y whom he calls Dionysos--probably Khem or Osiris or Bes;
such images are mentioned by Plutarch,[721] supposed by him to represent
Osiris. Both Khem and Osiris were great gods, credited with general
creative power, and popular ceremonies of a phallicistic nature might
easily be attached to their cults. Bes, a less important deity, seems to
have been fashioned largely by popular fancy. These ceremonies were
doubtless attended with license,[722] but they probably formed no part
of Egyptian serious worship. The phallus was essential in a realistic
image, but it appears to have been regarded simply as a physical part of
the god or as an emblem of him; there is no evidence that worship was
addressed to it in itself.

+398+. The evidence that has been adduced for a cult of the phallus
among Semitic peoples is of a doubtful nature. No ithyphallic images or
figures of gods have been found. Religious prostitution there was in all
North Semitic lands,[723] but this is a wholly different thing from a
phallicistic cult. It is supposed, however, by not a few scholars that
descriptions and representations of the phallus occur in so many places
as to make some sort of cult of the object probable. In a passage of the
Book of Isaiah, descriptive of a foreign cult practiced, probably, by
some Jews, the phallus, it is held, is named.[724] The passage is
obscure. The nature and origin of the cult referred to are not clear; it
is not elsewhere mentioned. The word (_yad_, usually 'hand') supposed to
mean 'phallus' is not found in this sense elsewhere in the Old Testament
or in later Hebrew literature. But, if the proposed rendering be
adopted, the reference will be not to a cult of the phallus but to
sexual intercourse, a figurative description of idolatry.

+399+. A distinct mention of phalli as connected with religious worship
occurs in Pseudo-Lucian's description of the temple of a certain goddess
at Hierapolis.[725] He gives the name to enormously high structures
standing in the propylaea of the temple, but mentions no details
suggesting a phallic cult. Twice a year, he says, a man ascends one of
them, on the top of which he stays seven days, praying, as some think,
for a blessing on all Syria--a procedure suggesting that the pillar was
simply a structure consecrated to the deity of the place (probably
Atargatis, who is often called "the Syrian goddess")[726]. However, if
there was a phallic cult there (the phallus being regarded as a sy