The most significant and distinctive feature of nature worship certainly had to do with phallic emblems. This viewed in the light of ancient times simply represented allegorically that mysterious union of the male and female principle which seems necessary to the existence of animate beings. If, in the course of time, it sadly degenerated, we may lament the fact, while, nevertheless, not losing sight of the purity and exalted character of the original idea. Of its extensive prevalence there is ample evidence, since monuments indicating such worship are spread over both continents and have been recognized in Egypt, India, Assyria, Western Europe, Mexico, Peru, Hayti and the Pacific Islands. Without doubt the generative act was originally considered as a solemn sacrament in honor of the Creator. As Knight has insisted, the indecent ideas later attached to it, paradoxical as it may seem, were the result of the more advanced civilization tending toward its decline, as we see in Rome and Pompeii. Voltaire speaking of phallic worship says "Our ideas of propriety lead us to suppose that a ceremony which appears to us so infamous could only be invented by licentiousness, but it is impossible to believe that depravity of manners would ever lead among any people to the establishment of religious ceremonies. It is probable, on the contrary, that this custom was first introduced in times of simplicity, and that the first thought was to honor a deity in the symbol of life which it gives us." The so-called Jewish rite of circumcision was practiced among Egyptians and Phoenicians long before the birth of Abraham. It had a marked religious significance, being a sign of the Covenant, and was a patriarchal observance because it was always performed by the head of the family. Indeed on the authority of the Veda, we learn that this was the case also even among the primitive Aryan people. Later in the centuries, as Patterson has observed, obscene methods became the principal feature of the popular superstition and were, in after times, even extended to and intermingled with gloomy rites and bloody sacrifices. The mysteries of Ceres and Bacchus celebrated at Eleusis were probably the most celebrated of all the Grecian observances. The addition of Bacchus was comparatively a late one, and this name Bacchus was first spelled Iacchos; the first half, _Iao_, being in all probability related to _Jao_ which appears in Jupiter or Jovispater, and to the Hebrew Yahve, or Jehovah. Jao was the Harvest God and consequently the god of the grape, hence his close relation to Bacchus. How completely these Eleusinian mysteries degenerated into Bacchic orgies is of course a matter of written history.