ribes of Central Africa both boys and girls after
initiation must as soon as possible have intercourse." Initiation being
not merely preliminary to, but often ACTUALLY marriage. The same
among Kaffirs, Congo tribes, Senegalese, etc. Also among the Arunta of
Australia.

(5) Professor Diederichs has said that "in much ancient ritual it
was thought that mystic communion with the deity could be obtained
through the semblance of sex-intercourse--as in the Attis-Cybele
worship, and the Isis-ritual." (Farnell.) Reitzenstein says (op. cit.,
p. 20.) that the Initiates, like some of the Christian Nuns at a later
time, believed in union with God through receiving the seed.

(6) Farnell, op. cit., iii. 176. Messrs. Gardner and Jevons, in
their Manual of Greek Antiquities, above-quoted, compare the Eleusinian
Mysteries favorably with some of the others, like the Arcadian, the
Troezenian, the Aeginaean, and the very primitive Samothracian:
saying (p. 278) that of the last-mentioned "we know little, but safely
conjecture that in them the ideas of sex and procreation dominated EVEN
MORE than in those of Eleusis."

After all it is pretty clear that the early peoples saw in Sex the great
cohesive force which kept (we will not say Humanity but at any rate)
the Tribe together, and sustained the race. In the stage of simple
Consciousness this must have been one of the first things that the
budding intellect perceived. Sex became one of the earliest divinities,
and there is abundant evidence that its organs and processes generally
were invested with a religious sense of awe and sanctity. It was in fact
the symbol (or rather the actuality) of the permanent undying life
of the race, and as such was sacred to the uses of the race. Whatever
taboos may have, among different peoples, guarded its operations, it
was not essentially a thing to be concealed, or ashamed of. Rather the
contrary. For instance the early Christian writer, Hippolytus, Bishop of
Pontus (A.D. 200), in his Refutation of all Heresies, Book V, says that
the Samothracian Mysteries, just mentioned, celebrate Adam as the
primal or archetypal Man eternal in the heavens; and he then continues:
"Habitually there stand in the temple of the Samothracians two images
of naked men having both hands stretched aloft towards heaven, and their
pudenda turned upwards, as is also the case with the statue of Mercury
on Mt. Cyllene. And the aforesaid images are figures of the primal man,
an