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The story of the Garden of the Hesperides is at heart one with that of the Garden of Eden; for it is obvious that the same phallic meaning underlies each, and that they are but different versions of the same allegory.
Translated, the passage runs: 'And why should it not be thought lawful for the eclogue to grow out of its infancy and arrive at mature years, if this has been possible in the case of tragedy? ... Even as the Muses grafted tragedy upon the dithyrambic stock, and comedy upon the phallic, so in their ever-fertile garden they set the eclogue as a tiny cutting, whence sprang in later years the stately growth of the pastoral, that is, of the favola di pastori, or dramatic pastoral, as he elsewhere explains.
Thus we find that some animals the bull because of its strength and aggressive nature, the snake, perhaps because of its form or of its tenacity of life, were male representatives of phallic significance. Likewise the fish, the dolphin, and a number of other aquatic creatures came to be female representatives.
We would probably be in error to interpret all these animal symbols as exclusively phallic although many were definitely so. Thus, while Hermes was a priapic deity, he was also a deity of the fields and the harvests; so the bull may have been chosen for its strength as well as its sexual attributes. There are many animals which were symbolic of the female generative power.
The caduceus again the conspicuous part of the sacred Triad Ashur is symbolized by a single stone placed upright, the stump of a tree, a block, a tower, a spire, minaret, pole, pine, poplar or pine tree." Hargrave Jennings, the author of several books on some aspects of religions of antiquity, among them one on phallicism, deals freely with the phallic principles embodied in these religions.
It is another expression of the sex worship of that period. Our present conventional symbols of art are very easily traced to ancient symbols of religion. We may expect these to be phallic in their meaning, to just the extent that phallicism was fundamental in the religions where these symbols originated.
He noticed the phenomena of religion, the trees smeared with paint, the Buddhist caves, the Parsee Towers of Silence, the phallic emblems of nature-worship. Evidently he was not converted to cremation, for he wrote, "The earth is our mother, and it is sweeter to lie on her bosom amid blooming flowers or beneath bending elms and sighing pines in God's Acre."
Upon Plate LXIX. are given no less than 134 illustrations of ancient religious symbols, and the phallic character of nearly if not quite all is plainly apparent. In twelve of these the presence of the Sun or the Crescent Moon as the case may be, points out that in the former event the Male Principle of Life, and in the latter the Female Principle of Life, is referred to.
"As the Phallic cult was much the older, it retained its position after the rise of the Solar cult. In support of these conclusions the author marshals a huge number of facts, so that the work becomes a veritable encyclopaedia of symbolism.
This egg is identical with the ark, and from it the diluvian patriarch was born. He was "Baal-Peor or the lord of opening; and, from an idea that the Ark was an universal mother, he was considered as the masculine principle of generation, and was adored by his apostate descendants with all the abominations of phallic worship."