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Throughout every polis and colony and settlement of ancient Greece, and also in the regions of the Mediterranean littoral, in Egypt and the Middle East, the phallus was a symbol of veneration always associated with religious ritual, with hieratic traditions, and temple worship on a wide and enthusiastic scale.

In Greece, there were the phallic hermae, enormous phalli attached to pedestals, tree-trunks, boundary-markers. They were protective and apotropaic, and where the phalli appeared, there would credibly be fecundity and erotic consummation, generation and abundance, in man and beast and throughout the cosmic design.

The phallus was variously named Priapus and Tutunus and Mutunus and Fascinum and, in Hindu religious mythology, the lingam. Among the esoteric Gnostics, Jao, the sun-god, equipped with ithyphallic force, had properties akin to those of Priapus. Thus the generative, energizing organs of virility, of the cosmic erotic impulse and of its purpose, are, despite variations of name and epichorial traits and accretions, basically comprehended under one concept, in all proto-history, in verifiable history, and, by traditional progression, in later ages.