In speaking of the “mysteries” of the goddess “Cotitta,” a popular Venus of the isle of Chios, Dulaure says: “Les initiés, qui se livraient à tous les excès de la débauche, y employaient le Phallus d’une manière particulière; ils étaient de verre et servaient de vases à boire.” He quotes Juvenal, satire 2, verse 95, as saying of the extreme license of these mysteries: “vitreo bibit ille Priapo.”—(“Des Divinités Génératrices.”)
Does not the preceding paragraph, in the lines from the Roman satirist, conceal under a very gauzy veil, a dirty proceeding akin to the urine dance of the Zuñis?
Frommann quotes the above lines from Juvenal, without attempting to enter upon an explanation of them. (See “Tract. de Fascinatione,” p. 333.) Rev. Lewis Evans, a Fellow of Wadham’s College, Oxford, translates them as follows in his edition of “Juvenal:”—
“Another drains a Priapus-shaped glass.”
But Gifford renders it:—
“Swill from huge glasses of immodest mould.”
Montfaucon says that in the Festivals of Priapus “celebrated by the women ... the priestess sprinkles Priapus with water.”—(“l’Antiquité expliquée,” lib. i. part 2, c. xxviii.; in the first volume is a representation of a phallic vase with human ears attached.)
“Verser quelques gouttes sur la tête dans la bouche des agonisants.”—(Dulaure, “Des. Div. Generat.,” Paris, 1825, pp. 105, 106, 111.)
“In a manuscript of the church of Beauvais about the year 500, it is said that the chanter and canons shall stand before the gates of the church, which were shut, holding each of them urns full of wine with glass cups, of whom one canon shall begin the Kalends of January.”—(Fosbroke, “British Monachism,” p. 81.)