Free God's Doodle by Tom Hickman Page A

simply were no words for female plumbing. Not surprisingly it did strike Galen that it was jolly useful that half the human race were botched males, allowing, as it did, childbirth, not to mention the pleasure of sexual intercourse. The Creator, he thought, would not ‘purposely [have done it] unless there was to be some great advantage in such a mutilation’.
    Was woman’s inferiority ever thus? According to some interpretations of prehistory, the situation was very different: woman ruled over man, because she was deemed enchanted: mysteriously, monthly, she bled and yet healed herself; she produced new life from her own body. Be that as it may, once man realised he was necessary for conception to take place, non-penis-possessors became relegated. Until relatively recently, the consensual view was that this happened only when herdsmen and farmers began to control animal sexuality around ten thousand years ago and put two and two together about their own. Nowadays most anthropologists and evolutionary psychologists doubt the timeline, believing it insulting to our ancestors who, ten thousand years ago, had had anatomically modern brains for some one hundred and fifty thousand years.
    All is conjecture. What is indisputable is that, if once the penis was only a jobbing extra in the story of life, by the time writing appeared around five thousand years ago, its name was already above the title of the film. ‘Throughout all of history,’ as Isadora Wing percipiently remarks, ‘books were written with sperm, not menstrual blood.’
    How true that is, is evidenced in mythology, those supernaturalised chronicles of the dawn of time and the birth of humankind. The Egyptian god Amun, for example, brought the world into being by swallowing his own semen and then spitting it out. The god Atum masturbated to create the Nile, while in Mesopotamia the god Enki, ‘lifted his penis, ejaculated, and filled the Tigris’, and had the stamina to move on to create the Euphrates similarly (he dug irrigation ditches with his penis, too). Man was quick to create his gods in his own image: with a penis – three, in some manifestations of Osiris, another of the multiplicity of Egyptian penis deities. The Phoenicians even named their chief god Asshur, meaning penis, ‘the happy one’. And man was already sizeist. The celestial rod of the Indian god Shiva shafted through the lower world and towered up to dwarf the heavens, so impressing the other gods that they fell down in worship.
    There were, of course, goddesses as well as gods in the ancient world, and female generative power had its worshippers, but none was dominant in any major culture. The penis erect (ithyphallic, or straight up) ruled the roost and monuments fashioned in its likeness, usually in stone (the Japanese also favoured iron) sprang up like dragon’s teeth across the globe. In Greece by the third century BC , the island of Delos boasted an avenue of massive erections, mounted on prodigious testicles, aimed skywards like cannon. Herms, the most famous and sophisticated phallic monuments – smooth stone square pillars that sported the bearded head of Hermes, the messenger of the gods, and, halfway down, an erect ‘penis stick’ – were placed at every crossroads to offer protection to the traveller, frequently anointed with wine and oil and constantly touched for luck. Herms stood at roadsides (as did the Japanese counterparts, the
dosijinas
), on every street corner and inside every home, as did their counterparts among the Egyptians, Hindus, Hebrews, Arabs and other Semitic peoples. The Scandinavians and the Celtic tribes of Europe placed phallic stones at strategic points on boundaries and at entrances.
    The Romans adopted the herm and scattered it across their empire – and in echo had their gravestones carved with the likeness of their own head and genitals. Rome adopted the Grecian god Priapus, too (as Liber), a god permanently at awesome attention – though