contemporary objects of worship

flying under the radar amidst phallic symbols
she had to go incognito.
the will to resist was torture.
if he found her there's no telling

she began researching phallic worship
she thought if she understood the phallus
she could take charge of the power playdom

could she use this worship to help the plight?
visualize. actualize.
the interwoven mother and father.
the possibility of birth
expectant unknowns
a lawless future
a phallus worshiping past
She read an anthropology article from 1850 about the universality of phallic worship
what to do with that?
was it about continuity of beings?
still today, nei
Freud found sexuality central to all being
but why phallus
because it protrudes into sculptural arabesque with ease?
to love the phallus for fertility
and castrate the penis for continual plunder.

could it be a worn out symbol of dominance
man, human, reproduction, continuity...
future's symbol will surely not be the phallus


Our friend, Judith Butler assures us of the connection between the phallus and the penis. She writes, "The law requires conformity to its own notion of 'nature'. It gains its legitimacy through the binary and asymmetrical naturalization of bodies in which the phallus, though clearly not identical to the penis, deploys the penis as its naturalized instrument and sign"


Below, I've pasted a bit from wikipedia on an old short story Völsa þáttr which describes a family of Norwegians worshiping a preserved horse penis. This story was part of a collection of stories telling of St. Olaf's missionary activities in various parts of Norway. It is probably from the fourteenth century but takes place in 1029 when Scandinavia was still largely pagan. I couldn't find a good translation of the story in English.


The worship

It relates that an old man and an old woman lived with their brisk son and intelligent daughter on a promontory far from other people. They also had a male and a female thrall.

When the thrall had butchered a horse and was to throw away the penis, the boy ran past, took it and went to the place where his mother, sister and the slave woman were sitting. There he joked at the slave woman telling her that the organ would not be dull between her legs, whereupon the slave woman laughed. The daughter asked her brother to throw away the disgusting object, but her old mother rose and said that it was a useful thing that should not be thrown away. She wrapped in a cloth of linen together with onions and herbs to conserve it and put it in her coffer.

Every evening in the autumn she took it out of the coffer and prayed to it as to her god and had the rest of the household take part. She recited a verse over it, handed to her husband who did the same and so on until every one had taken part.

Enter king Olaf

One day when king Olaf II of Norway was fleeing king Canute the Great, he came by their promontory. He had heard of their worship and wanted to convert them to the Christian faith. He went to their abode and only brought with him Finnr Árnason and Þormóðr Kolbrúnarskáld and they were all wearing grey cloaks to hide their identity.

They entered the house and when it was dark, they met the daughter who asked them about their identity. They all answered that their names was Grímr (hooded). The girl was not fooled and said that she saw that he was king Olaf. He then asked her to keep quiet about it.

They then met the rest of the household and they were invited for dinner. The old woman came last and carried the völsi, the penis. She put the völsi in her husband's lap and read a poem saying "may the giantess (Mörnir) accept this holy object". The husband accepted it and read a poem including the same phrase, and this continued until everybody in the company, but the king, had recited a poem with this phrase.

When it was the king's turn he revealed himself and preached about Christianity, but the old woman was very skeptical whereas her husband was very interested. Finally, they all accepted to be baptized by the king's chaplain and they stayed Christian ever since.

I side with the old woman, maybe we would have been better off to keep this worship going. She was guiding this practice. They followed her lead. Then the Christians came, took the phallus, subverted it, made it unfit for table discussion and used it as a covert/overt symbol of king kong dominance and fucked it all up. We are left with confusion and the Nebraska state capital building.

Linking all of this phallic worship to philosophy might be helpful. Maybe it is innate that we have a conflicted relationship to the phallus, individually and as a collective society.

Arthur Schopenhauer published The World as Will and Representation (or Idea) in 1819 in which he regarded humankind as being driven by blind, internal forces of which he is barely aware: these were the instincts towards conservation and towards reproduction or the sexual instinct. For Schopenhauer, the Will - an analogy of the unconscious - not only drives many of our thoughts which are often in conflict with our intellect (ego-consciousness), but also causes us to repel unwanted cognitions from consciousness.

just poking around. nothing serious.