About the Author

Hargrave Jennings (1817-1890) was an English cleric and author whose studies of comparative religion played an important role in the development of Western interest in sex magic during the Victorian era. A Freemason and Rosicrucian, he numbered among his friends the American sex magician and occult writer Paschal Beverly Randolph. In addition to covering subjects such as Rosicrucianism, Hinduism, and Buddhism in his books, Jennings drew on the works of predecessors, such as Richard Payne Knight, to develop at length his theory that all religions, including Christianity, Hinduism, and Buddhism, ultimately derive from an ancient phallic worship, which he properly called "phallism." Unlike many modern authors, for whom he word "phallic" implies the male penis, Jennings used the word "phallic" in its non-gendered sense, meaning "relating to the sexual organs". For this reason, in addition to citing examples of religions which featured worship of the male genitalia, he studied those in which the worship of the female genitalia and the worship of human sexual union were practiced. Jennings did not limit his description of phallic religions to representations of genitalia or human coitus; he also wrote extensively on the human tendency to utilize natural things, such as snakes, the Sun, fish, and fire as symbols of phallism, and, with the establishment of sacred architecture in prehistoric times, to create specific forms of consecrated structures that had a phallic character, including megaliths, wells, obelisks, and the round towers of Ireland. He was particularly interested in the erotic temple architecture of India, but did not overlook even the humble phallic charmstones of California native tribes. His relish for these matters might seem unexpected in a Christian minister of his time period, but Jennings apparently saw no moral contradiction between studying the Bible and writing enthusiastic descriptions of lingam-in-yoni artifacts from India. In addition to the works to which he affixed his own name, Jennings is thought by some researchers to have written a number of anonymous volumes in the limited edition and privately printed "Nature Worship and Mystical Series", and possibly also to have written under the pseudonym "Sha Rocco."