Sacred Texts  Sacred Sexuality 

The Masculine Cross and Ancient Sex Worship by Sha Rocco (pseudonym of Hargrave Jennings) [1874]

This short book on ancient 'Phallic worship', as the Victorians called it, contains much which is covered in the other entries in this literature. Jennings has a compelling thesis about the role of sexuality in ancient religions and their modern successors which bears careful examination. There is also a lot of speculation, incorrect information, conclusion-leaping and questionable etymology.

Jennings places an inordinate amount of signficance on anything that is vaguely phallic looking or resembles a vagina. This includes pawn shop signage, tortise heads, arched doors, lozange-shaped design elements, and so on. While some of this is revealing and possibly valid, he finishes off by pegging a fairly standard native Californian mortar and pestle as a set of ritual phallic symbols. There are examples ad nauseum of these items in the anthropologicial and archeological literature of California, and none of them have ever been associated with sex-worship to my knowledge. Sometimes a pestle is just a pestle....

Hargrave Jennings also wrote The Rosicrucians, their Rites and Mysteries, also available online at sacred-texts, where he goes into much more detail on the subject of phallic worship.

Introduction © 2003 J. B. Hare