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Posts tagged ‘Richard Payne Knight’

  1. A Phallic Knight – III

    In the previous post in this series I outlined the publishing of Richard Payne Knight’s A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus and the ensuing scandal. For this post I’m going to look at some of Knight’s other works -and his later life – post-Discourse. My aim here is to highlight the wide range of Knight’s interests and show how he continued to express, in various ways, his antipathy to Christianity. I’ll get around to examining some of the background politics and social context in the next post. Continue reading »

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  2. A Phallic Knight – II

    As I hope the treatise may be forgotten I shall not name the author, but observe, that all the ordure and filfth, all the antique pictures, and all the representations of the generative organs, in their most odious and degrading profusion, have been raked together, and copulated (for no other idea seems to be in the mind of the author) and copulated, I say, with a new species of blasphemy. Such are, what we would call, the records of the stews and bordellos of Grecian and Roman antiquity, exhibited for the recreation of antiquaries, and the obscene revellings of Greek Scholars in their private studies. Surely this is to dwell mentally in lust and darkness in the loathsome and polluted chamber at Capreae.”
    Thomas James Mathias

    Given that I’m going to give a lecture on Richard Payne Knight for the London Fortean Society in October, I thought I’d better get on with the series of posts on Knight I started last June. Continue reading »

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  3. 2016 Lectures in London

    A quick post to announce two forthcoming lectures: Continue reading »

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  4. A Phallic Knight – I

    Back in 2011 I gave a lecture at Treadwells Bookshop for LGBT History month on Richard Payne Knight’s A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus under the title “A Phallic (K)night”. Due to one thing and another, I never got around to writing up the lecture for publication, so I’m going to serialise it here. This first post provides a general introduction and outlines some biographical information on Payne Knight and some of his colleagues. In future posts I’ll examine Discourse itself – and the circumstances in which it came to be written, and then go on to look at the role it played in the nineteenth-century enthusiasm for theories of “phallic worship”. Continue reading »

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  5. Lecture Notes: On Edward Sellon – II

    In the previous post on Edward Sellon I took a look at Sellon’s pornographic writings within the wider of context of nineteenth century attitudes to India & sexuality. For this post, I’m going to take a look at some of Sellon’s scholarly work, it’s reception, and its role in the representation of tantra. Continue reading »

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  6. Pan: “disreputable objects of pagan licentiousness”

    “Shocking things go on here. You wouldn’t believe it! Licentiousness! Orgies! …. Even bingo. Oh yes.”
    Lurcio (Frankie Howerd), Up Pompeii

    Continue reading »

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  7. Ganapati variations: an eighteenth-century interpretation

    “But the obvious forms and ceremonies of a religion are not always to be understood in their obvious sense; but are to be considered as symbolical representations of some hidden meaning, which may be extremely wise and just, though the symbols themselves, to those who know not their true significance may appear in the highest degree absurd and extravagant.”
    Richard Payne Knight, A Discourse on the worship of Priapus

    In the midst of Richard Payne Knight’s A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, and its connection with the mystic Theology of the Ancients (first published in 1786) there is an early European analysis of Ganesa: Continue reading »

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