Bygone Beliefs: Being a Series of Excursions in the Byways of ThoughtRedgrove, H. Stanley (Herbert Stanley)
Philosophy
Bygone Beliefs: Being a Series of Excursions in the Byways of Thought
Redgrove, H. Stanley (Herbert Stanley)
Alchemy; Magic; Superstition
better still, by both methods.
Of the second class of facts--those common and obvious facts which
the primitive mind accepts at face-value and uses as the basis of
its explanations of such things as seem to it to stand in need of
explanation--one could hardly find a better instance than sex. The
universality of sex, and the intermittent character of its phenomena,
are both responsible for this. Indeed, the attitude of mind I have
referred to is not restricted to primitive man; how many people
to-day, for instance, just accept sex as a fact, pleasant or unpleasant
according to their predilections, never querying, or feeling the need
to query, its why and wherefore? It is by no means surprising, that when
man first felt the need of satisfying himself as to the origin of the
universe, he should have done so by a theory founded on what he knew
of his own generation. Indeed, as I queried on a former occasion, what
other source of explanation was open to him? Of what other form of
origin was he aware? Seeing Nature springing to life at the kiss of the
sun, what more natural than that she should be regarded as the divine
Mother, who bears fruits because impregnated by the Sun-God? It is
not difficult to understand, therefore, why primitive man paid divine
honours to the organs of sex in man and woman, or to such things as
he considered symbolical of them--that is to say, to understand the
extensiveness of those religions which are grouped under the term
"phallicism". Nor, to my mind, is the symbol of sex a wholly inadequate
one under which to conceive of the origin of things. And, as I have
said before, that phallicism usually appears to have degenerated into
immorality of a very pronounced type is to be deplored, but an immoral
view of human relations is by no means a necessary corollary to a sexual
theory of the universe.(1)
(1) "The reverence as well as the worship paid to the phallus, in early
and primitive days, had nothing in it which partook of indecency; all
ideas connected with it were of a reverential and religious kind....
"The indecent ideas attached to the representation of the phallus were,
though it seems a paradox to say so, the results of a more advanced
civilization verging towards its decline, as we have evidence at Rome
and Pompeii....
Public-domain text, read in full here on John Shaqi.
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