Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar (2)

Going back through the blog archives, I discover that I omitted to mention at the time (back in March) that I completed and posted on Scribd an edition of Phallism in Ancient Worships (a.k.a. Ancient Symbol Worship) by Hodder M. Westropp, C. S. Wake, and Alexander Wilder. The two essays comprising the bulk of this were originally papers presented to a dodgy bunch of blokes called the Anthropological Society of London, who were also the original audience for Edward Sellon's ramblings on Indian "phallic worship." On which subject, I've just uploaded a slight update of Sellon's Annotations on the Sacred Writings of the Hindus. This mainly fixes a few previously unnoticed OCR errors in the "S'akti Puja" paper, and slightly expands one of my notes.

As I almost got round to explaining in a post last year under this title, what started me on the trek through this morass, which with the CP release of Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names is more or less over (I do not count Gerald Massey or Godfrey Higgins as Phallicists) was my interest in the works of the English occultist Aleister Crowley, and the quasi-Masonic association the Ordo Templi Orientis, which he took over in the 1920s and which is now widely associated with his name and ideas.
Theodor Reuss, the founder of the O.T.O., echoing the words of Thomas Inman's Symbolism, claimed for his order the possession of a "KEY" to explain all religious, Masonic and Hermetic symbolism, namely "the teaching of sexual magic." Crowley, who even prior to his association with Reuss was at least aware of the Phallicist school of History of Religions, enthusiastically embraced this scheme of interpretation, and while keeping the precise nature of this teaching a secret, reserved for the higher degrees of the order, recommended works like General Forlong's Rivers of Life, Payne Knight et al. on the Worship of Priapus, and Hargrave Jennings' The Rosicrucians to his students even in writings intended for publication.

There is one very important difference between Reuss and Crowley on the one hand, and Dr. Inman in particular on the other. The Doctor, whose own religious position seems to have been a vague Theism, revering a self-contradictory abstraction he called "the Almighty" and rejecting any kind of religious symbolism or ritual as a blasphemous insult to the divine majesty, used the presence of supposed "phallic" elements in the doctrine, ritual, iconography and nomenclature of existing religions as grounds for violently denouncing them. Reuss and Crowley, on the other hand, accepting the arguments of the Phallicists as to the intimate and indissoluble connection between sexuality and religion, deduced from these the divinity of the human sexual instinct and the "solar-phallic" cult as the one true religion:

[In] the Macrocosm is one sole God, the Sun [. . .] in the Microcosm, which is Man, the vicegerent of the Sun, sole giver of Life, is the Phallus.

-- Crowley, Liber 228, "De Natura Deorum."

[The] only rational God is the Sun, who is in the Macrocosm what the Phallus is in the Microcosm.

-- Crowley, Liber 888, "The Gospel according to St. Bernard Shaw."