Lunar and Sex Worship

Christianity

admin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 11:01:45 +0000

I have already shown that Christianity was preeminently a religion of male deities, and that in this, it differed from the old phallic faiths which either recognized a female as the third person in the trinity of Divine Powers or in some other way paid homage to the feminine principle. Moreover, Christianity was, as I have also stated, the culmination of centuries of reaction against the licentiousness into which sex worship had degenerated. For this reason, being preeminently a male religion, the promoters evidently thought it advisable to assert the power of the new god (the Son of the Father) over the feminine principle. If a symbol venerated as typifying the feminine principle could be shown to be subject to the power of the new god, his triumph might be assured with the common people. And so we find in the New Testament...the really remarkable and apparently unnecessary miracle of the cursing of the fig tree by Jesus. Looked at as a bold statement of fact, it is difficult to see in the latter story—reverently as we may strive to view it—anything but a display of ill-temper, totally incompatible with the character of a good man, let alone a godlike one. But viewed as the type of an old worship whose symbol is behooved the new god to show the weakness of, we can readily see how necessary was the cursing of the fig tree and its eventual withering away before him. Perhaps, too, in his cursing the tree for its lack of fruit, we may see a symbolic reproof by the new religion aimed at the woman who exists for sexual pleasure only, and not for propagative purposes.

(pp. 256-257)

The Dove

admin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 10:55:44 +0000

A favorite symbol and accompaniment of the yoni is the dove. "From the affectionate intercourse between the sexes, it was sacred to Venus, and was her constant attendant." Inman however, seems to think that it is because the dove’s "note, coa or coo has, in the Semitic, some resemblance to an invitation to amorous gratification."

Still a third reason may be found in the fact that the parent birds among doves, as well as the rest of the pigeon family, nourish the young with the curd-like contents of the crop, secreted by special glands like the milk in mammalia; and that "a young dove, like a young mammal, will die if deprived of its parents in the first week of its life." Since this "pigeon’s milk" is secreted by both the father and the mother dove, it must have rendered this bird markedly a type of motherhood, and, therefore, of the yoni. We need, therefore, not be surprised at learning that the Hebrews called a dove yonah, and that the very name yoni is applied to this bird in Sanskrit. Nor need we wonder that the Hebrew woman, after bringing a child into the world—an act deemed symbolically so "unclean" as to require her religious purification and abstaining from all hallowed things, including the sanctuary, for thirty-three days—should be commanded by Jehovah to bring either "a young pigeon or a turtle-dove for a sin offering unto the door of the tabernacle of the congregation"; since this was but a symbolic homage exacted by the masculine Hebrew deity from a type of the more ancient deity of the female principle; and it was necessary to show that the young mother was too impure a creature to be admitted, even as a worshipper, into Jehovah’s sanctuary without a purification extending over a lunar-menstrual month of 28 days plus five days = 33 days, to make sure of her complete sexual purification from the blood-source both of present and of future motherhood.

The Hebrew word yonah bears such a marked resemblance to the name John or Ion (pronounced Yon) that the dove at the baptism of Jesus in the Jordan must have seemed, to the Oriental mind, only a natural accompaniment of John the Baptizer. The same word Yonah appears in the name of the prophet Jonah or Ionah, whose name the Oxford Bible Vocabulary translates as dove....

Since the dove was emphatically a symbol of Venus and other amorous goddesses, it naturally came to occupy a place in the phallic triad on the left-hand side of the central pillar—i.e., the left-hand testicle or "egg" from which, it was said, girls were produced. And when Christianity began to preach its doctrine of the Trinity in Unity, it was small wonder if the dove of Venus fell heir to the same place in the Christian as in the old pagan triad—on the left hand of the Father God (the Son, of course, continuing also to hold his old position on the right, since the Church teaches concerning him that he "sitteth on the right hand of God the Father Almighty"). Here the dove received the name of the Holy Ghost, or Holy Breath, or Holy Wind or Holy Spirit—in some aspects an equivalent of the Hindu Shakti, a term applied long centuries before to the female inspirer of passion in the male. Christianity, however, made the Holy Spirit the male inspirer of the Virgin Mary, when she conceived Jesus. Nevertheless, it was sometimes masculine, and sometimes feminine. Origen expressly makes the Holy Ghost feminine, saying, "the soul is maiden to her mistress, the Holy Ghost." .... The mother of Confucius, 551 B.C., when walking in a solitary place, was impregnated by the vivifying influence of the heavens. Great Zeus himself, it is said, visited Pythia under the form of a dove. That these ideas all meet in the traditions concerning the conception of Jesus is shown by the fact that the Arabic legends relate that Mary was conceived by the breath of Gabriel, the angel of annunciation.

(pp. 266-270)

The Yoni

admin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 10:41:16 +0000

While the symbols of the male have claimed a worldwide homage, the symbols of the female have by no means been neglected, either by ancient Phallicism or by Christianity. The usual and natural symbol of femininity is a doorway or archway, suggestive of the vulva or external genitals. This is often conventionalized into an oval, a circle, a crescent, a vesica piscis or fish’s bladder (a term applied by architects to an oval church window which narrows at top and bottom), a diamond-shaped lozenge or an inverted triangle. Concerning this last symbol, which is sometimes referred to as the Greek letter Delta, Inman says:

The selection of name and symbol was judicious, for the words Daleth (Hebrew) and Delta (Greek) signify the door of a house, and the outlet of a river, while the figure reversed, with the heavy side above, modestly represents the fringe with which the human delta is overshadowed.

This sacred doorway of life, through which every human soul must enter this world, has been deemed worthy by the Roman Catholic Church to frame around the Blessed Virgin and Holy Child, either as a vesica piscis or in some other conventionalized form, unmistakably yonic.

(p. 241)

The Phallic Triad

admin — Fri, 20 Aug 2010 10:20:11 +0000

The phallic symbolism of parenthood often takes the form of what is known as “the phallic triad.” In this, the linga is flanked or supported by two other symbols to represent the testicles. The Tau-Cross is a conventional representation of this; and I have already shown how it is possible this Tau-Cross may have evolved from the looped or ankh-cross. This symbolism appears conspicuously on ancient coins, medals, etc., and may be recognized by a tall figure in the center, supported by two smaller figures, one at either side, such as, for instance, a man standing erect between two snakes, or a palm (an Oriental euphemism for the phallus) entwined with a serpent and flanked by two rocks. It was anciently believed, and still is believed by some people, that the right testicle or “egg” of the male produces boys, and that the left egg produces girls. This symbolism occurs in many Christian church decorations.... The designs on stained glass windows in churches sometimes have conventionalized phallic crosses, with each limb of the cross flanked at the base by two balls which signify the testicles or “eggs”; and the pinnacles on the majority of Christian churches represent either the phallus erected in the floral cup of femininity, or else the phallic triad — “The Trinity in Unity.” And it is to this ancient veneration for the phallic triad that the sacredness of the number three seems to owe its origin.

(p. 231)

Sexual Symbolism of the Cross

admin — Thu, 05 Aug 2010 08:04:14 +0000

Around this symbol and the cult which it symbolized gathered the first civilization of the human race, the first feeble aspirations of savage humanity toward beauty, grace and unselfishness. For the cross, in whatsoever land it be found—and it or some one of its correlated emblems is reverenced in every civilized nation or savage tribe yet met with upon the earth—is an old, old symbol of the relation resulting from that mysterious attraction between man and woman which is called sexual love. To this mighty passion—stronger than even hunger or the fear of death—the animal world owes the acquisition, through natural selection, of grace in form or beauty in coloring, of perfumes, as in the muskdeer, of splendid crests and gorgeous plumage, as in the male birds of many species. The magnificent antlers of the stag, the exquisite music of the canary, are alike the result of sexual selection. In man, the higher animal, this force has acted on a more extended scale still. The graceful contour of women, their soft voices and coquetries, are but a few of those secondary differences of sex intensified by masculine selection through long centuries. But it is on the mind and heart that sexual attraction has always exerted its greatest power, leading each sex to practice every grace it possessed in order to attract the other. Primitive man perforce abated his rude savagery to become tender and considerate toward the woman he desired to possess; and primitive woman, endowed by Nature with an Amazonian strength which in a state of savagery rendered her the physical equal of the man, laid aside her virgin fierceness to meet him more than halfway in unselfish tenderness, and, for love of him, to become less his equal and more his slave as the ages rolled on. Whatever errors or immoralities may have gradually crept into the relationship of the sexes, Nature has more than counterbalanced them by making the law of sexual attraction the chief educator of the race in acquiring with every generation increased sensibilities, physical, intellectual, moral, aesthetic, and in many cases spiritual.

For this reason, we need not wonder that the euphemistic symbol of sexual union, the Cross, should command universal reverence. Its meaning has long since been forgotten, save by a few of the educated; nevertheless, its symbolism still survives in a thousand ways in the folklore of the people, and in the religions of learned priests everywhere, whatsoever those religions be; and though ignorantly, it (or some one of its correlated emblems) is none the less loyally honored, and rightly so, as a sacred symbol throughout the world.

(pp. 109-110)