Edward Sellon and the Cannibal Club: Anthropology Erotica Empire – IV

Posted by Phil Hine in History, Lectures  |  April 13th 2020  |  About poster:

“in view of the indelibility that is characteristic of all mental traces, it is surely not surprising that even the most primitive forms of genital worship can be shown to have existed in very recent times and that the language, customs, and superstitions of mankind today contain survivals from every phase of this process of development.”
Sigmund Freud, Eine Kindheitserinnerung des Leonardo Da Vince, 1910

Before I move onto an examination of Edward Sellon’s anthropological and “phallic” works, I want to first discuss the wider context of phallic theories of religion in the nineteenth century.

As I explored in my series on Richard Payne Knight it was in the eighteenth century that the idea arose that all religion was rooted it primitive fertility rites. It was an idea that had wide-ranging consequences, from the beginnings of cross-cultural anthropology to the exoticization (and eroticization) of other cultures.

Not all scholars supported this view of course. Connop Thirwall (1797-1875), for example, managed an eight-volume history of Greece which managed to be entirely silent on the subject of Priapus, and Thomas Keightley (1789-1872) wrote a series of textbooks aimed at students dealing with ancient Greece, Rome, and India, without once mentioning phallic worship. The kind of tensions generated by this theory can be seen in the case of a work entitled The Royal Museum at Naples, being some account of the erotic paintings, bronzes, and statues contained in that famous “Cabinet Secret. This book, first published in 1816 by a French antiquarian, César Famin, was given the blessing of the Royal Museum of Naples. But the work was seized by the French authorities, who destroyed most of the print run. In 1871 the book was republished in England using the byline “Colonel Fanin” – and it became a famous work of erotica (see The Royal Museum at Naples.)

Phallic Worship and Anti-Catholicism
Theories of Phallic worship were also drawn upon to express anti-Catholic, and anti-Indian sentiments, and commentators frequently drew parallels between the idolatry of Rome and the “paganism” of India. A tract published in 1858 – Idolmania: Or, the Legalised Cross Not the Instrument of Crucifixion, Being an Enquiry into the Difference between the Cross Proper and the Symbol of Heathen Processions made much of the apparent similarities between Roman Catholicism and Hinduism. In the preface, the pseudonymous author – “Investigator Abhorrens” asserts that:

“…the female object of their idolatry, whom they vainly attempt to impose upon the intelligent as the Mary of Scripture, is the universal goddess still worshipped in India as Sakti, or the energy of female nature. The popish goddess, so recently proclaimed by Pio IX. to be the heiress of the Roman Diva Triformis, and the Grecian Endonié Theos, commonly called Hekaté, agrees in every respect, the most minute, as she is found in Breviaries, Rosaries, legends, and other trumpery, with the character of the last in Hesiod (Theog. 404-452). And no wonder, for Hekaté and Sakti are etymological cognates, and denote the same powers of capacity and production of female nature, whose worship leads, as it ever did, to the practice of gross immorality, as will be seen in a subsequent account of the secret rites of the Saktas. ¹

The core of Abhorrens’ argument is that the Cross represents nothing less than ‘the phallus of universal antiquity’ and that Catholicism had been corrupted by pagan phallic worship. Drawing on etymological proofs, and learnedly discoursing on pagan rites of antiquity – and referencing the work of Richard Payne Knight, the author warns of the dangers of the acceptance, in Britain of the practice. He refers to European (presumably Catholic countries) where ‘precisely as the cross or phallus is more or less revered, there the illicit intercourse between the sexes is most unrestrained, and there the crime of murder is the most frequent’. ² He compares Catholic processions with the “bacchanals” of the ancient Greeks and Romans and asserts that “Murderous disposition, malice to persons, manifested by wilful destruction of property, habitual faithlessness, and commerce with beasts, are characteristics of idolatrous nations.” The candles placed in stands found on Catholic altars are ‘the upright lingga, worshipped by the Hindus’, and the author elaborates on the vileness of such worship by drawing on the accounts of ‘the adorers of the Linga’ by Colebrook and H.H. Wilson. The ‘Popish Mass’ he asserts, is a copy of ‘these mysteries as they were performed in the temples of Isis throughout the empire’ and he speculates that a ‘midnight mass inside of a nunnery might throw light on whatever is obscure in old authors respecting the Eleusinian mysteries, and concealed by the Saktas of the present day.’ ³ This latter comment could almost be a veiled reference to anti-Catholic erotica such as the infamous Venus in the Cloister (1683) or Female Convents: Secrets on Nunneries Disclosed which was published in England in 1829 – the year that the Catholic Emancipation Act received royal assent. ⁴

Abhorrens was clearly worried that, by bringing such distasteful topics to public attention, that he was encouraging the kind of carnal interests he was at such pains to dispel, so Idolomania ends with copious notes and references from a wide range of sources, and occasionally the author makes nods in the direction of the British Museum, where artifacts from ancient Egypt or contemporary India could be viewed to confirm his views.

In the next post, I’ll take a look at other phallic enthusiasts such as Henry O’Brien, and how phallic origin theories were taken up by Freemasons and other esotericists.

Sources
Investigator Abhorrens Idolmania: Or, the Legalised Cross Not the Instrument of Crucifixion, Being an Enquiry into the Difference between the Cross Proper and the Symbol of Heathen Processions (Effingham Wilson, Royal Exchange, 1858)
Sarah Bull Reading, Writing, and Publishing an Obscene Canon: The Archival Logic of the Secret Museum, c. 1860–c. 1900 (Book History, Volume 20, 2017, pp. 226-257).
Jocelyn Godwin The Theosophical Enlightenment (State University of New York Press, 1994)
Dominic Janes Victorian Reformation: The Fight over Idolatry in the Church of England, 1840-1860 (Oxford University Press 2009).
Andrew P. Lyons and Harriet D. Lyons Irregular Connections: A History of Anthropology and Sexuality (University of Nebraska Press 2004).
Helen Wickstead Sex in the Secret Museum: Photographs from the British Museum’s Witt Scrapbooks (Photography & Culture Vol 0 Issue 0 2018 pp1-11)

Tags: Edward Sellon, nineteenth century, Phallicism, Treadwells  |  Comments feed