Madame Blavatsky on the Author of Phallicism

Helena Petrovna Blavatsky · Black versus White Magic Series · 6 pages

A short study built around a sentence from Sir William Drummond's Oedipus Judaicus: that the truths of science were the arcana of the priests, because those truths were the foundations of religion. Blavatsky takes that as her starting point and turns it into a charge of inconsistency.

Why, she asks, should missionaries so cruelly twit the Vaishnavas and the worshippers of Krishna for the supposedly gross indecency of their symbols, when it has been made clear beyond doubt — and by the most unprejudiced writers — that the same symbolism underlies the tradition those missionaries themselves profess? The argument is one she makes repeatedly across this series: that phallic symbolism is universal in ancient religion, that its original meaning was cosmological rather than sexual, and that the coarsening came later and everywhere alike. Six pages, drawn from the fourteenth volume of the Collected Writings, and best read alongside the two companion pieces on the same subject in this series.

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