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

EARTH MOTHER

The following interesting chapter is taken from a valuable book issued a few years ago anonymously:

“Mother Earth” is a legitimate expression, only of the most general type. Religious genius gave the female quality to the earth with a special meaning. When once the idea obtained that our world was feminine, it was easy to induce the faithful to believe that natural chasms were typical of that part which characterises woman. As at birth the new being emerges from the mother, so it was supposed that emergence from a terrestrial cleft was equivalent to a new birth. In direct proportion to the resemblance between the sign and the thing signified was the sacredness of the chink, and the amount of virtue which was imparted by passing through it. From natural caverns being considered holy, the veneration for apertures in stones, as being equally symbolical, was a natural transition. Holes, such as we refer to, are still to be seen in those structures which are called Druidical, both in the British Isles and in India. It is impossible to say when these first arose; it is certain that they survive in India to this day. We recognise the existence of the emblem among the Jews in Isaiah li. 1, in the charge to look “to the hole of the pit whence ye are digged.” We have also an indication that chasms were symbolical among the same people in Isaiah lvii. 5, where the wicked among the Jews were described as “inflaming themselves with idols under every green tree, and slaying the children in the valleys under the clefts of the rocks.” It is possible that the “hole in the wall” (Ezek. viii. 7) had a similar signification. In modern Rome, in the vestibule of the church close to the Temple of Vesta, I have seen a large perforated stone, in the hole of which the ancient Romans are said to have placed their hands when they swore a solemn oath, in imitation, or, rather, a counterpart, of Abraham swearing his servant upon his thigh—that is the male organ. Higgins dwells upon these holes, and says: “These stones are so placed as to have a hole under them, through which devotees passed for religious purposes. There is one of the same kind in Ireland, called St. Declau’s stone. In the mass of rocks at Bramham Crags there is a place made for the devotees to pass through.” We read in the accounts of Hindostan that there is a very celebrated place in Upper India, to which immense numbers of pilgrims go, to pass through a place in the mountains called “The Cow’s Belly.” In the Island of Bombay, at Malabar Hill, there is a rock upon the surface of which there is a natural crevice, which communicates with a cavity opening below. This place is used by the Gentoos as a purification of their sins, which they say is effected by their going in at the opening below, and emerging at the cavity above—“born again.” The ceremony is in such high repute in the neighbouring countries that the famous Conajee Angria ventured by stealth, one night, upon the Island, on purpose to perform the ceremony, and got off undiscovered. The early Christians gave them a bad name, as if from envy; they called these holes “Cunni Diaboli.” (Anacalypsis, p. 346)