The Antiquities of Orissa v1.c9.155

v1.c9.155

These and innumerable other instances which could be easily multiplied, were it worth while, suggest the conclusion that the public exhibition of the phallus in the early ages had nothing in it which partook of indecency. “All ideas connected with it were of a reverential kind. When Abraham, as mentioned in *Genesis*, in asking his servant to take a solemn oath, makes him lay his hand ‘under his thigh’, it was that he required as a token of his sincerity his placing his hand on the most revered part of his body; as, at the present day, a man would place his hand on his heart in order to evince his sincerity. Jacob, when dying, makes his son Joseph perform the same act. A similar custom is still retained among the Arabs. An Arab, in taking a solemn oath, will place his hand on his *membrum virile* in attestation of his sincerity.”⁶⁵ Thousands upon thousands of Hindus—men, women, and children—visit the Orissan temples every year; they undertake long and tedious journeys in the most inclement of Indian seasons; undergo the greatest privations, to have a sight of them; and return home with the firmest conviction that they have by the pilgrimage freed themselves of all their sins, without even indulging in the merest shadow of an idea, that there is anything improper or indecorous in all that they have seen. The whole to them is a mystery—a mystery of ancient times hallowed by age and enveloped in everything that is pure and holy,—and none attempts to lift the veil, and pry into secrets, or their causes, which his ancestors for centuries left untouched. You may point out the offensive character of the representations before him, and create a cloud of anxiety and uneasiness in his mind, but it is only a passing cloud that soon melts away before the fervour of his faith.