While, over the course of a distinguished career, Thomas Inman, M.D. (1820-1876) produced a number of popular and scholarly works on medical subjects, outside of his profession he is probably better known ("better" being here somewhat relative) for
his writings on "Ancient Faiths" which began (on his account, at least) as an attempt to trace out the origins of English family and given names and ended as a highly destructive exercise in Old Testament criticism, interspersed with bitter polemic against priesthoods in general and the Jewish religion and various Christian churches in particular, on his way attempting to read a sexual meaning into just about all religious nomenclature and symbolism.
Ancient Faiths Embodied in Ancient Names (2 vols., 1868-9, second edition 1872-3) represents the first detailed presentation in English of the Phallicist theory of History of Religions.
This last statement may seem strange to those who have heard of
Two Essays on the Worship of Priapus by Richard Payne Knight
et al., but there is an important difference. Payne Knight, in his discourse on the worship of Priapus, looked at the grotesque classical figure with exaggerated and permanently erect phallus, images of satyrs copulating with goats, and the sexually graphic temple frescos of India which shocked the first British colonists to find them, and saw the mystic theology of the ancients, the great active and passive principles of nature combining to produce all things. The anonymous authors of the "Essay on the Worship of the Generative Powers in the Middle Ages of Western Europe" (believed to be Thomas Wright with assistance from George Witt, James Emerson Tennant and John Camden Hotten, the publisher of the 1865 combined edition) were less philosophical, but still treated of undisguised sexual symbols in religious, or assumed to be religious, iconography and customs, and illustrated their essay with engravings sufficiently graphic that the work had to be privately printed for subscribers in accordance with the conventions of the time.
Dr Inman, with no desire for himself or his publisher to be prosecuted for obscenity, started with names and emblems thought fit to print in works intended for general circulation, or even to be spoken or displayed in church, then tortured logic, Hebrew and the principles of symbolic interpretation to read a sexual meaning into the most innocuous, going on to use these interpretations as grounds for general condemnation. The passage from his
Symbolism quoted above, continues ". . . and however much we may dislike the idea that modern religionists have adopted emblems of an obscene worship, we cannot deny the fact that it is so, and we may hope that with a knowledge of their impurity we shall cease to have a faith based upon a trinity and a virgin—a lingam and a yoni. Some may cling still to such a doctrine, but to me it is simply horrible—blasphemous and heathenish."
A re-set of
Ancient Faiths is in something that might laughably be called progress and has been for about two years; since this work runs to nearly 2000 octavo pages, contains a massive amount of pointed Hebrew and appears to have a SAN cost, I am currently less than a third of the way through the page count.
Ancient Pagan and Modern Christian Symbolism Exposed and Explained was originally issued in 1869 and comprised the plates and inline illustrations from
Ancient Faiths and their explanatory text, with various rants and digressions interspersed. This edition is now rare. An expanded second edition was released in 1874, with the addition of an essay on 'The Assyrian "Grove" and other emblems' by a friend of the Doctor's called John Newton; this edition has been reprinted many times. In 1876 there appeared the Doctor's final salvo on the subject,
Ancient Faiths and Modern, represented in its first printing as
a third volume of Ancient Faiths . . . Ancient Names, and described on its title page as "a dissertation upon worships, legends and divinities in central and Western Asia, Europe, and elsewhere, before the Christian era, showing their relations to religious customs as they now exist." Whatever the Doctor may have intended on starting it, by the time he was finished any notion of a descriptive account of "ancient faiths and modern" had been entirely subordinated to polemic against the Jews and their religion, and various Christian churches (primarily, but not solely, the Roman and Anglican). Throughout its pages Inman repeatedly challenged various real or imaginary critics to a public debate on his theories; even had any been inclined to pay him the slighest attention, no such debate took place since Dr. Inman died in May 1876.
Yeah, I've been writing this entry because my patience with
Ancient Faiths . . . Ancient Names ran out again after about 13 pages (even before doing the pointed Hebrew). Anyway, if you want to read it, the
page images can be found on the Internet Archive.
