Love: A Treatise on the Science of Sex-attraction for the use of Physicians and Students of Medical Jurisprudence

In its right appreciation, love has been exalted by the ancients in song and story and extolled by priest and philosopher. “To the Spirit, to Heaven, to the Sun, to the Moon, to Earth, to Night, to the Day, and to the Father of all that is and will be, to Eros.” Such an invocation was possible only among the ancient civilized nations. They recognized the importance of sexuality in life. They could not see any moral turpitude in actions, regarded by them as the design of nature and as the acme of felicity. They discovered in Love the focus of life. For this reason sexuality among the ancients was an object of pure reverence as the fundamental force of life. The divine adoration of sex was the practice of every tribe and nation of prehistoric antiquity. Even the organs of sex were considered beautiful and pleasurable objects, and were admired accordingly. The phallus, or the male sex-organ, and the yoni, the external female genitals, were symbols of the worship of the ancients and were objects of special religious rites. In the remotest antiquity the worship of the generative principle was the only religion known to men. Sex-worship was not confined to any one race. It was the form of worship common to all primeval nations of the globe. The Hindus, Chaldeans, Hebrews, Egyptians, Greeks, Romans, Gauls, Celts, Teutons, Britons and Scandinavians, all shared in phallicism and yonism. The study of sexual activities and of generation was the basis of ancient Hindu theology. Siva had on his left arm a ring on which was portrayed the sex organs in the act of procreation. The Greek bacchanalia, and the Roman saturnalian mysteries, the free love that prevailed during the festivities in honor of Mylitta, Anaitis, and Aphrodita were still relics of sex-worship. Herodotos’ statement that in Babylon women offered themselves, once at least in their lives, in the Temple of Venus, and that only after so doing were they considered free to marry, and his further report that the women on the vessels sailing for Bubastis to the festivals of Iris uncovered themselves in the presence of the men, show that sex-worship was not unknown among Assyrians and Egyptians. In the historic time sex worship was almost replaced by other forms of religion. Yet there are traces of the cult of the phallus to be found everywhere in ancient profane and sacred history. The temple in which the emperor Elgabal was brought up was represented on a bronze coin of his reign; an ionic peristyle with a peek into the Cella, but instead of the statue of a god was a gigantic phallus. Even the Hebrews worshipped in the phallus the principle of the production of life before the adoption of the cult of Jehovah. Records of phallicism can still be found in the Old Testament. Instead of invoking the Deity in taking a solemn oath, Abraham orders his servant to place his hand upon his phallus, because the phallus was still kept in its former high veneration. The slain enemy was, for this reason, deprived of his phallus. David bought Saul’s daughter with a trophy of two hundred phalli, taken from the slain Philistines. Circumcision also shows the incorporation of phallic ritual with religion.