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Updated: May 31, 2025
It is, however, the opinion of Forlong that they are simply connected with an older and purer worship a worship which involved the union of the sex principles as the foundation of their god-idea. Regarding the cause for the "indecent" sculptures of the Orissa temples, the same writer quotes the following from Baboo Ragendralala Mitra, in his work on the Antiquities of Orissa.
If I follow the God-idea through its successive transformations, I find that this idea is preeminently social: I mean by this that it is much more a collective act of faith than an individual conception. Now, how and under what circumstances is this act of faith produced? This point it is important to determine.
Our moral standards, in so far as they relate to the sexes, are at present the logical descent of Hebrew adherence to phallic worship, engrafted into the Roman outgrowth of the God-idea.
Thereafter the sermons of the Prophets betray everywhere the intense desire, on the one hand, to restore to the God-idea its original universal character, and, on the other hand, while strongly emphasizing the importance of morality in the religious and the social sphere, to derogate from the value of the ceremonial system.
Christian Science addresses the Deity as "Father-Mother-God," and their reverence for the woman who established the creed, as well as the Ionian type of architecture employed in their church edifices, are evidences of the re-establishment of the female principle in the God-idea.
In the study of primitive religion, the analogy existing between the growth of the god-idea and the development of the human race, and especially of the two sex-principles, is everywhere clearly apparent. "Religion is to be found alone with its justification and explanation in the relations of the sexes. There and therein only."
Although it is declared that "great obscurity surrounds the God Hea," no one, I think, whose mind is free from prejudice, and who understands the significance of the early god-idea, and the true meaning of the symbols used in later ages to express it, can study the myths connected with this Deity without at once recognizing her identity with the great female God of Nature who was once worshipped by every people on the globe, but whose worship had become sensualized to satisfy the corrupted taste of a more depraved age an age in which passion constituted the highest idea of a God.
It is impossible longer to conceal the fact that passion, symbolized by a serpent, an upright stone, and by the male and female organs of generation, the male appearing as the "giver of life," the female as a necessary appendage to it, constituted the god-idea of mankind for at least four thousand years; and, instead of being confined to the earlier ages of that period, we shall presently see that phallic worship had not disappeared, under Christianity, as late and even later than the sixteenth century.
Although the serpent Deity was originally portrayed with the head of a woman and the body of a serpent or fish, after the change of sex in the god-idea which has been noted in the foregoing pages had been completed, it is observed that this figure is represented by the head of a man and the body of a serpent.
As the conception of a deity originated in sex, or in the creative agencies female and male which animate Nature, we may reasonably expect to find, in the history of the development of the two sex-principles and in the notions entertained concerning them throughout past ages, a tolerably correct account of the growth of the god-idea.
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