought by the female individual. It is destroyed in the very process so dear to the god of fertility. It is, therefore, sacred to the god and must be sacrificed at his altar.

The Roman bride offered her hymen directly to the god of generation, Priapus. To his temple she repaired with her parents and the groom. The latter waited in the ante-room while the young maiden alone entered into the sacred chamber of the temple. There, in the representation hewn out of marble, was Priapus himself, a strong, nude male, in passion. The youthful bride embraced him in fear and trembling, and when she left the sacred chamber, she was a virgin no longer.

A similar custom prevails even today in some parts of India. A writer, who was long a sojourner there, relates: "Many a day have I sat at early dawn in the door of my tent, pitched in a sacred grove, and gazed at the little group of females stealthily emerge from the adjoining village, each with a garland or bunch of flowers, and when none were thought to see, accompany their prayer for pulee-pullum (child fruit) with a respectful abrasion of a certain part of their person on a phallus."

To the westerner, watching stealthily, it was, perhaps, a quaint, erotic scene. To the maidens about to enter matrimony, this was a solemn sacrifice of their hymen to the god within whose power it was to bless them with many births, assuring them of the love of their husbands, or to curse them with barrenness, causing them to be hated and despised.

Among very primitive peoples the god was personified in the ceremony, not by an inanimate object, but by his priest. In many places, this divine representative acted openly, even demanding a fee. Again, he played the part of the god under cover, in the dark of the night. So it was that some brides believed they had actually consorted with the divinity, while others realized, perhaps, that it was with the priest. But the priest here became impersonal. He was no longer a mere human but rather the divine representative upon earth. He played a rôle similar to that of the modern priest when, as the confessor, he takes the place of Christ in forgiving the sins of the contrite penitent.

The custom of having the priest act as the representative of the god is practiced in India even at the present time. It is not uncommon for a husband to accompany his wife to the priest and to remain a reverential spectator of the act representing the union of god and woman. In certain parts of the country, there are definite days each year on which women call at the temples to receive from the priests the sacred blessing that they are unable to obtain from the god of creation through the medium of their husbands.

Where a king or lord assumed a theocratic function as was usual in ancient times, it was customary for him to substitute for the god at this hymeneal sacrifice. In our own times, the Justice of the Peace claims the right to kiss the bride first. He is entirely ignorant of the fact that therein he merely claims a mild substitute for the first right to the bride that should be his according to ancient custom.

In the male, there is nothing to correspond to the hymen, which so symbolically represents the transition' from virginity to the realm of sex experience. Still, the foreskin is the nearest to it. Like the hymen, it undergoes a change in sexual intercourse. Again, like the hymen, it can be removed with pain, yet with little danger to the life of the individual. We thus have the circumcision operation at the time of puberty as the sacrifice of the male agent in the sexual process. This ceremony is performed among the Jews on the eighth day after birth; among the Arabs at the age of thirteen; but by other peoples in various parts of the world as a tribal rite of initiation corresponding to the modern confirmation ceremony.

The sacrificial meaning of both circumcision and hymeneal rupture becomes even more apparent in the perversions of some religious sects. Among those people who live religion very intensely and vividly, we find the true intent of the rite unmitigated by the consideration of individual well being and the interest of the group. We see it in the actual incisions in the female organs, such as removing the clitoris, or in the infibulation of the labia minora. We see it again in the castrations following great religious excitations in both ancient and modern times.

In the heat of religious passion, the avid worshippers of Cybele lost all sense of reality and ran about like mad men with furious eyes and streaming hair. At times they joined in wild, fantastic dance amidst the cries and shouts of drunken song. Again, they broke up and rushed about through the woods, falling upon each other and flogging themselves relentlessly with iron chains. And all the time they carried burning torches or brandished sacred knives.

For hours the drunken, furious orgy went on and in the excitement of the dance, drink, and flogging, they forgot themselves completely. In the pain and frenzy of the approaching ecstasy, they thrust the knives upon their bodies in the name of the goddess. Unconscious of the resulting anguish, they continued their mad dance and waved about the severed portions of their bodies, while the blood streamed from the gaping wounds. When the fury had died away, they approached the altar to present their goddess with the spoils of their virility. They had made the great sacrifice for her and now they were to adopt woman's dress and serve her in the temple—eunuch priests.

V
As religion develops and love ever plays a larger part in it, the idea of sacrifice becomes more and more sacred, the sacrificial object ever growing in holiness. Hence, once the agents of the sexual process were offered in sacrifice to the generative divinity, it is only natural that they came to be looked upon as something sacred. When one took an oath in olden times and, as we do today, had to put his hand upon a sacred object, he placed it upon his genitals. When Abraham is stricken with age and desires his servant Eliezer, who is also the Elder of his household, to swear that he will take a wife for his son Isaac, not from the daughters of Canaan, but from Abraham's own people, he says:

"Put, I pray thee, thy hand under my thigh and I will make thee swear by the Lord, the God of heaven and the God of earth. . . ."

The thigh was a generic term for the organ of creation. In the Bible, one refers to his descendants as those "who came out of my thigh."

Travelers tell of a people whose priests on various occasions go about uncovered so that the worshippers of the generative divinity may pay the lingam the homage usually paid when sacred objects are exposed to the veneration of the pious. In Canara and other districts of India, the priests went about naked in the streets, ringing the bells that they held in their hands. It was to call out the women to the religious duty of piously embracing their sacred organs.

'The old idea of the sanctity of the lingam survives in the Christian attitude of reverence toward the Holy Prepuce, the foreskin of Jesus. Until very recently, there were twelve such prepuces extant in European churches, and many a legend was woven about them. One of these, the pride possession of the Abbey Church of Coulomb, in the diocese of Chartres, France, was believed to possess the miraculous power of rendering all sterile women fruitful. It had the added virtue of lessening the pains of childbirth.

Where the sanctity of the organs of generation had worn off, there still existed a certain attitude toward them—akin to sacred. The genitals were taboo. They were out of the range of usual experience, not to be touched or mentioned by name. The Mosaic law had no pity upon those who violated this taboo.

"When men strive together one with another, and the wife of one draweth near to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand and taketh him by the secrets, then thou shalt cut off her hand; thine eye shalt have no pity." The punishment was to be so severe because she had touched an object that was most taboo.

In many parts of the world, among savages, to uncover oneself before a person is to curse him. In Russia and other places in eastern Europe, one expresses spite or defiance by making a fist with the tip of the thumb extended between the index and the middle fingers. This is called a "fig" and is symbolic of the male genital. Although, when used as suggested, it may be very effective in producing the desired result, very few people are aware of its original significance. As late as the latter part of the eighteenth century, in Naples, this same figure was used as an amulet and worn to guard against the evil eye.

VI
There was yet another sacrifice that man could offer to the god of generation—the sacrifice of coition. Just as he created his god in his own image, so did he bestow upon him that which he himself cherished most. Respectable old Herodotus was shocked to find that all people, with the exception of the Greeks and the Egyptians, cohabited within their temples.

In principle, the first sex experience was to be with the god himself. There was involved in it the sacrifice of the hymen as well as the first act of coition. In the absence of the god, his priest or temporal representative could fill his place. There were yet other surrogates, such as the stranger and the group as a whole.

In a world where the group is small, every one is known, and travelers are rare, a stranger becomes an oddity. His coming and going are veiled in mystery. So it was that he came to be looked upon as a divine emissary, a possible angel in the flesh. To the Jew of the Middle Ages, every stranger was a potential Elijah the prophet, in disguise. To the Christian, he was possibly the wandering Jew or a reincarnation of Christ or some saint. To the Easterner, the stranger was a sacred man, and that accounts for the famed hospitality of the Orient. The same halo hung about him already in primitive times. What was due to a god was frequently given to the stranger and what was expected from the divinity was looked for in the possible gift some passing traveler might bring.

No wonder, then, that the virgin coition was also to be performed with a stranger. We read of maidens, among primitive peoples, being brought to the altar of the generative goddess at least once before their nuptials, to be sacrificed to a stranger. This did not at all detract from their value in marriage. In fact, to this day a husband in the Kamerun has small opinion of his wife if she has had only limited sex experience before her marriage, for "if she were pretty men would have come to her."

Among the American Indians, when girls enter into womanhood, they are taken to a hut, painted, and made to cohabit with strangers while songs are offered to the. goddess Iteque. Similarly must the Santal girl, once in her life, cohabit with a stranger in the temple of Talkupi Ghat. And when we reach the stage of so-called temple prostitution, it is the stranger again who takes away the prettiest girl, the girl that is first to be initiated.

Not only the stranger, but the group as a unit may take what rightfully belongs to the gods. A vestige of this attitude we have in the popular concept of vox populi vox dei—the voice of the people is the voice of god. We have it again in the unusual theological powers which a conclave of ministers will assume for themselves. A hundred rabbis will void a marriage vow against the rule for divorce. A church council will decide upon substantiation and the figure of the cross.

The tribe as a whole may delegate to itself the privilege that accrues only to the god. In Serang a maiden must herself provide the food for her wedding feast. Yet she has nothing with which to get it but her maidenhood. So she calls at the temple and there, after prayer and song, she is ceremoniously bathed and clothed in a skirt of fiber. Now she is at the service of every man until she has collected as much as she needs for the feast.

At the feast, a pot filled with water is covered with a leaf. An old woman takes the index finger of the girl's right hand and thrusts it through the leaf. This symbolizes the fact that her hymen has been broken. The leaf is then displayed on the ridge of the roof. It is a sign for the old men of the village that it is their night, and during that evening, they all have access to her room.

Herodotus tells us that among the people of Lydia, the bride, on her wedding night, accorded her favor to all the guests for which they, in return, presented her with gifts. Possibly our custom of wedding presents is a forgotten hang-over of such rewards to the bride for her amorous favors, just as our privilege of kissing her may be a mild form of another and more severe claim upon the newly wed maiden by all the members of the clan.

It was not only the first coition that became a sacrifice.

Any sexual union, if executed within the temple and under the auspices of the divinity, might be offered to the god of generation. Soon, any man, a lonesome stranger or a tired soul, weary with the burdens of life, could come to the temple to find escape from worldly troubles through the gateway of love. He had only to pay the god for the privilege of representing him, and the union in which he joined was then but another sacrifice of coition. Hence, we find the widespread custom of the duty upon every woman, at least once in her life, to come to the temple and to give herself to anyone for a donation to the god. Little did it matter how humble or how noble she might be; she must offer herself to the first bidder.

We are told by Herodotus that once in her lifetime every woman born in Chaldea had to enter the inclosure of the temple of Aphrodite, sit therein, and offer herself to a stranger. Many of the wealthy were too proud to mix with the rest and repaired to the temple in closed chariots, followed by numerous attendants. The greater number seated themselves in long lanes on the sacred pavement. The place was thronged with strangers passing down the lanes to make their choice. Once a woman had taken her place there, she could not return home until a stranger had thrown into her lap a silver coin and had led her away with him beyond the limits of the sacred enclosure. As he threw her the money, he pronounced the words: "May the goddess Mylitta make thee happy."

A similar custom prevailed among the American Indians. Among the ancient Algonquins and Iroquois as well as among some South American tribes, there was a festival during which the women of all ranks extended to .whosoever wished, the same privileges that the matrons of ancient Babylon granted even to the slaves and strangers in . the temple of Mylitta. It was one of the duties of religion.

In the course of time, this custom passed out of existence. No longer could the group take the place of the god in the sacrament of sex. Yet it continued in a different form. What the group could not do as a whole with all the individuals participating in it, some individuals representing the group could still do for the god of generation. Instead of the entire group joining in promiscuous sexual union, certain individuals were selected by the group to execute the act on behalf of the entire assemblage.

In those temples in India where there is no general sexual union, there is still a ceremonial performance of coition by a chosen couple. It is carried out in a so-called "vacant enchanted place," which is rendered pure by sprinkling it with wine. Secret charms are whispered three times over the woman, following which the sexual act is consummated.

When Captain Cook visited one of the Pacific Islands, he and his party invited the natives to a religious ceremony. In return, the natives performed a rite of their own. After the usual Indian ritual, a tall, strong young man and a slight girl of about twelve stepped forward and, upon an improvised altar, joined in sexual union, the elder women advising and assisting the young girl in the performance of her amorous duty. The entire audience stood silent as they looked on in solemn reverence.

Various were the forms that the sexual sacrifice assumed in the temples of the gods. In one case, it may have been just the hymeneal offering of the first union in sex. In another, it may have been a union at any time during the life of the woman. In still another, the sacrifice was to be repeated annually, or every time a certain festival was celebrated. These variations were effected by the religious institution itself, the priests, and the social traditions of the group.

Still other variations found their origin in the different attitudes of the individual women. One woman may have brought the single sacrifice more out of necessity than out of inner desire. To her, it may have been a painful duty of which she was glad that no more was required. To another woman, the one sacrifice may have left only greater desire for a repetition of the worship. In terms of our modern psychology, this distinction would be one of sexual sensibility and erotic propensities. To the primitive man, the distinction was in degree of piety. It was the extent to which one was devoted to the god and ready to serve him.

Five times a day the Azan is chanted on the balcony of the minaret. It is the call to the faithful Moslem to wash his face, hands and feet, and bend down in prayer. North-light, meridian, and sunset are reminders to the Jew to "listen that the Lord is his God, the Lord is One." Morning, noon, and evening the Angelus bell tells over and over again to the faithful Christian the story of Christ's advent upon the earth and reminds him of the worship he owes his God.

There are those whose lives are merely intermissions between acts of worship. There are others whose worship is a rare and thin sprinkling over a secular existence. This was true in primitive times as it is today. There were women whose sexual sacrifice at the temple was an incident of small significance in their lives. There were other women who were devotees of the divinities, bent upon serving them continually. In time, such persons came to be the priestesses of the god and acquired as much dignity in the temple as the priests who performed the rites of worship. He who chanted the incantations or carried the idol was no more entitled to the dignity of the priesthood than she who honored the god in her own sentient flesh.

There were priestesses who devoted themselves entirely to the god, sleeping in the sacred chamber and never leaving the temple. Their lives were given wholly to the divine being. They offered themselves directly to him, foregoing all the joys of secular living. There were others who did not cohabit with the god directly, but with his representatives, the stranger, the passer-by, anyone who might call in the divine name. They were offering themselves in sexual sacrifice. The procreative god was served by the act of procreation performed in the temple. The priest partook of the sacrifice of the firstborn. The priestess partook of the sacrifice of coition. In the latter we have the origin of the institution of temple priestesses, which has so shocked the prudes of later times.

In its inception, however, there was nothing degrading about it. To the primitive man, it was both honorable and pious. He looked at it in some such fashion as this:

Sexual union is a pious act pleasing to the gods. Every woman is enjoined by the god to sacrifice at least one such union in his honor. The god being divine and physically absent, a surrogate is necessary to receive the sacrifice. He may be a priest, a stranger, or a group. Whoever the surrogate is, he who is thus honored must himself bring an offering to the god; he must show his appreciation of this privilege by contributing his mite for the divine needs. In our own plain, prosaic words, we might say: he must pay for it. Now, let us remember: pay, not the woman, but the god for partaking of her sacrificial favor.

When the priest was the surrogate, no one was to inquire how he squared it with the god. Presumably, he repaid it in prayer and worship. Sometimes, it was the woman herself, or her family, who provided the recompense which was due from the priest. Whenever the surrogate was not of the god's human family, that is, not of the priesthood, he contributed to the upkeep of the god's house in coin or in gift from field or forest.

When the man threw the coin to his choice of the women aligned at the temple and said: "May the goddess Mylitta make thee happy," he was not buying the woman's body. He was participating in a religious ceremony in which his share consisted not only in uniting with the woman but also in bringing an offering to the god—in this case, a monetary one, since the priests must live and the temple of the divine being must be kept up.

In fact, one may question the justice of applying to this institution the term "prostitution." By the latter we seek to signify a sexual union in which one of the partners fulfills his part for reward or material gain outside the field of sexuality. It is the motive that determines whether a sexual union is prostitutional or not. Certainly, the woman who came piously to the temple, waiting in prayerful mood to be chosen by anyone at all, be he ever so unattractive physically, and receiving for herself no monetary or material compensation,—certainly, this woman cannot be called a prostitute.

True, in its later development, this institution of sacrificial sexual union did assume a semblance of prostitution. As time went on, the temple priestesses easily outnumbered the priests. In some temples, there were as many as a thousand of them.

Our churches and synagogues are built in locations where they may be most eaqly accessible to the public. A modern house of worship will not disdain to advertise its services so as to attract a greater number of worshippers. The pagan temples followed a similar course in their attempt to attract a large attendance. They were even more concerned with it, since the economic factor here played a greater rôle. The human family of the god was large and their material needs were considerable. In consequence, their temples were built on crossroads and, in cities with a port, not far distant from the docks. For it was the traveler, most in need of the sexual sacrifice, who was sure to call at the temple. It was he, too, that was to be favored, and in many cases, when a woman came to offer herself at the temple, she was to do so only to a stranger, as he was possibly a divine representative.

With so many priestesses and so many worshippers, the service had to become systematized, the fee or monetary sacrifice definitely fixed, and the share of the priestesses in the proceeds justly apportioned. No wonder, then, that to infidel eyes this looked more like a brothel than a house of worship. Did not any man call there, just as he calls on a legalized house of prostitution, pays the fee, and takes a woman in sexual embrace?

But the fact that the services of the temple priestesses had been so definitely systematized need not be deprecatory of the temple priesthood. System is a necessary feature in any large human institution, religious as well. Our worship today is only too well systematized. Nor need we be shocked by the payment offered for the services of the priestesses, since it was really the sacrifice of the male. The priestess offered her sexual function to the god, the man offered his coin. In fact, both were offering coin in addition to the sexual union, for the temple was receiving the payment from the male on account of the female. She was as much a partner to the monetary contribution to the temple as she was a partner to the sexual intercourse.

Even her sharing the fee with the temple need not be surprising considered from the pagan viewpoint. When the farmer brought his first-born to the temple, it was sacrificed to the gods; yet, only a small part went to the god directly, that is, was burnt at the altar. The greater portion was returned to the donor and he was supposed to feast upon it in the temple court. And a goodly portion went to the priest. Just as the priest received his portion of the sacrificial lamb, so did the priestess receive her part of the fee for the sexual sacrifice. The one is no more prostitution than the other.

After all, the term prostitution is psychological in nature. There is nothing inherent in the physical union of the sexes to make one prostitutional and the other legitimate or respectable. It is the way in which society looks upon a sexual union and the way the partners feel about it that determines whether it is prostitutional or not. In those times and places where the institution of temple priestesses was established, society did not look upon it as prostitutional. Quite to the contrary, it was the most respectable and pious vocation a woman could select, or have selected for her by her parents or guardians. Nor did the temple priestess view herself as a prostitute. She saw herself a servant of the god, possibly bringing more joy and gladness to the divinity than to herself.

VIII
There were several paths by which a woman found her way to the temple priesthood. She may have come as a virgin to marry the god, where such marriages between divinities and humans were performed. In this case, she was wedded to the god according to the rite of the tribe. After being initiated by the priests, she was the divine spouse and could, therefore, receive all his worshippers. The priests, in addition to consecrating her to her love-life, may have trained leer in the art of love. In proportion to her amorous talents, her fame and fortune grew to the extent that she was paid by lay married women for private instruction in the ars amandi.

Again, she may have come after her marriage, preferring the exalted erotic life in the temple to the cheerless existence of a primitive wife in servitude. In that case, she approached the divine dwelling-place, bearing upon her head some such gift as a cocoanut and a packet of sugar. She was received by the priest and given cakes and rice to eat. After her consecration, she was assigned to temple duty, such as sweeping and purifying the floor by washing it with cow-dung and water, and waving a fly-whisk before the god. In the meanwhile, she was instructed in the art of the sexual sacrifice by priest or priestess and, in time, she assumed her place before the god of generation.

More often, perhaps, she was brought to the temple by her father or brother, at an age when she was not yet old enough to have an opinion in the matter or to understand its significance. Her father may have had a guilty conscience; perhaps he had broken his marriage vow. He may have committed adultery, and the punishment for this would be visited upon the entire tribe. The tribe, in turn, would wreak its vengeance upon him. It were best to mend things before it was too late. So he took his female child, possibly not more than five years of age, and brought her to the temple in expiation. It was not much of a sacrifice, girls being of little account anyway. In addition, it conferred an amount of distinction—one was somehow associated with the priesthood.

Occasionally, she got there by accident. Times were hard for the tribe; somehow the god or goddess was not pleased with the worship of the people. Then, a number of girls were collected and, en masse, admitted to the temple so that the divine frown might disappear. In another case, all may have been well with the tribe. Gods were pleased and man grateful. Once more, girls were consecrated to the divinity. Xenophon dedicated fifty courtesans to the Corinthian Venus, in pursuance of the vow he had made beseeching the goddess to give him victory in the Olympian games. Pindar makes Xenophon address the priestesses thus:

"O, young damsels, who receive all strangers and give them hospitality, priestesses of the goddess Pitho in the rich Corinth, it is you who, in causing the incense to burn before the image of Venus and in inviting the mother of love, often merit for us her celestial aid and procure for us the sweet moments which we taste on the luxurious couches where is gathered the delicate fruit of beauty."

However a girl came into the temple, she had a long period of training before her. This training was neither in religion nor in sex, but primarily in the graces of lovemaking and companionship. For the vocation of the temple priestess was complicated, indeed. She was catering not to the Western man, but to the man of the East whose loving was as refined as it was intricate.

To the Occidental man, love is either highly spiritual—romance and chivalry, or purely physical, mere sexual union. The prostitute of the West answers the call of his physical love. She receives her guest in the dark and only for a brief moment. The man comes to her when his passion runs high; the minute the passion is spent he leaves. The Chinese or Indian prostitute is first of all a companion and an entertainer. She will delight her guests intellectually by conversation, or artistically by playing or singing; she may dance and she may serve tea. What follows is a relationship gradually drifted into, not an act bought and paid for.

The temple priestess is, therefore, trained for Oriental love-making. For ten hours each day these little girls are instructed in singing and dancing. From the age of seven or eight to fourteen or fifteen, they dance six times daily. They are taught, too, to acquire charm and poise and to make their bodies attractive through the use of fine clothes, sweet-scented powders, and delicate perfumes whose exotic fragrance enhance their allurement. Their minds are also trained and they become delightful conversationalists.

A pen picture of the priestess in action is offered us by Savarin: "The suppleness of their bodies is inconceivable. One is astonished at the mobility of their features, to which they give at will an impression agreeable to the part they play. Their indecent attitudes are often carried to excess. Their looks, gestures, all speak in such an expressive manner that it is not possible to misunderstand what they mean. At the commencement of the dance they throw aside, with their veils, the modesty of their sex. A long, very light silken robe descends to their heels enclosed by a rich girdle. Their long black hair floats in perfumed tresses over their shoulders; a gauze chemise, almost transparent, veils their breasts. To the measure of their movements, the form and contours of their bodies are successively displayed. The sound of the flute, of the tambourine and cymbals, regulates their steps and hastens or slows their motions. They are full of love and passion; they appear intoxicated; they are Bacchantes in delirium; then they seem to forget all restraint and give themselves up to the disorder of their senses."

The sexual sacrifices by these priestesses were usually carried on in the ante-rooms of the temple but sometimes, also, outside, in the court or out buildings, or even along the banks of the sacred rivers. The price was always considerable. In India, in comparatively recent times the sacred fee was from ten to forty dollars, while the Nizam of Haldabad offered a thousand pounds sterling for three nights. Stories of Egypt and Greece indicate that the fee was considerable. King Cheops, impoverished, sacrificed his daughter to procure the necessary funds for the pyramid he was building. Flora, a priestess, was the benefactress of her town, erecting at her own expense a statue to the father of Croesus.

To what extent favors were highly paid for in antiquity may be gleaned from the following anecdote of a famous courtesan, Archidice. A young Egyptian became infatuated with her and offered her all his possessions for one night of love. Archidice disdained his offer. In despair, the lover besought Venus to give him in his dream what the beautiful Archidice refused him in reality. The prayer was answered and the young Egyptian had the dream he so much desired. When Archidice heard of it, she had the young man arrested and taken before the judges to make him pay for his voluptuous dream. The judges decided that Archidice should, in turn, pray to Venus for a dream of silver in repayment for a fictitious lover.

In India, there were even wandering troupes of priestesses led by old women, former servants of the temple. Raynal describes their activity:

"To the monotonous and rapid sounds of the tom-tom these Bayaderes, warmed by a desire to please and by the odors with which they are perfumed, end by becoming beside themselves. Their dances are poetic pantomimes of love. The place, the design, the attitude, measure, sounds and cadences of these ballets, all breathe of passion and are expressive of voluptuousness and its fury.

"Everything conspires to the prodigious success of such women—art and the richness of ornament, the skill with which they make themselves beautiful. Long dark hair falling over their lovely shoulders or arranged in pretty tresses is loaded with sparkling jewels, glittering among natural flowers. Precious stones flash from their jewel-decked necklaces and tinkling bracelets. . . . The art of pleasure is the whole life occupation and only happiness of the Bayaderes. It is extremely difficult to resist their seductions."

The institution of temple priestesses was widely spread and quite extensively developed. Strabo said that there were as many as a thousand of them at the temple of Corinth. There were nigh twelve thousand such priestesses in Madras in quite recent times. There was not a country in which the institution was not present in some form. It was a natural development out of the sex worship which was universally followed. Beginning with a god of generation and reaching a stage of sexual sacrifice, a priesthood for the sacrifice was a natural and logical consequence.

IX
There was another way in which man sought to tap divinity by his sexual emotion. To our eyes it would seem most unholy, as pitiable as it was unnatural. And yet it was there, exercised in all the piety and seriousness man is capable of. For not only did man create his gods in his own image but he also served them in his likeness. The man whose sex life was contrary to nature, set upon members of his own sex, served his generative god homosexually.

The Armenian father who brought his daughter to the temple of the goddess to be there consecrated as a priestess, often brought a son along as well. The son, too, was consecrated and his service was just as much a sexual sacrifice. The priest of Cybele who castrated himself in religious frenzy assumed feminine dress not without a purpose. He continued in the service of the temple and like the priestess served man for the required fee. There were male priests serving males in the temples of all the gods. The homosexual priest had a special designation in both the Hebrew and Babylonian languages. Kadosha was the name applied to the temple priestess engaged in sexual worship; kadosh was the word for the male in the same service.

In Tahiti, there were special divinities for homosexual worship. It was the god Chin himself who instituted homosexualism in Yucatan and sanctified it. His priests, therefore, wore feminine dress. What Chin was in the primitive world for the homosexual man, Mise, Pudicitia and Bona Dea were for the homosexual woman in antiquity. In these services artificial lingams were used by the women worshippers. There were divinities, like the Phrygian Cotytto, that were homosexually worshipped in some places by men and in others by women. And at the service to Demeter at Pellene not only were men excluded but even male dogs so that there would be no disturbing element whatever for the rites to be performed.

Among the Santees, an American Indian tribe, if a man had a nightmare and dreamed of the terrible goddess, the moon, he had to appease the divinity by putting on feminine dress, serving as a woman and offering himself to men. In other tribes, the medicine men had to be effeminate and always wore the dress of women. In old Japan, according to Xavier, priests were to have sexual relations not with women but with men. Arabic travelling merchants reported, in the ninth century, that the Chinese resorted to pederasty in the worship of their icons. Leo Africanus tells of an order of women Satacat in northern Africa that served the gods in tribadistic fashion.

Even the gods resorted to homosexual practices. Zeus, their very father, came down from Mount Olympus attracted by a rosy-faced, bright-eyed youth. It was Ganymede, the most beautiful of mortals, whom the god, disguised as an eagle, seduced and carried away to the Mount. There, Ganymede became the object of love among the divinities for whom he acted as cup-bearer. And Zeus, to compensate the boy's father for the loss of his son, sent him a team of beautiful, light-footed horses.

The key to this strange way of serving a god must, as already indicated, be sought in the homosexual tendency that we find creeping up throughout the entire history of man. There were special lupanars for boys in Greece which were frequented by both men and women and were subject to the same tax and regulations as other lupanars. Dufour tells us that "Rome was filled" with male hierodules who "rented themselves out like the girls of the town. There were houses especially devoted to this kind of prostitution and there were procurers who followed no other business than that of renting out, for profit, a hoard of degraded slaves and even free men." Some of the greatest men of Rome, especially among the Cæsars, though not infrequently among the poets as well, were publicly known to be homosexual. They frequently gave themselves to men for gain—monetary or political. There seems to be no people on earth that did not know of this sexual relationship. In fact, it seems to have come down the animal line with man, for this very practice is found even among animals. It still is not uncommon. Less than a century ago, there were legalized brothels of men for homosexual practice in Paris just as there had been in Greece and Rome. The late Doctor Ivan Bloch described a ball of homosexuals in Berlin. There were some thousand of them; some in men's clothes, others in the dress of women, and still others in futuristic attire. At present, in America, homosexualism seems to be on the increase, especially in the artistic circles.

How did man come to prefer a member of his own sex to a person of the opposite one? This is a very interesting question but it need not concern us here. Suffice it to say that at first man's sexual nature is indefinite. It is a vague, blind yearning that has to be set to a person and to a sex, and that is conditioned by first associations and experience. There are environmental and social conditions that give man's instinct a homosexual turn. These obtained in the past as they still do today. That is why the homosexual tendency was ever present, running parallel with the so-called natural instinct.

Was homosexual worship merely a reflection of homosexual living? Quite likely it was, although by a stretch of the imagination one may derive it in another way:

Originally the gods were hermaphroditic and were, therefore, worshipped by the union of the opposite sexes. As the hermaphroditic divinity separated itself into god and goddess, the worshippers, in some places, may also have separated by sexes, the male serving the god, the female the goddess. When members of one sex exclusively worship a generative god, their service is well in danger of becoming homosexual. Still, it seems more simple and doubtless more psychological to assume that homosexual man preceded the homosexual worshipper; and that even in homosexualism man only offered to his god what was dearest to him and all-embracing in his life.

. . . . . . .

On the shore of the island of Cyprus, in the waters of the Mediterranean, there once was a townlet called Amathonte. It lay well in the shade of Mount Olympus, yet it dared to defy the gods.

Its women were modest, reserved, contemptuous of all carnal pleasures. They covered their bodies and were disdainful of the flesh. One day, Venus was washed upon their shore. As the women came down to see her, they noticed her nudity and treated her with scorn. So when Venus came to her own, she descended to punish the women of Amathonte. She called them together and ordered them to prostitute themselves to all corners, so that they might glory in the very flesh they had so disdained. The women had no other recourse but to do as commanded by Venus. Still, they did it so reluctantly and with such distaste as to defeat the purpose of the goddess. Then Venus came down again and turned these women into stone.

And this was the end of the women of Amathonte, the women who denied the call of the flesh. They who feign would live were turned into stone while life went on. For in time, in this very city of Amathonte, a temple to Venus was erected, and other women came to live there, women who instead of denying love lived to worship it, who instead of rebelling against the flesh lived to triumph in it.

And amid the stones that once were women, the song of love was heard, love, natural, physical, permeating the entire existence of mankind. And woman's rebellion against sex defeated its own purpose.

There was yet another revolt against sex—by man; and this is the story of Siva and his lingam:

Siva was a great god. With Brahma and Vishnu, he was master of the universe, his own function being generation and aiding new life to emerge out of death, like the spring out of the arms of winter. It was Brahma himself who said: "Where is he who opposes Siva and yet is happy?"

But the great god Siva himself was not happy, for he was bereaved of his mate and he was tired and weary. So he wandered about the land and came to the forest of Daruvanam, where the sages live—the sages and their wives.

And when the sages came out to see the great god Siva and noticed that he was haggard and sad, they treated him with scorn and only saluted him with bent heads.

Siva was tired and weary and said nothing but: "Give me alms." Thus the god went about begging along the roads of Daruvanam. But wherever he came the womenfolk looked at him and felt a pang at the heart. At once their minds were perturbed and their hearts agitated by the pains of love. They forsook the beds of the sages and followed the great god Siva.

And as the sages saw their wives leaving with Siva, they pronounced a curse upon him:

"May his lingam fall to the ground."

Was it the effectiveness of the curse, or did Siva himself shed his lingam in affliction at the loss of his consort? Whatever the cause, there it was—his lingam—sticking into the ground and Siva himself gone.

As the lingam fell, it penetrated the lower worlds. Its length increased and its top towered above the heavens. The earth quaked and all there was upon it. The lingam became fire and caused conflagration wherever it penetrated. Neither god nor man could find peace or security.

So both Vishnu and Brahma came down to investigate and to save the universe. Brahma ascended to the heavens to ascertain the upper limits of Siva's lingam, and Vishnu betook himself to the lower regions to discover its depth. Both returned with the news that the lingam was infinite: it was lower than the deep and higher than the heavens.

And the two great gods both paid homage to the lingam and advised man to do likewise. They further counseled man to propitiate Parvati, the goddess, that she might receive the lingam into her yoni.

This was done and the world was saved. Mankind was taught that the lingam is not to be cursed or ignored; that it is infinite in its influence for good or evil; and that rather than wishing it destroyed, they should worship it by offering it flowers and perfumes and by burning fires before it.

Whether it was the goddess Venus or the god Siva, whether it was the feminine principle or the masculine, the worship of the god or of the goddess came as a punishment for sex ignored. Love suppressed, offended, and imprisoned came to be rescued by the gods of religion.

sursa:
http://www.sacred-texts.com/sex/tsf/tsf06.htm

I
ON the cross-roads of the Balkans, near a city called Naissus, an illegitimate son was born to an innkeeper's daughter. The boy's arrival in the world hardly raised a stir at the very inn of his mother. Yet he came to rule over a mighty empire and to shape the destiny of Europe. As if to reflect upon his parents, this boy was named Constantine.

Up from obscurity Constantine climbed. He fought his burdensome way through Roman soldiery in the East. On the banks of the Danube his star began to rise. He was made a tribune. He became a Cæsar. He made himself an Augustus. Slowly, slowly it all came about. It required patience to wait until a superior would rise to greater heights and vacate his place. Prudence was necessary that neither envy nor suspicion be aroused in filling the place vacated. And courage was needed when the ripe moment came to make the move so decisively that it would weather any storm.

Patience, prudence, decision, brought this son of a woman innkeeper of Naissus to the very waters of the Tiber—at the head of an army. But there was the end. Across the bridge lay Rome with Maxentius and his army, two hundred thousand strong. Beyond Ponte Molle no one could go. Constantine saw Severus try it with disastrous result—Severus, the very man in whose footsteps he had followed on his climb in the East. He watched Galerius make his attempt to cross the Ponte, Galerius whose star had sailed out of the East westward across the heavens—the celestial path his own star followed. Galerius never came to Rome again. The hopes and aspirations, the very lives of these Augusti lie buried in the sands of the Tiber shore.

It was just like Constantine to halt at Ponte Molle and—wait. But one day, Constantine had a dream—a dream at noon-time. On the horizon in front of him he saw a flaming cross; the familiar triad, which the poor, persecuted men and women called Christians always carried about them. In the flame of the burning cross he read: "In hoc signo vincas"—in this sign you will conquer.

When he came to himself, his patience was gone; his prudence thrown to the wind; only decision was left, his decision to cross the bridge, however unequal his army might be to the forces of Maxentius.

So Constantine had a cross made and bearing the sacred emblem he passed over the Tiber and took Rome. And the son of a woman innkeeper at Naissus sat upon the throne of the Cæsars with the name Constantine carved upon it. When he left this throne, heeding the call from a still higher one, fame came and added "the Great" to his name.

Constantine was the first Christian Emperor, the founder of the Holy Roman Empire, and the father of papal power at Saint Peter's. Who knows what might have become of the growing yet already disintegrating band of Christians had not Constantine joined them at this time? The faith of the cross had been saved by the vision of the cross appearing to a mighty man of Rome.

True, Constantine was just then in need of a faith. He was facing the crucial point of his career, the critical moment of his life. And everything was against his favor. Considering the actual situation, common sense would have made the ardent leader stop at Ponte Molle. All his courage and energy, fired by ambition and his overwhelming desire for power, could never have carried him across the bridge in the face of such odds. Yet, there was one source out of which a hand might appear to lead him. There was still something that could save him. It was faith; the force that takes away the very sense of reality and taps the energy of the subconscious, the mystic nature in man. Faith—the power that makes so many super-human heroes, men who defy nature and life itself to attain their goal.

Faith, a new faith, Constantine needed, to make his own cause the cause of the faith, so that he might fight his own battle in the name of God and for his religion. "When thou goest forth to battle . . . thou shalt call in the name of God. . . ." Constantine may have saved Christianity, but Christianity surely saved Constantine.

Now, he may have heard long before of those poor, ridiculed bands of men and women who called themselves Christi ins. He may even have been acquainted with the ideas and rituals of this new group coming out of the East. Yet no amount of knowledge or rational persuasion concerning Christianity could have given him that reliance and self-confidence needed to cross the bridge. Mere thought, abstract idea, imageless belief, never carried one off his feet. The Sermon on the Mount might or might not have aroused Constantine's admiration; the vision of the fiery cross conquered worlds for him. The symbol of Christianity was more effective than Christianity itself.

A symbol will rouse men and women and carry them over all sorts of obstacles, beyond their apparent limitations. A striking example of its efficacy is to be found in the mascot. Everyone undertaking a hazardous task "trusts to luck." He has no solid reason for believing that things will take a good turn in his enterprise; but he hopes for it. It is the will to win that instills the hope of victory and inspires confidence in the ability of the individual to carry the project to a successful end. So far, it is all abstract and cannot very well hang together. What is lacking is a concrete basis for this sentiment of trust and confidence, and belief in luck. This is offered by the mascot. The elk, or dog, or rabbit, taken along on a dangerous voyage, on an airflight, or to a football game is supposed to assure the luck that is hoped for. And any man may commit this intellectual sin and accept the superstitious premise, not because he believes in the mascot's power to charm, but because it offers an object upon which he can collect and focus all his hope and confidence.

Deep in the heart of every man there is a strong feeling of nationality, but whether his nation be large or small, as an abstract thing, it is hard for him to visualize it and to love it in itself. There is a symbol, however, that offers him something upon which to center his devotion. It is the flag, the emblem of the land he loves and honors. His entire thought may be taken up with the problems and duties of business and life; he may have little time to think about his country. But once an appeal is made to him in the name of his flag, he will drop everything for it. It exerts such a hold upon him that he may gladly face death itself to protect it.

The cross and the crescent, the emblems of two great religions, convey to their followers thoughts that transcend the limitations of language. And the faithful, in turn, love these symbols of creeds that are in themselves highly abstract. The very cross that means so much to a Christian may convey an entirely different idea to a man of another belief. In the times of the Inquisition, to save his life, a Jew might bend before his executioner and kiss his boots imploring surcease from torture. Yet, he would not kneel or touch the cross with his lips. The former was simple humiliation; the latter was to him a symbol of betrayal of God and people.

In religion, symbols play an important rôle. The symbolic object offers many sensations, every one of which helps to keep the idea that is symbolized in the foreground of consciousness. A symbol is the hold that a man can obtain on an abstract thought, the peg upon which he can hang his heart, the funnel through which he pours out his soul.

II
If it is difficult for us today to grasp a purely abstract idea, how much more difficult must it have been for the man of primitive times? His mind was less organized, his notions more confused, and his thinking heavily befuddled. Watch a steamer sail out of a haze on a misty morning and you will see man's thinking slowly emerging out of primitive mentality. Watch the steamer making shore on a foggy night and you will observe the primitive mind groping for a way to give a meaning to the multitude of impressions hammering away at him from all corners.

Imagine Old Anthropology Adam struggling toward the concept of a generative force in nature. Its manifestations showered upon him at every turn: spring, warm weather, green grass, flowering fields, budding trees, fresh products of the land, births of animals, the increase of fish in the streams. There were births in his own hut and there were times when he himself seemed reborn as well. He felt the sharp, sweep pang of romance, and his whole being was attuned to mystic forces beyond his power of comprehension. What a leap from all these varied impressions to a single thought of regeneration!

Thrown amidst these phenomena of life, death, and rebirth, primitive man was unconsciously groping in the dark of his ignorance, seeking a symbol, a unifying element for all that was going on about him. Lost in the woods, he was searching a way out into the open. In the language of today, he was attempting to give a meaning in a single concrete form to the various phenomena of generation about him. This process was gradually and unconsciously working out in the primitive mind, clarifying his thought and giving it definite expression, just as our ideas become definite and fixed in our minds very often while we are apparently not thinking at all.

One such clarification was light. In the dark, all things seemed to ebb away. All nature seemed to have sunk into a languid inactivity, while man himself was lost in sleep. Whatever lay awake at night was a source of danger and of fear. Darkness was an enemy. Darkness was death.

As the sun creeps above the horizon a new day is born. Everything begins to stir: the birds chirp and the horses neigh. When the sun rises, man may leave the dark, damp cave and bask in sunshine. He feels as if new life has come to him. As the days grow longer and the rays of the sun become more intense, all nature seems happier, the fields yielding their crops and the trees their ripening fruit. Consequently, this heavenly body may be that common denominator in all manifestations of generation, so gropingly sought after by primitive man. Just as the father is both generator and provider of the family, so may the sun be generator and provider of all life upon the earth.

To the sun, the author of life, the power behind all generation, primitive men sought to render homage by identifying him with the principle of good. They personified the sun in such divinities as Brahma of the Hindus, Mithra of the Persians, Osiris of the Egyptians, and Adonis of the Greeks. We, therefore, have sun worship all over the world, in some places in its pure form, in others in a form merged with other symbols.

Some superstitions prevailing until very recent times point to the erotic element of the sun. It was believed that if a young woman walked naked through a field of corn in the intense sunlight of midday, she would become pregnant. In the same way, some Slavs still hold the belief that a woman may conceive by standing naked in the moonlight; the moon like the sun being once taken for a deity.

Again, it may not be the sun itself that is behind creation, but the light of the sun, its rays, the fiery ball sinking below the edge of the world at the approach of night. That is fire, the great mystery that consumes everything like the crocodile, yet aids man in combating darkness and in driving off the beast. The fire built by man is only a small part of the great fire of the Universe that makes for life and generation. Just as it sustains life, it may also generate it. And just as it generates, so does it consume, transforming everything it touches into ashes and smoke. Fire is the beginning and the end of things. It is the basis of all the generative manifestations that the spiritual hand of primitive man was groping for. Its worship became another universal religion.

Fire and sun came to serve man as symbols of the generative force; but even they were abstract. The sun is distant and cannot be touched. One cannot even look at it when it is at its zenith. It is difficult to visualize its action upon the earth, or to see in the concrete its generative quality. Fire, too, is intangible. The young child tries to grasp the flame before him. He reaches for it, but it only burns his fingers. Fire is something that is nothing. God appeared to Moses in the form of a fire upon the bush. Yet Moses could not tell what God was, and when he asked, the answer came: "I am that I am," a very slightly illuminating reply. Had God appeared in the form of a bull, like the god of the Egyptians, Moses would not have been puzzled.

In consequence, both of these representatives of the generative manifestations had to be reinforced with more concrete symbolic aids. There were animals about man doing in their own way for themselves what the sun or fire was doing for the universe. There were the bull and the goat, both of which came to their high positions in the religions of the world because of their supposed superior virility. They performed sexually oftener than other animals in primitive man's immediate environment. And in the period of rut no other domesticated animal could compare with them in sheer brutal strength and in the blind urge that would not stop at self-destruction in its hunt for the female. The strength of the force of rut fills us with awe even today. The sight of an aroused bull making for the cow or of a stallion rushing upon the mare is an exhibit of so tremendous an urge that it cannot fail to impress.

The generative force exemplified by these animals introduced the animal symbols as aids to the higher symbolism of the sun and fire. In time, these symbols, just because they were more concrete, overran the entire worship. There are religions in which the bull or goat or serpent is the basic element and the sun or fire has almost entirely vanished from the minds of the worshippers, lingering only in rare and half-forgotten rituals.

When the Bijagos of Africa were attempting to represent in the concrete their generative deity, they took the goat as its representative on earth. Similarly, the old Aryans of Europe had their spirits of the woods, Ljeschie, depicted with the horns, ears, and legs of a goat. The woods were ever swarming with life: grass and trees, birds and beasts and insects. There was always something creeping, flying, humming in the woods. This seething life, this bubbling-over of the forests, must be the spirits of life, Ljeschie. And only the goat could justly symbolize the generative powers of the divinity.

Dionysos, the Greek and Roman version of the Eastern god of generation, was personified as a goat. This god was born, died, and came to life again to annually resurrect all nature, just as he himself had been resurrected. He was known as the "one of the Black Goatskin."

The sacred goats were usually kept in the temple with considerable care and tenderness. At Mendes, there were sacred stalls for them back of the room containing the altar. As the ceremonial progressed and the worshippers worked themselves to a pitch of excitement bordering on ecstasy, the goats were let loose among them. There was a scramble to touch the sacred animals. People struggled with one another for the opportunity to give them an humble kiss of homage. In this state of excitation, amidst song and revelry, attempts were made to join in sexual union with these living symbols of virility. There were he-goats for the woman worshippers and she-goats for the males. Those who were not fortunate enough to have the animal impersonations of the generative divinities had to be satisfied with human substitutes. And general sexual promiscuity followed the festivities and worship.

Not always, however, was the life of the sacred goat so happy. Often enough this animal became all the more sacred in its death and was offered up as a sacrifice to the generative god. Just as man offered his own generative organs, or parts of these organs, to the divinities, so did he sacrifice the entire animal that symbolized for him the very essence of these organs.

Kali was an Indian goddess, who knew everything that was going to happen to the humans in the huts and villages of India. She was kind enough to impart her knowledge in the form of prophecy to the priests in her temple. Yet she would not descend to her earthly dwelling-place unless a goat was sacrificed upon her altar and her priests sucked the blood of the animal while it was streaming from its cut neck.

The fate of the bull in the faith of the primitive peoples was not much different from that of the goat. There were occasions when the bull was eaten alive so that the worshippers might draw directly to themselves a part of his living force, for this animal was a powerful phallic emblem signifying the male creative power. At the Dionysian mysteries, bulls were torn apart and their flesh devoured while still warm. Dionysos himself was often represented as a bull as well as a goat. In Achia, the priests of the goddess of the earth could not commune with the divinity before they had offered her the fresh blood of a bull.

However, there were places where the bull was kept with great care, led a long life of comfort and ease, and, at death, received a distinguished tomb. There was the sacred bull of Egypt. In excavations at Serapeum, near Memphis, in Egypt, the tombs of over sixty of these sacred animals have been discovered. In these tombs, one usually finds a careful statement of the age of the animal, its place of birth, its mother's name, and the date when it was enthroned. Even the plain bull, without any official connection with god or temple, was held in great esteem. All these animals that died a natural death were carefully buried in the suburbs of the city, and their bones were afterwards collected from all parts of Egypt to be interred in a single spot. When the bull lost his life in religious duty, such as in sacrifice to Apis, all the worshippers beat their hearts and mourned his death.

The worship of the bull was not confined to Egypt and Greece. In India, Nandi—the sacred white bull of Siva—is still the object of much veneration. For the Persians and the Jews this animal, the personification of virility, served as an important religious symbol. And it was reverenced as well by the Assyrians, the Phœnicians, and the Chaldeans.

Like the bull and the goat, the serpent came to lend its aid in presenting to the human mind the force of generation in the world. Because it annually sheds its skin, reappearing in a new body as it were, this animal has for ages been looked upon as the emblem of immortality and reincarnation. The serpent, it is said in the Bible, is "more subtle than any of the beasts in the field" and therefore carries away the biggest prize. Not only has it become an erotic symbol, but it was, at one time, almost a universal religion in itself.

The American Indians had their serpent mounds, and the Druids reverenced their sacred snakes. The mystic serpent of Orpheus, the Midgard snake of Scandinavia, and the brazen serpent of the Jews give testimony to the universality of this religion. There are even today some quarter of a million snake worshippers in India alone. A carved serpent curled up in an oval may still be found among the decorations on the ark in the synagogue. There were serpent ceremonies in Europe long after the advent of Christianity. Within recent times, live serpents were burned on the Eve of Saint John in the Pyrenees. The Ophites caused a tame serpent to coil round the sacramental bread and worshipped it as the representation of the Savior. The very traditions of Saint Patrick driving the snakes out of Ireland and of the expulsion of serpents from France indicate the struggle of early Christianity against the worship of the serpent-lingam.

What is it that singled out the serpent of all the animals for such a prominent place in the symbolism of religion?

On the one hand, it was the particular impression the serpent was making on the primitive mind. Its noiseless walk aroused both suspicion and mystery. Its peculiar gaze and its knowing look, along with its supposed power of fascination, won the serpent the designation of "intelligent fish" from time immemorial. Its name in some languages means life; it also stands for wisdom. It was the serpent that opened the eyes of the first human pair that were born blind. The serpent is the teacher of man in wisdom, but its wisdom is generally taken to be misguided and applied for evil purposes. It was evil in the minds of some primitive peoples; it is evil in the faith of Zoroaster; it was so conceived in the Biblical story of Adam and Eve.

In Sunday school, we learn of the serpent in his glory. He did not crawl over the surface of the earth but had legs to stand upon. In fact, he walked erect like Adam and Eve and was equal in height to the camel. He could talk and was in the habit of conversing with the first woman on earth. He was clever enough to meddle in the life of the first humans and to offer them the benefit of his counsel.

To be sure, it was bad advice; slyly he induced Eve to desire the fruit of the forbidden tree. Gently and cleverly he pointed the way to disobedience of the divine command. And as the woman slid downward, she pulled man down with her. It was by the guile of the serpent that Adam and Eve were driven out of the Garden of Eden to a life of toil and pain. Like Samson of a later day, the serpent itself shared the ruination it caused. By the fall of man, it was crushed and left to spend its days crawling upon the earth.

There is more to the story than is told to the Sunday school class. The serpent was in love with Eve. He had seen Adam and Eve in their conjugal act and was animated by a passion for the woman. He hoped to get Adam out of the way and to take Eve for himself. The serpent is the first illicit desire of sex, the first thwarted passion of love, the first struggle of the male with the male for the female.

There is another reason for the serpent's place in religious symbolism—its resemblance to the lingam. They who ascribed the life principle to their own organs of generation were impressed by a living animal so suggestive of the male generative organ. So they deified the serpent and associated it with the sun-father gods and the generative divinities in general.

Like all male gods, the serpent came to be considered as a source of generation. A married woman needed only to enter a place where Tamburbrin, the eel-like creature was, and she would become pregnant. In the temple, a serpent might assume a human form and bless the woman worshipper with his divine sexual presence. The offspring resulting from this union were known as the children of the snake. In the execution of the sexual function, however, the priest represented the serpent.

Just as we today associate the generative powers with youthfulness, so did the primitive men ascribe to the serpent not only generativeness, but the capacity of eternal youth as well. Utnapishtim, living beyond the mountain Mashu, past the wonderful park and across the Waters of Death, knew the secret of immortal life and perpetual youth. Gilgamesh, a hero of Elam, who became a god in Babylonia, set out to learn this secret. After a series of supreme difficulties, he ran the gauntlet of scorpion men and obtained the thing he so desired. But a serpent in the pool deprived him of the plant that rejuvenated old age, and itself became the guardian of the treasure. Out of scorpions the secret came to Gilgamesh; to a serpent it returned. The serpent is in itself the fountain of youth.

Once this animal symbolizes virility and youth, it is promptly exploited by men anxious to impregnate women. At a religious festival in Bengal, the men march entwined with snakes, while the chief has a rah-boa, or python, round his neck. It is a march like many others in which the males strut out like birds before the females, in display of their conjugal strength. He who kills a serpent even accidentally may be burned alive, for he has exposed the virility symbol to humiliation and insulted the men of the tribe.

Naturally, it was the women who were to show the greatest reverence to the serpent. It was their homage to the lingam, the sign of their subjection to the male sex. In India, there are wives of the snake as there are wives of the other gods in the temples. In Malabar, the serpent inspires certain women with oracular power, if they are perfect in their purity. In another place, the oldest woman enjoys the distinction of carrying the image of the serpent in the processions. This woman must lead a celibate life, since she is dedicated to the snake. Like many generative divinities, the serpent is worshipped by women with libations of milk; they are bestowing upon the snake their motherly gift.

If the serpent is a god and a source of fertility, it is only natural that he should be looked upon as a father as well. And a father he is for many of his worshippers. The rattlesnake men of Moqui claim to have originated from the snake, and snakes they will become after death. The Black-snake men of the Warramungas believe that they embody the spirits of snakes, which their ancestors, genuine serpents, deposited in a certain creek. The Moquis of America claim descent from a woman, who gave birth to snakes; in consequence, reptiles are freely handled in their snake dances, the purpose of which is to secure fertility of the soil.

In Papua, the natives have given thought to the animating principle of human beings. What is that something that gives life to a growth within the woman's body and causes it to eventually emerge as the new born? Why, it is Birumbir, of course. Birumbir is the embryo, as we might call it, operating within the uterus. And how does Birumbir get there? It enters the vulva in the form of Junga, and the Junga is inserted by an eel-serpent-like creature called Trombuir. Translated into our scientific tongue, it is as if we said: life is brought into the womb in the form of semen introduced by the male organ. In the picturesque language of the Papuans, the lingam is the serpent-like Trombuir.

Now while Trombuir may enter the yoni of a married woman and impregnate her, it cannot do so to virgins. In the latter, the entrance is closed. Some special ritual must be observed by the woman and the tribe before the serpent or lingam may find its way to her. This is the origin, perhaps, of the universal stories of serpents guarding a treasure or dragons watching over hoards of value. It is symbolic of the masculine desire held in abeyance before the taboo on the virgin is raised. Having appeared on the scene as the mere physical representation of the lingam, a sort of living pillar, the serpent by its own attributes grew to much larger proportions and took on deeper meaning. It came to signify both wisdom and virility and to express the male protest and the masculine anticipation at the gate of the eternal feminine.

Alea iacta est !