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Antiquity, free from the modern attitude that makes demarcations between what is obscene and what is not so, venerated the sexual act, and its symbolic representation of the phallus, as significant of the universal sense of generation and procreation. As a consequence, all sexual, all amatory performances, references, allusions were accepted as an integral element in human life, and involved no intrusive image of salaciousness, prurience, lewdness.

This phallic reverence, in its widest and most sweeping sense, was especially prevalent among the ancient Greeks. But it was not confined to this people. It was prevalent in Asia Minor, among the Hittites and the Sumerians, the Accadians and the Parthians, the Medes and the Babylonians and the Phoenicians. It was prevalent in Egypt and the North African littoral, and it was equally prevalent along the Mediterranean coastal regions. In the Far East, particularly but not exclusively in India, the cult of the phallus was a devout religious experience, equated with the dominant cults of the cosmic deities.