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Posts tagged ‘Phallicism’

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

In the third installment of this series, I examined the erotic writings of Edward Sellon. Now I will turn to his “anthropological” work – the two lectures delivered to the Anthropological Society of London (ASL) – Linga Puja: On the Phallic Worship of India and Some Remarks on Indian Gnosticism, or Sacti Puja, the Worship of the Female Powers and follow through with a look at some other works dealing with Phallic worship from the ASL.
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March 19th 2021

Posted by Phil Hine in History, Lectures

Tags: Edward Sellon, nineteenth century, Orientalism, Phallicism

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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. Continue reading »

February 13th 2021

Posted by Phil Hine in History, Lectures

Tags: nineteenth century, Phallicism

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

“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. Continue reading »

April 13th 2020

Posted by Phil Hine in History, Lectures

Tags: Edward Sellon, nineteenth century, Phallicism, Treadwells

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

And so to Edward Sellon; libertine, atheist, orientalist, anthropologist, pornographer. For this post, I’m going to focus on Sellon’s pornographic productions and then will turn to his anthropological excursions in the next post. To some extent, this is a repeat of the approach I took in my first two essays on Edward Sellon (here and here) but I shall endeavour not to repeat earlier material too much. Continue reading »

February 2nd 2020

Posted by Phil Hine in History, Lectures

Tags: Edward Sellon, nineteenth century, Phallicism, Treadwells

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

Following on from the previous post in this series, I will now examine the activities of the Anthropological Society of London and its “inner cabal” – The Cannibal Club. Continue reading »

January 2nd 2020

Posted by Phil Hine in History, Lectures

Tags: Edward Sellon, nineteenth century, Phallicism, Race, Treadwells

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

I have for some time been interested in how representations of India – particularly those related to sexuality – emerged out of the Colonial period and went on to influence twentieth-century stereotypes of India in a wide variety of ways. The ready association made between Tantra and sex, for example, is something I would argue, has its roots in this period, as does much of the romanticism about India as a land of enlightened sexuality. It is this interest that led me into a murky territory which is sometimes called ethnopornography – a shadow zone where a piece of erotic writing can disguise itself as a scholarly work – or a scholarly work can be read as erotica. Where the body of the native is portrayed as alluring or threatening – sometimes both, and colonial territories become both zones of sexual adventure and hearts of darkness. Continue reading »

December 25th 2019

Posted by Phil Hine in History, Lectures

Tags: Edward Sellon, nineteenth century, Phallicism, Treadwells

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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 »

August 30th 2016

Posted by Phil Hine in Gender, History, Occult, Pagan

Tags: eighteenth-century, Phallicism, Richard Payne Knight

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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 »

June 3rd 2015

Posted by Phil Hine in Gender, History, Occult, Pagan

Tags: Phallicism, Richard Payne Knight

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