A Discourse On The Worship Of Priapus And Its Connection With The Mystic Theology Of The Ancients: To Which Is Added An Essay On The Worship Of The ... During The Middle Ages Of Western Europe

by Richard Payne Knight

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Genres: Religion, History

354 pages, Paperback

First published January 1, 1786

About the author

Richard Payne Knight of Downton Castle in Herefordshire, and of 5 Soho Square, London, England, was a classical scholar, connoisseur, archaeologist and numismatist, best known for his theories of picturesque beauty and for his interest in ancient phallic imagery. He served as a Member of Parliament for Leominster (1780–84) and for Ludlow (1784–1806).

Reviews

[Warwick · Rating 3 out of 5]

In the late eighteenth century, people were rethinking sexuality in more consciously ‘Enlightenment’ ways, and this pioneering essay of 1786 was an explosive example. It had a huge effect on how certain intellectual circles thought about sex and comparative religion, but some of its theories – that, for instance, the Christian cross had developed from a pagan cock-and-balls – proved a little too ahead of its time, and after a lot of angry debate, Knight pulled his pamphlet back out of circulation. Like Marty McFly playing ‘Johnny B. Goode’ in 1955, he knew the world just wasn't ready for his pelvic novelties.

It's a shame because most of what he says is really pretty mild. He noticed that peasant women in Isernia, in what was then the Kingdom of Naples, still wore phallic amulets, and that some local festivals seemed to represent survivals of more ancient priapic celebrations. From this starting point, Knight takes a quick canter through mythological symbolism to explore the basic point that people have always worshiped different aspects of existence in the shape of different gods and goddesses, and that in many cases ‘the ancient reverence […] continued to the symbols, when their meaning was wholly forgotten’. The ways in which the ‘generative aspect’ of nature has been expressed in different religions is then surveyed with reference to the Greeks, Romans, Persians, Celts, and the recently-translated Bhagavad Gita.

Some of this is couched in a fashionable anti-Catholicism – the phallic survivals in Naples show, he suggests, ‘the similitude of the Popish and Pagan Religion’ – but this flattery to English Protestant readers wasn't enough to smooth his book's reception in Georgian England. Nor were his game efforts to describe dick after dick in high-brow academic language (‘His characteristic organ is sometimes represented by the artists in that state of tension and rigidity, which it assumes when about to discharge its functions, and at other times in that state of tumid languor, which immediately succeeds the performance’). But despite its short career at the time, it had a traceable effect on contemporary art and literature – and was happily rehabilitated by psychologists and anthropologists of the twentieth century, once tumescence was back in fashion.

[Kevin · Rating 5 out of 5]

I cannot recommend this work enough. I've read it at least four times now, possibly five and it rewards the effort every time.

[Jesse · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fever dream of symbol interpretation that's surely full of nonsense, but was a lot of fun to read, and useful as a comparison to other myth & symbol interpretation of the period. Come for the dick pics, stay for the insinuations that early Christianity was a sex cult!

Knight's Discourse prefigures more pious symbol interpretation like Creuzer's Symbolik in a lot of ways, from its perennialism that tries to read Orphic symbolism into all ancient religious symbols, its reliance on Platonist interpretative methods (most especially Plutarch's On Isis and Osiris), its careless use of the Bhagavad Gita and the Vedic trinity of creator/preserver/destroyer, its love of coins. There's a bit more emphasis on Pan than Bacchus, due to an Orphic/Egyptian bull-> Satyr/Pan goat connection he's trying to make.

Despite dealing with similar themes, Knight doesn't make Apollonian-Sun-Form-Paternal-Rationality versus Dionysian-Earth-Matter-Maternal-Irrationality into a dichotomy like Bachofen & Nietzsche will, as there's more of an emphasis on androgynous figures, although the phallic still (pre)dominates over the yonic as far as actual images go. He's not particularly interested in defending the Patriarchy like Bachofen or dethroning Reason like Nietzsche - he's an Enlightenment Deist who wants people to have less shame about the moderate gratification of natural passions.

[Per · Rating 3 out of 5]

https://www.sacred-texts.com/sex/dwp/... --

"Published in 1786, this book shocked English society to such an extent that Knight took it upon himself to surpress his own book."

[Peter J. · Rating 5 out of 5]

This was a very interesting read. I learned a lot about the long abandoned underlying Orphic philosophies behind the obscene Roman, Greek, Egyptian, Persian, and Indian phallic and yonic symbolism.