One Of The Weirdest Practices In Ancient Roman

 One Of The Weirdest Practices In Ancient Roman

In our society, mischievous artists like giggling schoolboys leave crude drawings of a phallus on walls to shock and titillate. They are usually scrubbed off or painted over as such images are deemed taboo and offensive. In ancient Rome, the image of the phallus was depicted on door knockers, lamps, wind chimes, charms as well as drawn and sculpted on walls and depicted in mosaics and other decorative surfaces. The sexual energy of these images was believed to protect people by invoking the power of the god Fascinus. The Vestal Virgins tended the cult of the fascinus populi Romani, who represented a masculine generative power located within the hearth, regarded as sacred. Saint Augustine notes that a phallic image was carried in procession annually at the festival of Father Liber, the Roman god identified with Bacchus or the Greek Dionysys, for the purpose of protecting the fields from fascinatio, magic compulsion:

certain rites of Liber were celebrated in Italy which were of such unrestrained wickedness that the shameful parts of the male were worshipped at crossroads in his honour. …this obscene member, placed on a little trolley, was first exhibited with great honour at the crossroads in the countryside, and then conveyed into the city itself. … In this way, it seems, the god Liber was to be propitiated, in order to secure the growth of seeds and to repel enchantment (fascinatio) from the fields. De Civitate Dei, 17.21.

Oil lamp with a winged fascinum

A tintinnabulum from Pompeii showing a winged phallus:

A bronze polyphallic tintinnabulum of Mercury from Pompeii: the missing bells were attached to each tip (Naples Museum)

Although the etymology of “fascinum” is unknown, the English word “fascinate” derives from it via the Latin verb “fascinare,” “to use the power of the fascinum to enchant, to bewitch.”

The amulet itself was called a fascinum. It was worn by children to ward off illnesses. They would be worn to ward off the evil eye. The type of fascinum also indicated the social standing of the wearer.

The apotropaic fascinum as a protection against the evil eye is also found in bas-reliefs, as in this example from Leptis Magna in Libya, a legged phallus ejaculating into an evil eye on which a scorpion sits:

The penis was so associated with power that it was often used as a symbol of war, adorning the chariot of the triumphator. Pliny the Elder wrote: “It is the image of this divinity that is attached beneath the triumphant car of the victorious general, protecting him, like some attendant physician, against the effects of envy.”

There was even the worship of a god connected to the phallus. Priapus, Greek Πρίηπος, was a minor rustic deity originally worshipped by Greek colonists in Lampascus, Asia Minor. He protected livestock, beehives, vegetable gardens, fruit trees, grape vines and virility. The cult spread to mainland Greece then to Italy during the 3rd century BC. He was said to be the son of Aphrodite by Dionysus or the son of Hermes or of Zeus or of Pan. Hera cursed him with impotence, ugliness and foul-mindedness while he was still in Aphrodite’s womb in revenge for Aphrodite’s having been awarded the golden apple by Paris. The gods threw him down to Earth where he was brought up by shepherds and then joined the band of Pan and his satyrs. His statue, holding a wooden sickle in his hand, was used in the Roman gardens as scarecrow, and his enormous penis as a threat against thieves.

 Anyone who dares steal from the garden will be sodomised or sexually assaulted in another fashion by Priapus. He is a depicted as a dwarf wearing a Phrygian cap as he came from Asia Minor. Priapus is always shown with a permanently engorged penis, sometimes painted red, which inspired the coining of the medical term “priapism.” In later times, Priapus was the subject of a hilarious collection of epigrams called the Priapeia, in which he brags about his virility and threatens trespassers with picturesque sexual assaults. Ovid wrote about Priapus’ attempt to violate a nymph in his Fasti, AD 8. There were numerous statues and depictions of Priapus, including the famous fresco from Pompeii. The god is shown weighing his phallus against the produce of the garden. He is crowned with a peaked Phrygian cap, wears Phrygian boots, and has a Bacchic, cone-tipped thyrsus resting by his side.

In many places, such as Pompeii, the ubiquitous phallus was also depicted in graffiti, such as the one with the inscription: “I screwed the barmaid.” Humans never change.

The practice of displaying in public thousands of paintings and sculptures of the phallus in current times is found in Bhutan, where the symbol is thought to ward off evil people, spirits and gossip.