‘a prodigious concourse of people’ came carrying wax penises, ‘some even of the length of a palm’, purchased from street sellers. In the church vestibule, those who carried them – mostly, Sir William noted, women – kissed their votive offering before handing it, together with a piece of money, to a priest sitting at a little table.
‘Santo Cosmo benedetto, così
lo voglio,’
many murmured as they did so: Blessed Saint Cosmo, let it be like this – a prayer with several possible interpretations. At the church altar men and women uncovered any infirmity of their body, ‘not even excepting that which is represented by the ex-voti’, to be anointed by another priest with the ‘oil of Saint Cosmo’. The oil of Saint Cosmo was held in high repute, especially ‘when the loins and parts adjacent are anointed with it’. On Cosmo’s feast day the church got through 1,400 flasks of the stuff.
A clash of symbols
Are the spires, minarets and domes that rise above places of worship phallic symbols? Given that when the earliest of them were being erected religion hadn’t shaken free of phallic worship, they almost certainly were, according to most authorities. Like the cross and the hot cross bun, and an almost endless list of religious artefacts claimed to have phallic origins (in some cases admittedly disputed), penile spires and minarets and testicular domes have long since lost their meaning. But to deny that that meaning was once very real would be, as the respected J.B. Hannay wrote (
Sex Symbolism in Religion
) in 1922, rather like discussing
Hamlet
without the prince.
Phallic symbolism is as old as phallic worship and almost everything with a resemblance to male genitalia in the natural or animal kingdom has been accorded phallic significance at some period in history – there’s a lot of crossover with the metaphorical. The literature of every culture runs riot with phallic symbolism. In Greek mythology, Zeus’ thunderbolt, Poseidon’s trident and the caduceus of Hermes, not to mention the ‘massy clubs’ carried by the likes of Hercules and Theseus, the ancient world’s superheroes, were all symbols of the potency and power of the penis, just like Norse hammers, Tibetan
dorjes
, Chaldean swords, Chinese dragons, the witch doctor’s or wizard’s wand and the monarch’s sceptre (this reinforced by the ‘witnessing’ orb, topped by a cross for further reinforcement).
Many phallic symbols have been only of their time. The setting sun was in prehistory seen as the engorged tip of the penis plunging into the female earth and the rain that moistened and fertilised the female earth a kind of heavenly semen – something that appears in the oldest layers of many literatures. When moonbeams were considered phallic, women would not sleep in their light in case they were made pregnant by them. Before household door locks became commonplace, well-to-do ladies carried a ‘chatelaine’ key chained to their girdle – symbol of the authority of the household penis-possessor by proxy – to lift door latches, when a finger would have done the job as easily.
Time has neutered the majority of phallic symbols including the village maypole. A part of pagan fertility worship in prehistory and still a copulatory symbol in the Middle Ages, the maypole was burnt by evangelical Protestants at the Reformation, banned under Cromwell (‘a heathenish vanity, generally abused to superstition and wickedness’), and while restored at the Restoration, lost any remaining sexual significance so that by the nineteenth century, which added the ribbons for dancing couples to intertwine, it was erroneously taken to be an innocent reminder of a Merrie England that never was.
By the nineteenth century phallic symbolism had largely dropped out of general consciousness. But psychoanalysis brought it back in a big way – by locating it as hardwired in the subconscious. In his
Interpretation of Dreams
Freud listed many phallic
‘Santo Cosmo benedetto, così
lo voglio,’
many murmured as they did so: Blessed Saint Cosmo, let it be like this – a prayer with several possible interpretations. At the church altar men and women uncovered any infirmity of their body, ‘not even excepting that which is represented by the ex-voti’, to be anointed by another priest with the ‘oil of Saint Cosmo’. The oil of Saint Cosmo was held in high repute, especially ‘when the loins and parts adjacent are anointed with it’. On Cosmo’s feast day the church got through 1,400 flasks of the stuff.
A clash of symbols
Are the spires, minarets and domes that rise above places of worship phallic symbols? Given that when the earliest of them were being erected religion hadn’t shaken free of phallic worship, they almost certainly were, according to most authorities. Like the cross and the hot cross bun, and an almost endless list of religious artefacts claimed to have phallic origins (in some cases admittedly disputed), penile spires and minarets and testicular domes have long since lost their meaning. But to deny that that meaning was once very real would be, as the respected J.B. Hannay wrote (
Sex Symbolism in Religion
) in 1922, rather like discussing
Hamlet
without the prince.
Phallic symbolism is as old as phallic worship and almost everything with a resemblance to male genitalia in the natural or animal kingdom has been accorded phallic significance at some period in history – there’s a lot of crossover with the metaphorical. The literature of every culture runs riot with phallic symbolism. In Greek mythology, Zeus’ thunderbolt, Poseidon’s trident and the caduceus of Hermes, not to mention the ‘massy clubs’ carried by the likes of Hercules and Theseus, the ancient world’s superheroes, were all symbols of the potency and power of the penis, just like Norse hammers, Tibetan
dorjes
, Chaldean swords, Chinese dragons, the witch doctor’s or wizard’s wand and the monarch’s sceptre (this reinforced by the ‘witnessing’ orb, topped by a cross for further reinforcement).
Many phallic symbols have been only of their time. The setting sun was in prehistory seen as the engorged tip of the penis plunging into the female earth and the rain that moistened and fertilised the female earth a kind of heavenly semen – something that appears in the oldest layers of many literatures. When moonbeams were considered phallic, women would not sleep in their light in case they were made pregnant by them. Before household door locks became commonplace, well-to-do ladies carried a ‘chatelaine’ key chained to their girdle – symbol of the authority of the household penis-possessor by proxy – to lift door latches, when a finger would have done the job as easily.
Time has neutered the majority of phallic symbols including the village maypole. A part of pagan fertility worship in prehistory and still a copulatory symbol in the Middle Ages, the maypole was burnt by evangelical Protestants at the Reformation, banned under Cromwell (‘a heathenish vanity, generally abused to superstition and wickedness’), and while restored at the Restoration, lost any remaining sexual significance so that by the nineteenth century, which added the ribbons for dancing couples to intertwine, it was erroneously taken to be an innocent reminder of a Merrie England that never was.
By the nineteenth century phallic symbolism had largely dropped out of general consciousness. But psychoanalysis brought it back in a big way – by locating it as hardwired in the subconscious. In his
Interpretation of Dreams
Freud listed many phallic
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