Christianity
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)