Edward Sellon and the Cannibal Club: Anthropology Erotica Empire – V
At the close of the previous post in this series I promised I would take a look at the work of Irish scholar Henry O’Brien, an early nineteenth-century exponent of the phallic theory of religion.
Henry O’Brien (1808-1835) is now remembered for his work The Round Towers of Ireland (1834). Little is known of O’Brien’s life apart from that he was born in Kerry of a well-to-do family and obtained a degree in Classics from Trinity University.
Throughout Ireland are many examples of so-called “Round Towers” – tall, slim edifices with conical roofs, sometimes with an entrance several feet above ground level. In December 1830, the Royal Irish Academy offered a gold medal and the not inconsiderable sum of fifty pounds for the best essay investigating the origins and functions of these monuments. This competition set O’Brien to work, and in June 1832, he submitted a five-hundred-page essay On the Origin and Use of the Round Towers of Ireland.
Round Towers is a sprawling, meandering work into which O’Brien poured his theories and opinions, regardless of their direct relevance to the subject at hand. He argues – dismissing the theories of other scholars and various contemporaries – that the many round towers found across Ireland are older than has been previously supposed, and were built by the “Tuath-de-danaans” – colonists from India, who erected them in honour of “the fructifying principle of nature”.
Drawing on the work of scholars such as Sir William Jones, O’Brien argues that the most ancient Indian temples are representations of the Phallic principle:
“Such was the origin and design of the most ancient Indian pagodas, which had no earthly connection with fire or fire-worshippers, as generally imagined. And that such, also, was the use and origin of the Irish pagodas is manifest from the name by which they are critically and accurately designated, viz. Budh, which, in the Irish language, signifies not only the Sun, as the source of generative vegetation, but also as the male organ of procreative generativeness, consecrated, according to their foolish ideas, to Baal-Phearagh or Deus-coitionis, by and by to be elucidated. This thoroughly explains the word “Cathoir-ghall,” or “temple of delight,” already mentioned as appropriated to one of those edifices, and is still further confirmed by the name of “Teaumpal na greine,” or “temple of the sun,” by which another of them is called; while the ornament that has been known to exist on the top of many of them represents the crescent of Sheevah, the matrimonial deity of the Indians, agreeably to what the Heetopades states, viz. “may he on whose diadem is a crescent cause prosperity to the people of the earth.”
The term Budh in the above quotation is O’Brien’s master-stroke, as he goes on to argue that the “Budhists” originally worshipped the Sun and Moon (he does not think that there was a real person called “Budha”) and the Lingam:
“But the Budhists, not content with this ordinary veneration, or with paying homage in secret to that symbol of production which all other classes of idolators equally, though privately, worshipped,—I mean the Lingam,—though they could never carry their zeal sufficiently far, unless they erected it into an idol of more than colossal magnitude—and those idols were the Round Towers. Hence the name Budhism, which I thus define, viz. that species of idolatry which worshipped Budh (i.e. the Lingam), as the emblem of Budh (i.e. the Sun)—Budh signifying, indiscriminately, Sun and Lingam.”
O’Brien was awarded second place in the competition and received £20 for his essay, which was later published in the Transactions of the Royal Irish Academy. But that was merely the opening shot. O’Brien apparently felt that he had deserved to win the first prize, and carried on an extensive correspondence with the fellows of the Royal Irish Academy, much of which he later published as the prefatory introduction to the book form of his essay The Round Towers of Ireland, or the Mysteries of Freemasonry, of Sabaism, and of Buddhism (1834). He claimed that the Academy had awarded the first prize (which went to the archaeologist George Petrie) to a member of their own council purely out of political reasons, and called Petrie’s winning essay “a farrago of anachronisms and historical falsehoods.”
After a rather scathing review in the Dublin Penny Journal – the editor dismissed Round Towers as a “literary melange” and pronounced it “a downright blasphemous publication” – O’Brien threatened the Journal with legal action unless a printed apology was forthcoming. Needless to say, the Journal refused to do so, and O’Brien seems not to have pursued the matter. O’Brien went on to publish a translation of Villanueva’s Ibernia Phœnicia which was published in 1834 by Whittaker & Co. of London, and J. Cumming of Dublin. It was not well received by the reviewing press. O’Brien died at the age of 27, and was buried at Hanwell, in Oxfordshire.
The Round Towers of Ireland might well have vanished into obscurity were it not for the writings of Hargrave Jennings. Jennings (1817-1890) was a prolific promoter of the phallic origin of religion. He took up O’Brien’s ideas and worked them into his 1870 book, The Rosicrucians – which, despite its title, says almost nothing about the Rosicrucians, but rather, expounds the theory that all religions stem from the worship of a singular primordial power – expressed as the Sun, Fire, Light, and the Lingam. In The Rosicrucians, Jennings, like some deranged Freudian, finds Phallic monuments everywhere: in churchyards, outside Roman Catholic churches, in the centre of druidical circles, as obelisks across the world. Between 1870 and 1891, Jennings published no less than thirteen works dealing with various aspects of Phallic worship. 1 Thanks largely to Jennings, O’Brien’s Round Towers was frequently cited in later works exploring the phallic origin of religion, such as Clifford Howard’s (1897) Sex Worship: An exposition of the Phallic Origin of Religion, and Robert Allen Campbell’s Phallic Worship (1887)
Sources
Dublin Penny Journal No. 98, Vol. II., 17 May 1834 pp361-364.
Dublin Penny Journal No. 156 Vol. III 27 June 1835 pp410-411
Joscelyn Godwin The Theosophical Enlightenment (State University of New York Press, 1994)
Wouter J. Hanegraaff (ed) Dictionary of Gnosis & Western Esotericism (Brill, 2006)
Richard Kaczynski “Continuing Knowledge from Generation unto Generation: The Social and Literary Background of Aleister Crowley’s Magick” in Henrik Bogdan and Martin P. Starr (eds) Aleister Crowley and Western Esotericism (Oxford University Press, 2012).
Online
Henry O’Brien The Round Towers of Ireland
Irish Round Towers
Hargrave Jennings The Rosicrucians
Notes:
- Kaczynski, 2012. ↩
