With primitive people these deeper feelings appear to arise unconsciously rather than consciously. Moreover, probably as a result of collective thought and feeling, motives and beliefs are developed and elaborated in a way quite beyond the mental capacity of any one individual of the community. Beliefs are formulated which have a grandeur of conception and a beauty of expression well worthy of admiration. The beauty and native vigor of some of the earlier myths are examples of this. They live in the tribe as traditions. No one person seems to have written them; in fact, they are added to, changed and improved until they represent the highest expression of national feelings. Gilbert Murray has indicated this in the Rise of the Greek Epic. He emphasizes that there is found an expression of racial feelings, built up from many sources. Such Sagas are not the property of any one individual. The feelings they express are associated with the unconscious of the race, if such a term is permissible. Gilbert Murray,[3] in interpreting this element in primitive literature states: “We have also, I suspect, a strange unanalyzed vibration below the surface, an undercurrent of desires and fears, and passions, long slumbering yet eternally familiar, which have for thousands of years lain near the root of our most intimate emotions and been wrought into the fabric of our most magical dreams. How far in the past ages this stream may reach back I dare not even surmise; but it sometimes seems as if the power of stirring it or moving with it were one of the last secrets of genius.”
The importance of the collective or group feeling has been emphasized as thereby one sees how a fundamental racial motive becomes an integral part of the mental life of each and every member of the group. In primitive life every individual contributes something to this motive and in turn receives something from it. It enters into the developing mind and becomes inseparably associated with it. In studying the evolution of these motives one is studying the evolution of the human mind.
The motive which we have undertaken to explain has to do with one of the most important of instincts, i. e., that of reproduction. The feelings associated with this instinct were raised to the dignity of religion, and in this we have the worship of sex. This worship is to be regarded as an unconscious racial expression, the result of group or collective feeling, the dynamic significance of which, from a biological standpoint, will appear later.
Before proceeding, it is desirable to make reference to some of our sources of information. There are plenty of books on the history of Egypt, the antiquities of India or on the interpretation of Oriental customs, which make scarcely any reference to the deification of sex. We have always been told, for example, that Bacchus was the god of the harvest and that the Greek Pan was the god of nature. We have not been told that these same gods were representations of the male generative attribute, and that they were worshipped as such; yet, anyone who has access to the statuettes or engravings of these various deities of antiquity, whether they be of Egypt, of India or of China, cannot fail to see that they were intended to represent generative attributes. On account of the incompleteness of many books which describe primitive races, a number of references are given throughout these pages, and some bibliographical references are added.
As will be presently indicated, we have evidence from a number of sources to show sex was at one time frankly and openly worshipped by the primitive races of mankind. This worship has been shown to be so general and so wide-spread, that it is to be regarded as part of the general evolution of the human mind; it seems to be indigenous with the race, rather than an isolated or exceptional circumstance.
The American Cyclopedia, under Phallic Worship, reads as follows: “In early ages the sexual emblems were adored as most sacred objects, and in the several polytheistic systems the act or principle of which the phallus was the type was represented by a deity to whom it was consecrated: in Egypt by Khem, in India by Siva, in Assyria by Vul, in primitive Greece by Pan, and later by Priapus, in Italy by Mutinus or Priapus, among the Teutonic and Scandinavian nations by Fricco, and in Spain by Hortanes. Phallic monuments and sculptured emblems are found in all parts of the world.”
Rawlinson, in his history of Ancient Egypt, gives us the following description of Khem: “A full Egyptian idea of Khem can scarcely be presented to the modern reader, on account of the grossness of the forms under which it was exhibited. Some modern Egyptologists endeavor to excuse or palliate this grossness; but it seems scarcely possible that it should not have been accompanied by indelicacy of thought or that it should have failed to exercise a corrupting influence on life and morals. Khem, no doubt, represented to the initiated merely the generative power in nature, or that strange law by which living organisms, animal and vegetable, are enabled to reproduce their like. But who shall say in what exact light he presented himself to the vulgar, who had continually before their eyes the indecent figures under which the painters and sculptors portrayed him? As impure ideas and revolting practices clustered around the worship of Pan in Greece and later Rome, so it is more than probable that in the worship of Khem in Egypt were connected similar excesses. Besides his priapic or ‘Ithyphallic’ form, Khem’s character was marked by the assignment to him of the goat as his symbol, and by his ordinary title Ka-mutf, ‘The Bull of His Mother,’ i. e., of nature.”
This paragraph clearly indicates that the sexual organs were worshipped under the form of Khem by the Egyptians. The writer, however, has fallen into a very common error in giving us to understand that this was a degraded form of worship; from numerous other sources it is readily shown that such is not the case.
The following lines, from Ancient Sex Worship, substantiate the above remarks, and at the same time, they show the incompleteness of the writings of many antiquarians. In this book we read: “Phallic emblems abounded at Heliopolis and Syria and many other places, even into modern times. The following unfolds marvelous proof to our point. A brother physician, writing to Dr. Inman, says: ‘I was in Egypt last winter (1865-66), and there certainly are numerous figures of gods and kings on the walls of the temple at Thebes, depicted with the male genital erect. The great temple at Karnac is, in particular, full of such figures and the temple of Danclesa, likewise, although that is of much later date, and built merely in imitation of old Egyptian art.’” The writer further states that this shows how completely English Egyptologists have suppressed a portion of the facts in the histories which they have given to the world. With all our descriptions of the wonderful temple of Karnac, it is remarkable that all mention of its association with sex worship should be omitted by many writers.