Ophiolatreia
Chapter 3
Examples quoted illustrate the inductive powers by which unsided reason arrives at its results, as well as the means by which it indicates them in the absence of a written language or of one capable of conveying abstract ideas. The mythological symbols of all early nations furnish ample evidence that it was thus they embodied or shadowed forth their conceptions---the germ of a symbolic system, which was afterwards extended to every manifestation of nature and every attribute of Divinity.
We may in this manner rationally and satisfactorily account for the origin of the doctrine of the reciprocal principles. Its universal acceptance establishes that it was deduced from the operations of that law so obviously governing all animated nature---that of reproduction or procreation.
In the Egyptian mythology, the Divine Osiris was venerated as the active, dispensing, or originating energy, and was symbolized as the Sun; Iris as terrene nature, the passive recipient, the producer; their annual offspring was Horus, the vernal season or infant year. The poet Hesiod, in the beginning of his Theogony, distinguishes the male and female, or generative and productive powers of Nature, as Ouranus and Gaia, Heaven and Earth. The celestial emblems of these powers were usually, as we have said, the Sun and Moon; the terrestrial, Fire and Earth. They were designed as Father and Mother; and their more obvious symbols, as has already been intimated, were the Phallus and Kteis, or the Lingam and Yoni of Hindustan.
That the worship of the phallus passed from India or from Ethiopia into Egypt, from Egypt into Asia Minor, and into Greece, is not so much a matter of astonishment---these nations communicated with each other; but that this worship existed in countries a long time unknown to the rest of the world---in many parts of America, with which the people of the Eastern Continent had formerly no communication---is an astonishing but well attested fact. When Mexico was discovered, there was found in the city of Panuco, the particular worship of the Phallus well established, its image was adorned in the temples; there were in the public places bas reliefs, which like those of India, represented in various manners the union of the two sexes. At Tlascalla, another city of Mexico, they revered the act of generation under the united symbols of the characteristic organs of the two sexes. Garcilasso de la Vega says---"that according to Blas Valera, the God of Luxury was called Tiazolteuli," but some writers say, "this is a mistake." One of the goddesses of the Mexican Pantheon was named Tiazolteotl, which Boturini describes as Venus unchaste, low, and abominable, the hieroglyphic of these men and women who are wholly abandoned, mingling promiscuously one with another, gratifying their bestial appetites like animals. Boturini is said to be not entirely correct in his apprehensions of the character of this goddess. She is Cinteotl, the goddess of Maize, under another aspect. Certain of the temples of India abound with sculptured representations of the symbols of Phallic Worship, and if we turn to the temples of Central America, which in many respects exhibit a strict correspondence with those of India, we find precisely the same symbols, separate and in combination.
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