The Antiquities of Orissa v1.c11.58.3

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.