Religion and Lust
or, The Psychological Correlation of Religious Emotion and Sexual Desire
original materialism, yet retaining enough to show its undoubted origin in the sensual percepts, recepts, and concepts of its primal founders.
As I have observed above, the religion of these people has gained a certain degree of abstraction, and this abstraction is further shown by the presence of certain phallic rites and ceremonies in their religious observances; but of this, more anon.[D]
[D] In a letter to me, a naval officer of high rank states that, beyond question of doubt, the Aleutian priests keep male concubines whom they use in their religious observances. He, also, gives other evidences of phallic worship among these people.
In most of the tribes of Equatorial Africa, nature-worship has been superseded by ghost-worship, devil-worship, or witch-worship, or, rather, by ghost, devil, or witch propitiation; yet, in the sanctity of the fetich, which is everywhere present, we see a relic of nature-worship. Moreover, many of these tribes deify natural phenomena, such as the sun, the
