Not just a cigar

Gods and goddesses from all over the ancient world were the sex pests of their time

Sex in the World of Myth David Leeming Reaktion Books 2018 Hb, 239pp, illus, bib, ind, £15.99, ISBN 9781780239774

Hailed in his lifetime as a fortean and restorer of timepieces – and overlooked today as a great stylist of the English language – Rupert Gould is now revealed as unintentional satirist. In his 1930s and ’40s BBC radio tales, Stargazer Talks, he referred to the Victoria Embankment’s 21m (69ft) penis as “jacked up” and “rolled down”. He was speaking about the transport of Cleopatra’s Needle to Westminster. Even at the time, there was little doubt that it was neither Cleopatra’s nor a needle. The granite spire was erected (ahem) in ancient Egypt some 14 centuries before Cleopatra was born. We moderns have styled it as an obelisk or stele but, to paraphrase Andy Griffith’s 1953 nightclub act, “What it was, was a penis.” Not in those words, but so says David Leeming, author of Sex in the World of Myth, a deft and fast-paced tour of religious thought dating to prehistory.

Yes, “there were giants in the earth in those days” and they came eagerly “unto the daughters of men”. And also unto sons of men. And sisters, brothers, fathers and mothers of men; the ‘Oedipus complex’ existed long before Oedipus.

The sculpted figures of ur-woman resemble the young Linsey Dawn McKenzie. But those are easily outdone by a phallus as large as its owner in the earliest known illustration of human coitus, dated 40,000 BC. Or perhaps that’s too generous a description; the partner she earnestly clasps is clearly a floppy-eared dog. Good boy.

Leeming’s survey would make Jacques Vallée alternately smile and grimace. There is enough room here for fairy changelings and alien abductions. Indeed, visitors stalking humanity seem part of a universal pattern laid down since prehistory. Except for the failure of modern flying saucer crews to update and further the ancient worldwide legend of vaginas with teeth. You go, girl!

The earliest philosophers seem to have judged the ultimate foundational act to be the creation of Life, the Universe and Everything. But instead of explaining it as Douglas Adams’s ‘42’, they almost uniformly equated cosmic invention with the act of procreation. It was recognised millennia before the microscope that men had some sort of seed and that women had some sort of, um, wet and fertile pastureland. Something like the Nile in spring. And don’t let’s go into vulvas and landscaped country mounds in both hemispheres.

Besides Greeks and Romans, the author handles Canaan, India, Celts and Norsemen, China, Japan, Oceania and the aboriginal Americans. Many of the myths are pleasant and pastoral. Still, everywhere are t*ts, c*cks and high drama that make gods and goddesses often seem little better than equalopportunity rapists.

Freud supposedly said that “Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar”. But Leda and the Swan and the Minotaur, are just – well, tales relating to other kinds of cigars. With masturbation and castration thrown in. And that’s just classical history.

This is a highly recommended survey of how throughout time we have imagined the creation of Earth and its life in terms of our own procreation.

Jay Rath

★★★★ ★