Free God's Doodle by Tom Hickman Page B

‘phallus’, the word describing the penis in an erective state, derives from the god Phalles, whose cult of tireless sexual activity was rampant among young men. Greek, Roman and other cultures sculpted penises on the walls of their cities, houses and public baths to ward off bad luck, just as they protected their fields with replicas – and sometimes the real thing, removed from executed criminals and enemies. They decorated their household objects with phalluses, baked phallic cakes during festivals and wore phallic amulets –
fascina
in Greece, the word derived from yet another phallic deity 𔉏 both to enhance their sexual potency and to protect them against harm. 1
    Images of phallic gods were carried in sacred processions, equipped (according to the Greek historian Herodotus, who visited Egypt in the fifth century BC ) with movable members ‘of disproportionate magnitude’, to which were attached cords to control their movement. Many had a large eye painted on the glans, an early version of the all-seeing eye of providence, and women smothered them with garlands and kisses.
    There is no exaggerating the reverence which once was bestowed on male genitalia, or the potency with which representations of them were considered to be imbued. Victorious Roman generals entered the city with a replica penis of great size suspended upon their chariot: symbol of victory but also a talisman against the envy of others. In the Middle East it wasn’t unusual for a new king to eat the penis of his dead predecessor to absorb his power. In Kyoto, Japan, young men on the festival of a troublesome local goddess who tried to break up young lovers – carried her image through the streets without wearing their loincloths, to keep her under control by the mere sight of their manhood. Greek and Roman men and women sometimes held seeds resembling testicles in their hand during sex to increase their lovemaking. Worldwide historical records and archaeological evidence show that in almost every culture young women were known to mount a stone or wooden phallus, the lingam in India, before their wedding night, giving their virginity to their gods (or sometimes, as the scornful Roman poet Lactantius wrote, that a god ‘may appear to have been the first to receive the sacrifice of their modesty’); so did older women as a cure for infertility.
    Among the Egyptians, Romans, Semitic Arabs and Hebrews, male genitals were so esteemed they were even a basis of civil law. Men clasped themselves and swore upon what they clasped. ‘O Father of Virile Organs, bear witness to my oath,’ the Arabs intoned. Romans made oaths in like manner, holding their testicles or ‘little witnesses’ – by extension not just to their virility but to their probity. The Hebrews went further, men making a pledge by clasping the genitals of the man to whom the pledge was being made. ‘Put thy hand under my thigh,’ Abraham in Genesis orders his servant, ‘and swear by the Lord . . . that thou shall not take a wife unto my son of the daughters of the Canaanites.’ There are other such instances elsewhere in the Old Testament; when, for example, Solomon was crowned king over all Israel, as related in Chronicles, ‘all the princes, and the mighty men, and all the sons likewise of King David, gave the hand under Solomon’. Biblical translators, in a muck sweat over the issue, resorted to opaque circumlocution. There’s no evidence that the Ancient Greeks testified genitally, but in Athens older men openly fondled the testicles of those not yet old enough to grow a beard when greeting them in the street. ‘You meet my son just as he comes out of the gymnasium, all fresh from the baths, and you don’t kiss him, you don’t say a word to him, you don’t even feel his balls!’ complains a character in Aristophanes’ comedy
The Birds
. ‘And you ’re supposed to be a friend of ours!’ 2
    Genital oath-taking appears not to have extended outside Roman and Middle