[137] He further argues that the primitive object of
various savage peoples in practicing circumcision, as other similar
mutilations, is really to secure sexual attractiveness, whatever religious
significance they may sometimes have developed subsequently. A more recent
view represents the magical influence of both adornment and mutilation as
primary, as a method of guarding and insulating dangerous bodily
functions. Frazer, in _The Golden Bough_, is the most able and brilliant
champion of this view, which undoubtedly embodies a large element of
truth, although it must not be accepted to the absolute exclusion of the
influence of sexual attractiveness. The two are largely woven in
together.[138]
There is, indeed, a general tendency for the sexual functions to take on a
religious character and for the sexual organs to become sacred at a very
early period in culture. Generation, the reproductive force in man,
animals, and plants, was realized by primitive man to be a fact of the
first magnitude, and he symbolized it in the sexual organs of man and
woman, which thus attained to a solemnity which was entirely independent
of purposes of sexual allurement. Phallus worship may almost be said to be
a universal phenomenon; it is found even among races of high culture,
among the Romans of the Empire and the Japanese to-day; it has, indeed,
been thought by some that one of the origins of the cross is to be found
in the phallus.
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