The Tree of Ecstasy Quotes

“To the altars of the Great Mother, and later still to that of the Horned God, came those women who wanted children. In the Delta of the Nile in the small city of Mendes they worshipped a God with a goat's head. In the earliest times the Goat of Mendes was a simple fertility God, the animal's horned head and shaggy nether limbs representing the sexual energy of the most prolific animal the Egyptians knew. Its curving horns emulated the erect male penis and so it became a symbol of the seed-bearer. The God Pan served a similar purpose in ancient Greece. The early [Christian] Church labelled this simple but incredibly ancient God form 'the Devil', horned and hooved, and consigned it to oblivion except in the remnants of the Old Religion which remembered it only in a debased form. Now it is a symbol so defiled and linked to Satanism that it is impossible to use it even if one wished to do so. Please understand this fully: this particular symbol cannot be used, and those who have the knowledge and the understanding will leave it well alone. I repeat, this symbol cannot be used with safety.”
― Dolores Ashcroft-Nowicki, The Tree of Ecstasy: An Advanced Manual of Sexual Magic