The Antiquities of Orissa v1.c11.58

Language: English

v1.c11.58.1

**Reply to the seventh objection** : The seventh objection refers to the shape of the divinity. This, however, involves the quesition of phallic worship in ancient times. All the ancient nations of the earth regarded with awe the mystery of generation, and founded on it various myths and forms of religion, some looking upon it as the source of all evil ; others as the fountain of existence and blessing. The finest and most perfect allegory extant of the first class, is the Mosaic account of the fall of man. To the philosophic enquirer, this account means nothing more or less than that sin entered this world through the carnal desires of our first parents ; but it is so complete in all its parts, and so beautifully developed, that even the most fastidious critic fails to detect the smallest trace of anything offensive or indelicate in it. The tree, the apple, the serpent ²¹ are all well-known and generally-acknowledged phallic emblems among the followers of sexual forms of religion ; but they have been so artistically put together in the account in question, that they do not at first sight convey any improper idea. The Zoroastrian Aryans adopted the doctrine, and a counterpart of the Jewish account of the fall is given in the *Banduheṣ*, but in a form that has nothing of the charm of the Mosaic record.

v1.c11.58.2

We are there told that “Meschia and Meschiané, the first man and woman, were seduced by Ahriman under the form of a serpent, and they then committed in thought, word, and action the carnal sin, and thus tainted with original sin all their descendants.” ²² On the other hand the Semites and the Turanians looked upon it with feelings of veneration, and gave great prominence to sexual ideas. The Semites indulged in the idea very largely, and Egypt was its stronghold for a long period. All the Egyptian gods had their feminine counterparts, and the emblems of their faith were mostly of a sexual character. “There is reason to believe,” says Inman, ‘that the Vedic, Zoroastrian, Buddhist, and the Christian, were pure in their conception of the Almighty and of man's duty in this world. Some faiths seem to have been founded, we may say, upon the complete abnegation of all bodily propensities ; and amongst the Buddhist, Essenes, Christians, and others, the absolute celibacy of both sexes was regarded as the highest act and fruit of “a [ **143** ] saving faith.” ²³ This was, however, but temporary, for at one time or another the sexual theory got a footing in almost all ancient forms of religion, and it is difficult to notice a cult of former times in which traces of it may not be noticed. The early Aryans were free from it, and in the *Ṛgveda Saṃhitā* the gods are described mostly without reference to their wives ;

v1.c11.58.3

but this was only for a time, for in the age of the Brāhmanas, the domestic relations and ties of the Devas were fully developed, and the Hellenes carried the remembrance of them to people Olympus with a goodly host of male and female divinities. The cult of Priapus was the issue of this sexual anthropomorphism among the gods. Even that purest form of revealed religion, Christianity, was not able, in the early part of its history, to prevent the Gnostics and others, to import into it a variety of phallic symbols and observances, and there are not persons wanting who look even upon the cross and spires of churches as phallic emblems. Among the Indo-Aryans, the dogma of the oviparous genesis of the universe necessitated a feminine agency, and it opened the way to the cult of the *liṅgam* and *Yoni*. And even as in this cult "the phallus has been regarded as an emblem of the Creator, so the bull, the ram, the serpent, the torch, fire, the thyrsus, the sceptre, the caduceus, the knobbed stick, the crosier, the letter **T**, the cross, tall trees, upright stones, or stumps, spires, towers, minarets, poles, spears, arrows, swords, bows, clubs, and a vast variety of other emblems have been employed as symbolic of the phallus.

v1.c11.58.4

Again, as this organ represented the Creator and the sun, all were typified under such characters, as Bacchus, Dionysius, Hercules, Hermes, Mahādeva, Śiva, Osiris, Jupiter, Molech, Baal, Ashur, and innumerable others".²⁴ Most of the emblems here noticed are associated with Śiva. The bull, the type of fecundity, is his vehicle, the three pronged staff is his arm, and the serpent his ornament. Universally his image is the upright stone, dressed or undressed, and from the Island of Java to the furthest limit of Scandinavia, there is not a country where these uprights do not testify to the once prevalent currency of Śiva's worship in some form or other over a large tract of the earth. But there is nothing in all this necessarily to lead to the conclusion that Śivaism was non-Aryan, borrowed from the aborigines of India, and not self-evolved as the legitimate sequence of the oviparous theory of genesis, or of some other diseased forms of philosophical dogmatism.