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Phallic worship (făl´Ĭk), worship of the reproductive powers of nature as symbolized by the male generative organ. Phallic symbols have been found by archaeological expeditions all over the world, and they are usually interpreted as an expression of the human desire for regeneration. Phallic worship in ancient Greece centered around Priapus (the son of Aphrodite) and the Orphic and Dionysiac cults. In Rome, the most important form of phallic worship was that of the cult of Cybele and Attis; prominent during the empire, this cult was notorious for its festive excesses and its yearly "Day of Blood," during which the frenzied participants wounded themselves with knives; self-inflicted castration, a prerequisite for admittance into the priest caste of this phallic cult, took place during the festival. In India, the deity Shiva was often represented by and worshiped as a phallic symbol called the lingam. Phallic worship has also been practiced among the Egyptians in the worship of Osiris; among the Japanese, who incorporated it into Shinto; and among the Native Americans, such as the Mandan, who had a phallic buffalo dance.

Encyclopedia.com

The most primitive religious thinking always centers around the phallus as the default symbol of the natural world's life-giver. The primitive pagan religions centered their theology around the phallus in one form or another. The deities and symbols of the ancient pagans find their genesis in the generative power of the phallus.

It's important to remember this when it's pointed out that Jewish anthropologists and rabbis acknowledge that the removal of the foreskin in the formative ritual of Judaism transforms the uncircumcised penis (which has no religious connotation) into the religious artifact known as the "phallus." -----The Jewish ritual makes the penis appear "ithyphallic." -----By removing the foreskin in its quintessential religious ritual, Judaism reveals the corona and frenular-delta which are otherwise utterly invisible in un-circumcision (since even in the sex act the skin is only pulled back when the phallus enters its domain where it can't be seen). Brit milah makes the revelation of the corona and the frenular-delta into a permanent state thereby transforming an uncircumcised penis (the natural organ as it appears at birth) into the religious artifact known as the "phallus." ------In this sense, modern Judaism, by gathering around a natural (uncircumcised) penis, as it's transformed into a phallus (appearing permanently ithyphallic), situates modern Judaism as the last viable offspring of the ancient phallic cults.

On the other hand, the often heard suggestion that Christianity is just one more manifestation of the pagan idea of divine incarnation, is just as uneducated, and misguided, as is the unwillingness to recognize modern Judaism's pagan roots and pedigree. Throughout the Gospels and the Apostolic Writings, Jesus is portrayed not as having been sired by a an ithyphallic phallus, a man-god (as in the case of the pagans), but rather, Jesus is fancied born of a virgin who never knew a man, nor a man-god; she knew no man, hooded, un-hooded, or otherwise. Jesus is the product of the "seed of the woman" as that product would exist if the ovum began to divide without the help of a man. ------In botany this is a very natural process producing a facsimile of the original seed which in Jesus' case is the original flesh of Adam.

You can find the graft union on a tree by looking for a diagonal scar on the tree's trunk between six and 12 inches above the ground. Every part of the tree below the graft union comes from the rootstock tree; the trunk, branches and fruit emerge from the scion cultivar. When root suckers appear beneath the graft union, the growth comes from the rootstock tree, not the cultivar. If you allow that shoot growth to develop into a tree, it will have the characteristics of the rootstock tree, not the cultivar. For example, if you plant a Fuji that has been grafted onto a crabapple rootstock, sucker shoots left to develop will produce crabapples, not Fujis.

http://homeguides.sfgate.com/suckers...ees-65615.html

You can find the graft on the human tree of life by looking for a vertical-scar (the penile-raphe) on the tree's trunk between six and ten inches long (depending on the size of the tree). The penile-raphe is literally the place where the flesh of Adam was grafted together to form the first phallus. -----This natural suture (the penile-raphe) is the scar marking the original and nefarious graft of Adam and the Serpent (Sanhedrin 38b; Midrash Rabbah, Bereshith, XVII, 6; Genesis 2:21). This original graft is the original sin of desecrating God's perfect creation for the sake of sexual mixing.

Once the phallus is produced through demonic graft, everything produced by this graft is the "cultivar" of the graft itself, and not the fruit of the original root-stock. This tree, the phallus, grafted (as a “scion”) onto non-genital flesh (non-gendered flesh), produces its own fruit, and not the fruit of the root-stock it's grafted onto. The root-stock, prelapse Adam, doesn't exist any longer so far as the produce of the tree is concerned. The root of the original human produces no fruit. The graft has taken over the production of all fruit. The phallus produces sin (the evil inclination) and death, wherever its fruit is procured.

If the penile-raphe is the graft-scar, and it is, then what’s the root-stock beneath? If we answer that, we're onto the source of the original fruit from Adam's pre-desecrated flesh.

The flesh sutured together to form the penis is originally, on the original human body, the labial flesh behind which would otherwise be the "seed of the woman” (the ovum). This implies that it’s the "seed of the woman" that’s the unsullied root-stock of humanity. The postlapsarian “seed of the woman” merely requires oogenesis to cleanse it from its contact with the graft that produced Cain. What lies beneath the graft-scar, on the natural body (designed prior to Genesis 2:21), is the female ovum which in this case isn’t really the ovum of a female, but the flesh of the original, non-gendered, body of Adam. It's the original root of the original human being.

Everything from the "scion cultivar" (the grafted flesh) produces the fruit of the graft, i.e., the fruit of the phallus, i.e., sin and death. ------But, and Isaiah reveals this in chapter 11, if the grafted tree is cut down to a stump, and a "sucker" (a basal-shoot חוטר) grows out of the root-stock גזע, then this "sucker" has nothing whatsoever to do with the "scion cultivar" (the graft), but is an identical facsimile, a clone, of the root-stock itself.

What Genesis chapter 17 (interpreted through Isaiah 11) reveals is that the tree and forest associated with the scion cultivar (the grafted flesh) is going to be razed to the ground and a sucker is going to grow out of the original root-stock of the human race (Isaiah 10:33-34), at which point branches from this sucker (from the original Tree of Life) are going to be pruned to become the new "scion cultivar" (represented by the tzitzit) grafted on where the first scion cultivar is removed through circumcision. This new graft is going to produce a new graft-scar that's now horizontal rather than vertical. The new graft-scar crosses (so to say) perpendicular to the original graft-scar creating the "sign” of the renewed covenant.

As the sages remark over and over again, when the flesh of the first scion cultivar is removed, the resulting scar will create the "sign" of the covenant. The horizontal scar (from the mohel) crosses the vertical scar (from the first manufacture of the scion cultivar, Gen. 2:21) creating a perfect Latin cross on the backside of the organ of the covenant thereby symbolizing the true Tree of Life which is the Cross producing the fruit of eternal life for all those who can swallow the foregoing (which is the third stage of the ritual foregoing: "metzitzah b'peh").

The first place to start in an examination of penis-cutting, or penile ornamentation, is the etymology of the ritualistic practices. The deepest strata of the human collective-subconscious is most nakedly revealed in the rituals and symbols of the least modernized tribes and peoples of the world. This etymology exists most obviously and unadorned where it hasn't been distorted by modernization (e.g., the evolution from hieroglyphic to demotic) where it hasn’t been transformed into, and used almost exclusively for, ethnicity publicizing pabulum.

Evil was not part of man, but an outside force he could easily avoid. This was represented by the Serpent in the Garden, which was not part of man's makeup, but something outside of him. Man could debate with this evil or ignore it, like any other outside force. Evil urges and compulsions were not part of him, as they are now, so that now he cannot escape them, no matter where he goes.

Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, Waters of Eden.

It is a well known fact that in almost every culture the serpent represents some sort of phallic symbol. To a large degree then, the serpent represents sexual temptation. Our sages teach us that the main temptation the serpent used to lure Eve was that of sex.

Rabbi Aryeh Kaplan, Tzitzith: A Thread of Light.

Because of the Jewish epistemological (and hermeneutical) prejudice not to connect the dots on their rituals and theology you see things like the statements above whenever you study Jewish thought. Rabbi Kaplan spreads these two ideas out over two different books not connecting the two statements in the manner that lays bear their interconnection. ------Evil, represented by the serpent, which in almost every culture represents the phallus, was not part of man's original make up, but something outside of, and external to, his person. ------This is a fair paraphrase of Rabbi Kaplan's two statements and ends up being nearly parallel to the point made throughout a number of recent essays: Adam didn't have a phallus; the serpent wasn't part of the original paraphernalia on the human body. Genesis 2:21 is where the phallus is manufactured on Adam's body at precisely the time Eve was manufactured as a place to park the new appendage.

Subincision (like circumcision) is widespread[citation needed] in the traditional cultures of Indigenous Australians, and is well documented  . . . as a rite of passage ritual for adolescent boys.[1]. . A subincised penis is thought to resemble a vulva, and the bleeding is likened to menstruation.[2]

Wikipedia explains that a subincised penis is thought to resemble a vulva, and the bleeding is likened to menstruation, while anthropologist Eric Kline Silverman says, "It seems difficult not to discern a similarity between the purification ceremony and circumcision. Both rites represent male menstruation. . . circumcision created a man who was a better woman" (Silverman, 2006, p. 80). ------ Circumcision somehow transforms the Jewish man back into a woman. As has been stated over and over again, the prototype human body was either what we now consider "female," or was at least un-gendered, unencumbered with the fleshly serpent. More than once Rabbi Kaplan has said that circumcision, in some manner he claims not to be able to understand, makes the circumcisee like Adam prior to the Fall.

If cutting the penis symbolizes making it a vulva, or eliminating its masculine dimensions, then human reproduction, human regeneration, is freed from dual gender, and thus sex, and returned to that perfect state that's desecrated when the rise of the phallus leads to the Fall, Cain, and all his offspring. ------Augustine said: "Only when a Jew comes over to Christ, is he no longer Cain." ------Which is the same for everyone of us since we're all born of both Cain's seed and Adam's originally endowed flesh. The trick is merely to get rid of the duality of Cain and prelapse Adam, get rid of gender, such that both a subincised penis (a penis ritually transformed into a vulva) and a circumcised penis (a penis ritually removed) signify the elimination of the great guilt buried deep in the psyche of the human race where it archives our dark genesis and exodus from Eden.

. . . the Talmud offers a double rationale for the location of circumcision on the penis and nowhere else: one the penis is the part of the (male) body that distinguishes male from female and, two it is the fruitful part of the male body. I contend that the intermittent foregrounding of this symbol of maleness/fruitfulness reinforces a major dynamic of the patriarchal narrative -- namely, the increasing importance of the institutionalized system of patrilineal dissent, a system that ultimately overwhelms vestiges of matrilocality and matrilineal dissent. At strategic points in the story, the phallic trope reiterates its “subliminally insistent” iconic flashes until, finally, the descendants of Jacob are imagined as emerging not from the wombs of mothers but from the penis of the patriarch. They are yotsei yerekh Yaakov, “those who went out of Jacob’s `thigh’ (yerekh)” (Gen. 46:26; Exod. 1:5).

As a sign of male fecundity, circumcision memorializes the transforming moment when Abram, separated by God’s order, from his own father’s house, becomes the primogenitor Abraham who is to be “father to a multitude of nations” (Gen. 17:4). We shall see that as the patriarchal saga progresses toward the climactic escape of Abraham’s grandson Jacob from the household of his mother’s family, followed almost immediately by his naming as Israel, there are diminishing traces of matrilineal and matrilocal traditions in the text. Along the three-generation journey to Israelite nation-hood that follows the commandment to circumcise, the echoing pattern of phallocentric incidents includes the oath on Abraham’s yerekh, the wounding of Jacobs yerekh, the circumcision of the males of Shechem, and the oath on Jacob’s yerekh. Finally, near the end of the Book of Genesis and once again at the beginning of the Book of Exodus, we have that definition of the Israelite clans as emanations of the yerekh of Jacob. Bridging the two biblical books and a narrative gap of hundreds of years, the repeated citation of Jacob’s thigh as the Israelites’ biological source focuses attention on the patriarchal line of descent. As the people of Israel begin their wanderings, this reminder of their origin in Jacob’s phallus, with its sign of God’s covenant, links the final patriarch to the future generations of fathers and sons whose bodies will be marked with the same sign.

Professor Elizabeth Wyner Mark, Wounds, Vows, Emanations.

The seemingly strange idea that scripture could be speaking of Jewish patriarchs producing their young from their "thigh" (long known to be a euphemism for the phallus) unveils secrets concerning the founding ritual of the Jewish people that are finally coming out from behind the skene of modesty and weak exegesis and into the foreground of recent studies of the seminal ritual. Professor Mark says:

While this recurrent phallic imagery might be obvious to readers in diligent pursuit of patterns of textual repetition, for the more casual reader the euphemisms of an ancient tradition of modesty may make the pattern almost invisible. Of course, the ancient audience, attuned to the literary conventions of their time, readily understood that thighs, hips, legs, loins [loincloths], and other nearby body parts are often stand-ins for the genital organs, but for us this image substitution may hide meaningful self-references in the text, especially when translation adds its own layer of concealment. Moreover, our present-day discomfiture with the reverence our ancient forebears displayed toward the circumcised penis creates a subconscious aversion to lifting certain semantic veils. We would rather keep our usual discreet terminology in the case of, for example, "the oath on the thigh" than face the frank image conveyed by the unveiled alternative: a man pledging a solemn vow while holding the penis of one of the patriarchs of Judaism.

Professor Elizabeth Wyner Mark, "Phallic Trope in the Patriarchal Narrative."

The Professor's statement concerning the "lifting of certain semantic veils," in parallel to the lifting of the quintessential veil, removed in the founding of the covenant, couldn't be more nakedly clear since this ritual lifting of the most important religious veil hides, perhaps even in the lifting of the veil, the singularly most important knowledge mankind will ever gain concerning his past, present and future. Justifying this claim is the work of the Professor (Elliot R. Wolfson) most diligently in pursuit of the patterns associated with the unveiling and covering up long associated with brit milah. In his most recent work on ritual circumcision, Professor Wolfson has come as close as any Jew can come to uncovering the meaning of the sign of the covenant without cutting so deep into the spirit of the ritual that the flesh where the sign is located is lost to the ravages of the exegetical cutting (which Professor Wolfson has himself paralleled with the actual cutting of the flesh).

Professor Wolfson has long made the fruitful connection between the literary produce of the pen, versus what the pen-is (and produces), in biological re-production. Long ago, in Circle in the Square, Professor Wolfson established the relationship between the two kinds of production and produce:

. . . It is clear that the zoharic authorship, consistent with standard medieval views, reflecting in turn ancient Greco-Roman as well as Near Eastern cultural assumptions, identified the writing instrument (pen or chisel) with the phallus, on one hand, and the tablet or page with the female on the other. It is evident from other zoharic passages that the act of engraving---which signifies in its most elemental sense the process of forming or giving shape by digging out space from slabs of matter ---is understood in sexual terms as phallic penetration . . . (p. 62).

It may be concluded from these and other passages that in zoharic literature engraving letters, or more generally the process of writing or inscription, is a decidedly erotic activity: the active agent of writing is the male principle; the written letters are the semen virile, and the tablet or page upon which the writing is accomplished is the female principle. . . It is obvious, therefore, that the letters must be seen as the semen that the male imparts to the female. (p. 68).

Within the realm of writing, scripturally speaking, there are two fundamental genus: the sacred-glyph (hieroglyph), and the demotic word or letter associated with the pen. A sacred-glyph is different from a demotic word (or letter) in the important sense that the hieroglyph is an image of a tangible thing being used to produce an idea, or thought. In the hieroglyph, the idea, or thought, is still housed in the tangible image (from the natural world) that the sacred-glyph uses for the purpose of producing a thought. The hieroglyph is literally the incarnation of idea, or thought, with the thing (from the natural world) being used to produce the thought or idea. At the stage of the hieroglyph, the tangible and the intangible aren't yet separated. A sacred-thought, produced in a hieroglyphic sense, isn’t first separated from the tangible body where it’s hidden.

As I have suggested at length elsewhere, circumcision especially expresses the phallic nature of writing, for through this ritual the letter/sign of the covenant (`ot berit) is inscribed on the flesh. The incision on the penis of the infant boy is the first act of writing, which all other acts of writing emulate (p. 75-76).

Professor Wolfson implies something very important here, which comes into full bloom only in his more contemporary writings concerning circumcision. Professor Wolfson explicitly, or implicitly, consciously, or subconsciously, implies what is the case, and case in point, that the writing on the flesh of the male Jew on the eighth day represents the original act of writing such that the seminal question arises whether this writing on the flesh of the male Jew is hieroglyphic or demotic? If demotic, then the writing of brit milah severs the unity of tangible thing and idea from the sacred-glyph, producing the first demotic letter or word. . . If hieroglyphic, the writing of brit milah creates a sacred-glyph that's a picture, or pictogram, of some tangible thing (from the natural world) that the glyph, or image, uses to produce the thought, or idea, born of the act of writing. . . . Is brit milah, as the seminal act of writing, the act of a priest producing a sacred-glyph (as we would expect) or the act of a writer/amanuensis producing the demotic separation that severs the written word from it's source in the sacred-glyph? Does the mohel connect the word or letter written in the flesh with a tangible image from the natural world, or is his act the severing of a thought, or idea, from the tangible thing first associated with ideas and thoughts. ------Is the mohel's act evolution or priestly evocation? Ontological, or meontololgical?

Priestly evocation would be the yad revealing the sign (sacred-glyph) without depositing anything in order to do so. The tool used to create a hieroglyph removes material hiding the unity of thing/material and sign, while it, the tool, leaves nothing of itself behind. Demotic writing (using what a pen-is), on the other hand, is evolutionary. The pen leaves ink or lead or some medium unique to the pen on the page or parchment.

Unlike the word written by the pen, the hieroglyph is ontological in the sense that the material veil hiding the sacred-glyph is, like the foreskin in the ritual in question, originally considered part and parcel of the truth hidden by the intact nature of the material the yad removes. Prior to the creation of the hieroglyph the stone where the glyph is cut is thought to be one thing rather than two: sign and material. Similarly, in the meontological stage of Jewish monotheism, God is thought to be a singular hypostasis rather than his apparent singularity hiding deeper aspects of theological reality.

In the case of the hieroglyph, the "sign" is the male-element, while the material is female. The female is opened up not to deposit something from the male, but to reveal that the "sign" (male) was in the female all along. On the other hand, in the case of the pen, it is itself the male depositing its male element in or on the page "creating" something from the union of male and female which doesn't exist prior to this form of gender mixing. The hieroglyph reveals a hidden unity of male and female that's ontological, original, whereas the written word "creates" a unity that requires that the pen and paper come together (in an evolutionary fashion) to form what, until that unity, doesn't exist: Cain.

The hieroglyph requires only that the material be opened to reveal what's hidden in the material from the get-go. The pen doesn't so much reveal an ontic fact, as it's the case that it creates a new state of evolutionary affairs dependent on the pen unifying with the parchment, paper, or page.

So which is it? Does the mohel reveal a sign hidden beneath the foreskin that was there from the get-go, and is only hidden, until something originally part of the penis is removed to reveal something formerly hidden? Or does the mohel deposit something, create, archive, something, on the flesh of the penis, that makes the mohel part and parcel of what he creates (the revelation) in associated with his actions? Is the mohel a revealer, or a creator; writer or amanuensis? Does he merely uncover the revelation? Or are his actions part and parcel of the actual creation and existence of the revelation?



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