Notes about Sexuality and Religion

by Sibylle von Cles-Reden.

The mother-cults and legends of classical Greece contain indications of a primitive Mediterranean religion in which the phallus was an object of veneration. When we find Demeter sometimes surrounded by a strange swarm of small phallic beings, the so-called Dactyls or “fingers*, this is surely a reflection of an age before the Greek imagination had humanized the gods, when the female principle still predominated…

P16
This [earliest neolithic] culture, which subsequently became known as the Natufian, appears to have originated in about 10,000 B. C. or slightly later, and to have lasted until the seventh or sixth millennium B.C.

P21
The most astonishing feature of the first town of Jericho was its imposing defences…Infant sacrifice was practised. Beneath a bath-like structure made of mud plaster there came to light, besides a complete infant burial, a whole collection of small skulls with the neck vertebrae, which had been violently severed from the bodies, still attached.

P29
The importation into Jericho of obsidian, turquoise, and cowrie shells shows that extensive trade connections must already have existed. Moreover, the builders of the plaster-floor houses appear on the scene already equipped with an advanced culture which must have developed elsewhere

P53
The diggers had come upon the intact burials of the rulers of Sumer, where they lay amid their treasures. Like their Egyptian counterparts, they evidently desired to take with them into the next world all that they had possessed in this one…

The optimistic conception of the next world characteristic of the early period, in which these people believed in resurrection in the bosom of the all-destroying but allrenewing Great Mother seems subsequently to have given way to a gloomy, pessimistic view of the hereafter. This is plainly expressed in the epic of Gilgamesh. Man’s lot is now the “grim country from which no traveller returns”, where the dead lead a wretched existence in dust and darkness. With the retreat of the primitive maternal world and the appearance of new male gods the world grew uglier, the idea of destruction more dominant, and hope of salvation dimmed.

P54 WESTWARD JOURNEY

P81
The cult of the dead in Cyprus…As at Jericho, infants appear to have been the most frequent sacrifices. The skeletons of twenty-five infants came to light in various layers of one of the biggest huts…

In Mesopotamia, as in Crete, the snake that creeps out of the earth was a symbol of the Great Mother. Very ancient Near Eastern idols sometimes show her with a snake’s head on a woman’s body. A representation in relief of an erect snake was found on a block at the Ggantija, and the same theme occurs on menhirs in Brittany.

P98
A voice speaking into the recess reverberates with unearthly resonance through the vaults, for a kind of moulding along the wall helps it to re-echo. The faithful must have listened in awe to a disembodied voice emerging either in whispers or tones of thunder from the depths

P102
The rites practised at Hal Tarxien were presumably dedicated to this eternal mother figure, to the mysterious sexless deity, to the dead, and to phallic stones…

The mother-cults and legends of classical Greece contain indications of a primitive Mediterranean religion in which the phallus was an object of veneration. When we find Demeter sometimes surrounded by a strange swarm of small phallic beings, the so-called Dactyls or “fingers*, this is surely a reflection of an age before the Greek imagination had humanized the gods, when the female principle still predominated…

The worship of phallic pillars must have represented a stage in religious development before the warlike father-god appeared on the scene with his thunderbolts.

P107
The priests probably organized a good deal of impressive magic in the dim chambers of the temple. They may have moved the heads of the statues by strings and caused mysterious voices to be heard.

P122
The idea that dreams originated in the realm of the dead and the belief in the magic effects of sleep at ancestral tombs were apparently among the oldest features of the religion of the megalithic peoples; so deeply rooted were they that they survived practically unchanged into historical times.

P133
the Great Mother, whose ascendancy in the eastern Mediterranean was drawing towards its close about the middle of the second millennium… [ 1500 BC ]

The male deity of the Sards may have resembled the weather god of the Near Eastern pastoral peoples whose cult spread through the Mediterranean area in the third millennium. [ > 2000 BC ] El, the “great bull”, or Baal Hadad, the god of lightning, whose emblem was also a bull, may have reached Sardinia by way of Crete and Mycenae. The veneration of phallic pillars there may have been an aspect of the cult of the bull god

P157
Not only the poetry and simplicity of archaic ways of life are still evident in Sardinia; its dark and terrible features are also evident. Since the time of the rock-cut cemeteries and megalithic tombs the close community between the living and the dead has never been broken. A dead man still requires the aid of his kin, and if he died by violence, it means vengeance – the vendetta. The idea, reaching right back into prehistory, that the dead thirst for blood, which must be assuaged, and that the killer must be sacrificed to his victim, has maintained its baleful influence.

P184
Dark memories of the meaning of the statue menhirs still survive in Corsican legends and customs. Generally the menhirs are referred to as human beings turned to stone as punishment for blasphemous acts

P188
The menhir of Paccianese, which is said to have been a man who was turned to stone for practising free love, may again recall persecution of pagan practices by the Church. Apparently the primitive fertility cult which was perhaps performed at some menhirs lived on in popular practices in Corsica, as it did in Brittany, for instance.

P260
A number of free standing megalithic tombs popularly known as “hot stones” are pointers to the practice of a fertility cult at ancestral tombs. At certain phases of the moon girls who wanted husbands had to sit on or slide down these tombs naked. The tombs at Locmariaquer are reputed to have been particularly effective; and at the beginning of May they were adorned with kerchiefs and coloured ribbons by young women whose aspirations had been fulfilled. Until the last century the Church fought vigorously and with varying success against pagan and often obscene practices associated with the megalithic monuments.

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