Phallic Worship / A description of the mysteries of the sex worship of the ancients, with the history of the masculine cross. An account of primitive symbolism, Hebrew phallicism, bacchic festivals, sexual rites, and the mysteries of the ancient faiths.

by Hargrave Jennings

BUNS AND RELIGIOUS CAKES

Says Hyslop:—“The hot cross-buns of Good Friday, and the dyed eggs of Pasch or Easter Sunday, figured in the Chaldean rites just as they do now. The buns known, too, by that identical name, were used in the worship of the Queen of Heaven, the goddess Easter (Ishtar or Astarte), as early as the days of Cecrops, the founder of Athens, 1,500 years before the Christian era.” “One species of bread,” says Bryant, “‘which used to be offered to the gods, was of great antiquity, and called Boun.’ Diogenes mentioned ‘they were made of flour and honey.’” It appears that Jeremiah the Prophet was familiar with this lecherous worship. He says:—“The children gather wood, the fathers kindle the fire, and the women knead the dough to make cakes to the Queen of Heaven (Jer. vii., 18)”. Hyslop does not add that the “buns” offered to the Queen of Heaven, and in sacrifices to other deities, were framed in the shape of the sexual organs, but that they were so in ancient times we have abundance of evidence.

Martial distinctly speaks of such things in two epigrams, first, wherein the male organ is spoken of, second, wherein the female part is commemorated; the cakes being made of the finest flour, and kept especially for the palate of the fair one.

Captain Wilford (“Asiatic Researches,” viii., p. 365) says:—“When the people of Syracuse were sacrificing to goddesses, they offered cakes called mulloi, shaped like the female organ, and in some temples where the priestesses were probably ventriloquists, they so far imposed on the credulous multitude who came to adore the Vulva as to make them believe that it spoke and gave oracles.”

We can understand how such things were allowed in licentious Rome, but we can scarcely comprehend how they were tolerated in Christian Europe, as, to all innocent surprise we find they were, from the second part of the “Remains of the Worship of Priapus”: that in Saintonge, in the neighbourhood of La Rochelle, small cakes baked in the form of the Phallus are made as offerings at Easter, carried and presented from house to house. Dulare states that in his time the festival of Palm Sunday, in the town of Saintes, was called le fete des pinnes—feast of the privy members—and that during its continuance the women and children carried in the procession a Phallus made of bread, which they called a pinne, at the end of their palm branches; these pinnes were subsequently blessed by priests, and carefully preserved by the women during the year. Palm Sunday! Palm, it is to be remembered, is a euphemism of the male organ, and it is curious to see it united with the Phallus in Christendom. Dulare also says that, in some of the earlier inedited French books on cookery, receipts are given for making cakes of the salacious form in question, which are broadly named. He further tells us those cakes symbolized the male, in Lower Limousin, and especially at Brives; while the female emblem was adopted at Clermont, in Auvergne, and other places.