The Aphroditic injunction embraced, in a sense, the entire cosmos. It involved primarily self-love, love of being, awareness of the significant entity, the ego itself, marked by dignity, by esteem. Then followed the love of the social milieu of which one formed part, and of the impulse to maintain its equilibrium by contributing one’s own efforts, one’s personal function, to the totality of the social frame. Lastly, there was a kind of all-embracing, comprehensive cosmic love, directed to a synthesis of corporeal love that mystically rose to a sublimated spiritual-amatory zone. * * * * * In the mystic cults, it was postulated that the amatory embrace partakes of both a human and a cosmic form of attraction, and becomes, in a sublimated degree, an act of prayer, an erotic supplication. * * * * * The priapic cult was the male counterpart of the Aphroditic cult. Just as the hierodule was the official priestess of the goddess, mentor in the feminine erotic and reverential mysteries, so the priapic cult had for its primary objective the exaltation of the male generative principle. In remote antiquity, and particularly in Egyptian mysticism, the phallus was the representative symbol of Osiris, the ultimate creative potency. Gradually, in the course of the centuries, the phallic symbol acquired a pejorative and degrading and exclusively and narrowly functional nature associated with the mere physical act. And Priapus, equated at one time with Osiris, degenerated into a secondary and minor figure, a mere rustic threat. Yet Priapus retained some semblance of his former repute. He still had his temple and his priestly ministrants. He still received favors and offerings. He still made promises to his devotees and listened to their urgent amatory pleas. He still maintained his sexual rituals, however much they had lost their spiritual and cosmic values. He still presided, in the actuality of performance, over marriage initiations, over nuptial consummations. But with time he disappeared as a member of the mystery cults. And only in vestiges of legend, in old rites transmitted into the Middle Ages, in sculptural presentations, in phallic symbolisms, did his former magnificence and his primary rank retain any fragmentary reminiscence of his vanished glories. In the smaller towns of Italy festive occasions in honor of Priapus were perpetuated until far into the Middle Ages; and Priapus, in some instances, particularly in Brittany, in Belgium, and in France, merged with Christian saints, who appropriated, in their turn, the genesiac properties of their prototype.