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

THE CROSS AND ROSARY

The key which is still worn with the Priapic hand, as an amulet, by the women of Italy appears to have been an emblem of the equivocal use of the name, as the language of that country implies. Of the same kind, too, appears to have been the cross in the form of the letter tau, attached to a circle, which many of the figures of Egyptian deities, both male and female, carry in their left hand; and by the Syrians, Phœnicians and other inhabitants of Asia, representing the planet Venus, worshipped by them as the emblem or image of that goddess. The cross in this form is sometimes observable on coins, and several of them were found in a temple of Serapis, demolished at the general destruction of those edifices by the Emperor Theodosius, and were said by the Christian antiquaries of that time to signify the future life. In solemn sacrifices, all the Lapland idols were marked with it from the blood of the victims; and it occurs on many Runic ornaments found in Sweden and Denmark, which are of an age long anterior to the approach of Christianity to those countries, and probably to its appearance in the world. On some of the early coins of the Phœnicians, we find it attached to a chaplet of beads placed in a circle, so as to form a complete rosary, such as the Lamas of Thibet and China, the Hindus, and the Roman Catholics now tell over while they pray.