Promisit fore: mentulam movit
Pro nutu deus et rogata fecit.
Paying a Vow.
(Why, you ask, is portrayed on the tablet the member whereby we are begotten? When, as it befell, my penis was damaged, and like a wretched coward I dreaded the Surgeon’s hand, I was afraid to entrust myself and the cure of my organ to the great official gods, that were too high for me, such I mean as Phoebus and Phoebus’ son. “To the member, I said, do thou, Priapus, give aid,—the member that thou art fashioned in the likeness of[88]. Then when it has been healed without the knife, a painted image of the part thou has relieved shall be dedicated to thee,—a match, a perfect match in form and in hue.” Thus he made his vow; the god nodded his penis in token of assent, and answered his prayers.)
This poem, whoever its author may have been[89], testifies most explicitly that the Poet’s genital organs were seriously affected (by Phimosis and Ulcers?), that he from fear (timerem) of the Surgeon’s knife, from shame (verebar) before the regular physician in view of the part affected and of the way in which he had got the disease, had recourse to prayer and vow before the image of Priapus, and thereupon happily recovered without medical assistance!
The veneration of Priapus was pretty well universal in Italy, as the Roman poets teach us, and equally so the Phallic worship, of which the frequent representations of the Phallus that we find at Pompeii bear witness; in fact the latter, as Knight shows, maintained itself in connection with the veneration of Saints Cosmus and Damian down to the last Century at Isernia. The just quoted Poem from the Priapeia might perhaps serve to afford us an indication as to how the Phallus ritual has come to be connected with these Christian Saints; for probably patients attacked by the Venereal disease prayed to them, just as the Romans did to Priapus. Possibly examples of such cures by the saints in question are found in the “Acta Sanctorum Bollandi”. (Bollandist Lives of the Saints),—under Sept. 27.; but we are not able to consult the book. These Saints however were not the only ones that were venerated in the Middle Ages in the same way as the Priapus of the Ancients. In France unfruitful wives used to pray to St. Guerlichon, in Normandy to St. Giles, in Anjou to St. René, in connection with whom they practised rites which Stephanus declares himself ashamed to specify[90].
Plague of Baal-Peor.
§ 8.
Although the period at which the worship of Priapus was introduced among the different Peoples cannot be always definitely fixed, and although Classical Mythology invariably counts him as belonging to the newer[91] gods, yet he appears in quite early times to have played a not unimportant part in Syria[92],—if that is to say the conclusion[93], pretty generally believed on other grounds, is well founded, that the god Baal Peor was a sort of Priapus, in whose temple, situated on Mount Peor[94], young Maidens were offered up. The Rabbis[95] derive the name from פְּעוֹר aperire sc. hymenem virgineum, (to open sc. the hymen of a virgin), as if it had sprung from the Phallus ritual, as still found in Italy. At Goa indeed a man’s member made of iron or ivory is fastened in the Pagoda, which in the case of every bride is pushed by the parents and relations into her vagina, until it brings away with it visibly the bloody traces of the rupture of the hymen[96]; a proceeding that is connected, as shown in § 4., with the belief in the malignity of the menstrual blood, and in that of blood coming from the ruptured hymen. On the Coromandel Coast likewise a wooden Priapus is to the present day most ardently venerated by the inhabitants[97].
Here again we encounter a legend, which is not without importance for the history of the affections consequent upon the misuse of the genital organs, to wit the story of the Plague that broke out amongst the Jews at Shittim in consequence of their having taken part in the worship of Baal-Peor. Sickler[98] was the first who, as a champion of the antiquity of the Venereal disease, made this the subject of a more precise examination. However, in order to obtain as clear an insight into the matter as possible, it will be needful to quote at length the passages of the Old Testament connected with the subject, according to the English Revised Version[99]: