penis’ derives from the term for the vagina, and the title ‘possessor of a vulva’ is the honorific bestowed on all boys who undergo the ordeal. Later rituals also included the regular re-opening of the wound to demonstrate that the initiate could now ‘menstruate’.5
It was, in Margaret Mead’s words, ‘as if men can only become men by taking over the functions that women perform naturally.’6 For Jung, the secret of all male initiation rituals lay in ‘going through the mother again’, embracing the fear, the pain and the blood in order to be born anew not as a child but as a man and a hero. ‘Through the mother’, though, does not imply any sympathetic identification with the female. On the contrary, the key element is the takeover of birth as a male mystery, the first ‘weapon in the men’s struggle to shake off the feminine domination created by the matriarchy’.7 This struggle of men not merely to imitate and outdo, but to usurp women’s power of creating new life took place on every level; Zeus giving birth to Athene from his head is a classic reversal of the primal creation myth that finds a parallel in many other mythologies. It was nothing less than a revolution: of the weak against the strong, of the oppressed against their oppression, of value structures and habits of thought.
And human thought was itself progressing along lines that eased the way towards the domination of males. As human beings crossed the mental threshold between interpreting events in symbolic and magical terms, and the dawning realization of cause and effect, man’s part in the making of babies became clear. Now women’s rhythms were seen to be human, not divine, and the knowledge that man determined pregnancy completed the revolution that his resentment and resistance had already set in train. Historian Jean Markdale sums it up:
When man began to assert that he was essential to fertilization, the old mental attitudes suddenly collapsed. This was a very important revolution in man’s history, and it is astonishing that it is not rated equally with the wheel, agriculture, and the use of metals . . . As the male had been cheated for centuries . . . equality was not enough. He now understood the full implications of his power, and was going to dominate . . .8
And what better weapon of dominance was there to hand but the phallus? As man began to carve out some meaning for himself to set against woman’s eternal, innate potency, what would serve his turn better than man’s best friend, his penis. In its fragile human form, prey to unbidden arousal, stubborn refusal and unpredictable deflation, it could not challenge women’s unfailing power of birth. But elevated above reality into symbol, transformed into ‘phallus’ and enshrined in materials known to be proof against detumescence like metal and stone, it would do very well.
At a stroke, then, the power was there at man’s bidding. Now he was transformed from an unregarded afterthought of creation whose manhood held no magic for any except himself, to the whole secret and origin of the Great Mother’s life force. The power was not hers, but his. His was the sacred organ of generation; and the phallus, not the uterus, was the source of all that lived. Power to the phallus became the imperative (to, from, by, in and of the phallus); and so a new religion was born.
This is not to suggest that the penis and its symbolic equivalent the phallus were unknown to these early societies before the discovery of biological paternity began to sweep the world around the beginnings of the Iron Age, some 3500 years ago. Phallic emblems made their appearance in the earliest recorded living sites, and from the time of the ‘Neolithic Revolution’ (around 9000–8000 B.C. in the Near East), they occur in impressive size and profusion. At Grimes Grave in Norfolk, England, for example, an altar discovered in the bowels of the abandoned Neolithic flint mine workings bore a cup, seven deer anders, and a mighty phallus carved in chalk, all set out as offerings to the figure of the Great Goddess reared up before it. For whatever their proportions (and some of the lovingly wrought models in clay or stone display a truly impressive capacity for wishful thinking), these emblems were only fashioned as part of the worship of the Goddess, and were not sacred in themselves.
Paradoxically then, it was the Great Goddess herself who first established the cult of the phallus. In the myth of Isis, whose worship spread from the Near East throughout Asia and into Europe, the Goddess ordered a wooden lingam of Osiris to be set up in her temple at Thebes. Subsequently the worship of the Goddess involved making offerings to her of phallic emblems or tokens; the women of Egypt carried images of Osiris in their sacred processions, each one equipped with a movable phallus ‘of disproportionate magnitude’, according to one disgruntled observer, while a similar model in the Goddess-worship of Greek women had a phallus whose movements the celebrants could control with strings. In this state of ecstatic animation, the god was conveyed to the temple, where the most respected matrons of the town waited to crown the phallus with garlands and kisses in honour of the Great Goddess, as a sign that she accepted the tribute of phallic service.9
But once promoted from jobbing extra to leading man in the primal drama, the penis proved to be hungry for the smell of the greasepaint, the roar of the crowd. In Greece, phalluses sprang up everywhere, like dragon’s teeth; guardian Herms (phallus-pillars) flourished their potency on every street corner, while by the third century B.C., Delos boasted an avenue of mammoth penises, supported on bulging testicles, shooting skyward like heavy cannon. Across the Adriatic in Italy, the god Phalles was familiar to every family as one of its regular household deities, and many cities like Pompeii were entirely given over to the worship of the phallus-god, Priapus – a fact that disapproving later sages were quick to connect with its destruction by Vesuvius in A.D. 79. In Dorset, England, the ancient Britons poured the pride of their creation into the huge hill-figure of the Cerne Abbas Giant – forty feet tall, he glares out to history brandishing a chest-high erection and a massive phallic club to ram home the message of his mightiest member.
No country in the world, however, embraced phallus worship with more enthusiasm than India. There, as its mythologizers insisted, was to be found ‘the biggest penis in the world’, the ‘celestial rod’ of the god Shiva, which grew until it shafted through all the lower worlds and towered up to dwarf the heavens. This so overawed two other principal gods of the Hindu pantheon, Brahma and Vishnu, that they fell down and worshipped it, and ordered all men and women to do likewise. How well this commandment was obeyed for many thousands of years may be gauged from bewildered Western accounts of a long-standing custom. Traders, missionaries and colonial invaders recorded that every day a priest of Shiva would emerge naked from the temple and proceed through the streets, ringing a little bell which was the signal for all the women to come out and kiss the holy genitals of the representative of the god.10 To the average Victorian Englishman, it must have seemed like phallus in wonderland.
With its rise to sacred status, the phallus increased in significance, as well as in size and sanctity. From this epoch onwards, male superiority becomes vested in and expressed through this one organ, as an ever-present reminder of masculine power. By extension, and the extension was limitless, the phallus then becomes the source not only of power, but of all cultural order and meaning. For men, clasping and invoking the penis validated all greetings and promises; among the Romans the testes underwrote every testament, while an Arab would declare ‘O Father of Virile Organs, bear witness to my oath,’ and as a mark of respect suffer any sheikh or patriarch to examine his genitals on meeting.11
Over women the power of the sacred phallus began to make itself felt in a number of ways. In the temples of Shiva, a slave girl specially chosen for her ‘lotus-beauty’ was consecrated to ‘the divine penis’ and tattooed on her breasts and shaven groin with the emblem of the god. Worldwide, both historical records and archaeological evidence confirm women’s practices of imprecating, touching, kissing or even mounting sacred phalluses of wood or stone as a cure for infertility from the ‘phallus lord’, who may well have been also the original recipient of their virginity. In the remote villages of southern France, to the deep embarrassment of the Catholic church, the Provençal ‘Saint’ Foutin was worshipped in all the pride of his priapic magnificence as late as the seventeenth century. This was under constant threat from the women’s habit of
