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

STONEHENGE A TEMPLE OF BACCHUS

Of all the nations of antiquity the Persians were the most simple and direct in the worship of the Creator. They were the puritans of the heathen world, and not only rejected all images of God and his agents, but also temples and altars, according to Herodotus, whose authority we prefer to any other, because he had an opportunity of conversing with them before they had adopted any foreign superstitions. As they worshipped the ethereal fire without any medium of personification or allegory, they thought it unworthy of the dignity of the god to be represented by any definite form, or circumscribed to any particular place. The universe was his temple, and the all-pervading element of fire his only symbol. The Greeks appear originally to have held similar opinions, for they were long without statues and Pausanias speaks of a temple at Siciyon, built by Adrastus—who lived in an age before the Trojan war—which consisted of columns only, without wall or roof, like the Celtic temples of our northern ancestors, or the Phyrœtheia of the Persians, which were circles of stones in the centre of which was kindled the sacred fire, the symbol of the god. Homer frequently speaks of places of worship consisting of an area and altar only, which were probably enclosures like those of the Persians, with an altar in the centre. The temples dedicated to the creator Bacchus, which the Greek architects called hypœthral, seem to have been anciently of this kind, whence probably came the title (“surround with columns”) attributed to that god in the Orphic litanies. The remains of one of these are still extant at Puzznoli, near Naples, which the inhabitants call the temple of Serapis; but the ornaments of grapes, vases, etc., found among the ruins, prove it to have been of Bacchus. Serapis was indeed the same deity worshipped under another form, being usually a personification of the sun. The architecture is of the Roman times; but the ground plan is probably that of a very ancient one, which this was made to replace—for it exactly resembles that of a Celtic temple in Zeeland, published in Stukeley’s Itinerary. The ranges of square buildings which enclose it are not properly parts of the temple, but apartments of the priests, places for victims and sacred utensils, and chapels dedicated to the subordinate deities, introduced by a more complicated and corrupt worship and probably unknown to the founder of the original edifice. The portico, which runs parallel with these buildings, encloses the temenos, or area of sacred ground, which in the pyrœtheia of the Persians was circular, but is here quadrangular, as in the Celtic temple in Zeeland, and the Indian pagoda before described. In the centre was the holy of holies, the seat of the god, consisting of a circle of columns raised upon a basement, without roof or walls, in the middle of which was probably the sacred fire or some other symbol of the deity. The square area in which it stood was sunk below the natural level of the ground, and, like that of the Indian pagoda, appears to have been occasionally floated with water; the drains and conduits being still to be seen, as also several fragments of sculpture representing waves, serpents, and various aquatic animals, which once adorned the basement. The Bacchus here worshipped, was, as we learn from the Orphic hymn above cited, the sun in his character of extinguisher of the fires which once pervaded the earth. He is supposed to have done this by exhaling the waters of the ocean and scattering them over the land, which was thus supposed to have acquired its proper temperature and fertility. For this reason the sacred fire, the essential image of the god, was surrounded by the element which was principally employed in giving effect to the beneficial exertions of the great attribute.

From a passage of Hecatæus, preserved by Deodorus Siculus, it seems evident that Stonehenge and all the monuments of the same kind found in the north, belong to the same religion which appears at some remote period to have prevailed over the whole northern hemisphere. According to that ancient historian, the Hyperboreans inhabited an island beyond Gaul, as large as Sicily, in which Apollo was worshipped in a circular temple considerable for its size and riches. Apollo, we know, in the language of the Greeks of that age, can mean no other than the sun, which according to Cæsar was worshipped by the Germans, when they knew of no other deities except fire and the moon. The island can evidently be no other than Britain, which at that time was only known to the Greeks by the vague reports of the Phœnician mariners; and so uncertain and obscure that Herodotus, the most inquisitive and credulous of historians, doubts of its existence. The circular temple of the sun being noticed in such slight and imperfect accounts, proves that it must have been something singular and important; for if it had been an inconsiderable structure, it would not have been mentioned at all; and if there had been many such in the country, the historian would not have employed the singular number.

Stonehenge has certainly been a circular temple, nearly the same as that already described of the Bacchus at Puzznoli, except that in the latter the nice execution and beautiful symmetry of the parts are in every respect the reverse of the rude but majestic simplicity of the former. In the original design they differ but in the form of the area. It may therefore be reasonably supposed that we have still the ruins of the identical temple described by Hecatæus, who, being an Asiatic Greek, might have received his information from Phœnician merchants, who had visited the interior parts of Britain when trading there for tin. Anacrobius mentions a temple of the same kind and form, upon Mount Zilmissus, in Thrace, dedicated to the sun under the title of Bacchus Sebrazius. The large obelisks of stone found in many parts of the north, such as those at Rudstone, and near Boroughbridge, in Yorkshire, belong to the same religion; obelisks being, as Pliny observes, sacred to the sun, whose rays they represented both by their form and name.—Payne Knight’s Worship of Priapus.