For tens of thousands of years, the phallus was seen not simply as something to stick in a hole to relieve sexual tension or to impregnate a woman, but was worshipped as the sacred symbol of man's creative power. Representations of the phallus were everywhere, in temples and festivals, on street corners and in front of houses, mounted on chariots in triumphal processions, even in the wind chimes or tintinnabula of Roman homes. Male sexual energy was revered and treated with awe. And, it has aptly been said of those years that they were a time when men had sex with men for pleasure, and with women for procreation.

delos

Look for example at this image of a phallus from the Greek sanctuary of Delos.

Before it was attacked by Christian zealots, the phallus itself was about 6 feet long. Notice the phallic bird -- a common image in the ancient world -- on the base. On the other sides of the base are scenes of men worshipping the phallus.

herm

Such images were ubiquitous in the ancient world. This is a "herm" -- a statue of the god Hermes with an erection. These herms stood before houses and at every important cross-roads in ancient cities like Athens.

Below is a multi-phallic Roman tintinnabulum or windchime.

satyr

Among the Greeks, images of erect satyrs were commonplace.

priapus

While the Romans both worshipped Priapus, a god whose huge cock was a symbol of fertility and abundance, and celebrated genius, the male's innate generative spirit.

And I'll be showing you many more of these phallic objects in The Greeks.

So men in the ancient world were surrounded by images of sacred phallus.

And it's essential for contemporary men to recapture that sense of the phallus as sacred. For if we understand that the phallus is sacred, we'll realize that it's not to be misused to spread disease or for empty, meaningless sex, but rather to connect physically with the creative power of another man in the awesome and cosmic act of phallic mating, the ultimate celebration of the male-male bond.

The power of phallic mating has been celebrated in myth for millennia, in images that are universal.

Take for example the ancient symbol known to us today by its Greek name, the caduceus, the wand with two mating snakes that was held by Hermes, trickster spirit and conductor of souls, and that has come down to us in the symbol of healing found in every physician's office.

Long before the Greeks, the snake, which sheds its skin, was a symbol of immortality and rebirth, and in cultures worldwide snakes, revered as symbolic of nature's divine life, were the consorts of the Earth Mother.

Heterosexual scholars have therefore assumed that the caduceus is a representation of heterosexed snake mating.

But I've seen snakes mating, come upon rattlers humping and thumping their way through the hot, dry chaparral of the coastal mountains of California. They don't look remotely like anything, animal or human, heterosexual.

They are phallic, and their union is sensuous, ardent, and bestial, an act of pure phallic mating.

It's not like anything else I've ever seen, except cock2cock. And I don't believe that ancient peoples, who didn't have our prejudice against homosex, didn't see it the same way.

Look at these images of the double-headed snake: for example, The Sumerian Serpent Lord Ningizzida, Lord of the Tree of Truth:

the serpent lord - an image of cock2cock from ancient Sumeria

a caduceus -- used by Hermes to conduct souls to the underworld; notice how the wings give it the appearance of a tree

a Spartan herald's staff - the beards tell us that both snakes are male

Now compare:

That is the secret of the snakes. That is the power of Hermes' staff.

To see snakes mating as I and the ancients did, twisting, writhing, slamming into each other, their forked tongues like piss slits spitting venomous prejizz, their twined bodies moving slowly and sensually back through the undergrowth, is to be vouchsafed a vision of pure cock energy, of pure phallus to phallus.

What is seen is at once a mystery and a revelation, pure phallic mating, unadulterated cock force suddenly made manifest in the nonhuman, natural world.

It fills your soul with awe and wonder, just as it has for thousands of years, for it's a symbol of both creation and renewal.

That's why Hermes holds the caduceus as he conducts souls to the afterlife: the creative union of snake with snake and phallus with phallus produces the world healing force of rebirth.

That's why we so often find, in warrior cultures, the snake as a symbol of male parthenogenesis, the mythic ability of the male to rebirth the male as a man and a warrior.

boeotian hoplite

And it's not surprising therefore that the serpent is so often the warrior's symbol, emblazoned on their shields or worn about their necks, as it was for the Spartoi, descendants of the culture-hero Cadmus, who sowed the python's teeth and harvested living warriors.

Or as it was for Hashmonean (Judean) soldiers fighting the Greeks in a war of independence:

This is a type of deity known to scholars as the snake-footed god, and these amulets were found on the bodies of Jewish soldiers killed fighting the Seleucid Greeks around 164 BCE.

Note that the god is often cock-headed, snake-footed, and erect.

celtic warrior

Similarly, Celtic warriors wore a torque, another two-headed snake symbol.

While even today the snake remains the most potent symbol of masculine power:

The World Tree

This symbol of the phallus and phallic mating often combines with another phallic symbol, that of the world tree.

This image is from Sassanid Persia, sometime between 200 and 600 AD. The tree, mounted by the snake, stands between the sun and the moon.

Once again, this is a universal symbol. For example, in this medieval European version, the tree, still flanked by the sun and the moon, has now become frankly phallic:

13th Century European Alchemy Text

And among some gnostic Christians, the serpent and Christ are identical, while the tree becomes the cross:

(The symbolism of this Renaissance medallion is complex. The snake on the cross may refer to the bronze idol erected by the Hebrews during the exodus from Egypt, but it more probably refers to an heretical gnostic doctrine in which the serpent mediates between God the True Father and suffering humanity, and in which the body of the Christ who dies on the cross isn't human, but is just a projection of the true mediator who dwells elsewhere and everywhere, untouched by pain and suffering.)

In aboriginal cultures, this tree is said to be smooth, as though covered with human skin, and stretches from beneath the earth's crust to the vault of the sky. In the Aranda warrior initiation rite of circumcision and sub-incision, the adolescent warrior embraces the symbol of that tree just before his dick is cut, consecrating him and his phallus to the warrior way.

The cosmic tree takes many forms - for the Aranda a phallic pole, as I've just described, smooth, covered by skin; for the Hawaiians a tree of life and death, green on one side and rotting on the other; for Buddhists the Bodhi, that Tree of Cosmic Awakening at the center of both the psyche and the universe; for Teutonic peoples the World Ash, itself a counterpart to the Judeo-Christian Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil and of Life and Death, and the Christian Tree of Jesse, the Cross, on which Christ, true man and true god, hangs, as does Odin on the World Ash (Yggdrisal), a sacrifice to himself.

Warrior Brett with his dick out at Phallic Rock

The phallic contest is a common theme. In Oceanic myth for example, Maui, the Polynesian Herakles-Hercules-Thor, does cock battle with a great sea-dwelling eel, Te Tuna, whose name means, simply, The Phallus. (Maui, by the way, boasts of his lop-sided dick.)

This picture is of Phallic Rock on Molokai, scene of ancient Hawaiian warrior rituals.

In the Ring of the Niebelungen, an ancient Teutonic myth, the world-saving hero Siegfried does battle with a dragon or Wurm, here represented by the brilliant late-Victorian illustrator Arthur Rackham as frankly phallic:

Siegfried then uses his new sword to slay the phallic dragon. Note how the "smoke" shooting from Fafner at the moment of death resembles the ejaculate shooting from the following pic.

Similarly, in the great medieval romance of Parzival, the guardian of the Grail, Anfortas, is incurably wounded by a lance thrust through his testicles by his heathen opponent.

And in the well-known Ojibway corn myth, a spirit in the form of a handsome young man wrestles nude with the adolescent Ojibway warrior Wunzh who is on a vision quest; Wunzh kills the spirit, who instructs him to bury his dismembered body -- and from it grows maize.

But the phallic battle does not necessarily result in the destruction of the combatants.

In the famous Egyptian doctrine called "The Secret of the Two Partners," pharoah reveals that the gods and half-brothers Seth and Horus, seemingly locked in eternal strife, are also joined in eternal harmony, that their battle masks the reality of their unity.

Similarly, in both Valhal and the Hawaiian afterlife, warriors go out daily to fight and fell each other, returning at night to be refreshed and revived with ambrosial food, and then awakening the next day to fight again.

This vision of the cosmic joust at the root of the great phallic world-creating and supporting tree is one that is immediately understandable to men into cock combat, for it speaks to the recreative aspect of the masculine contest.

cock battle

Further, we need to recognize the potentially world-healing power of cock combat, and its symbols of joust and union.

Male aggressive energy is at the root of virtually all warfare, most violent crime, and most domestic violence, while in the contemporary world male promiscuity is the instrument of dissemination of increasingly severe sexually transmitted diseases.

Of course some of that male aggressive energy has survival value -- without it, we would have been in a very bad way after the recent terrorist attacks -- and so it seems unlikely male aggression will ever be wiped clean from the human genome.

Moreover, male aggression, and natural male sex aggression, can be expressed and safely satisfied in frot and cock war.

Cock combat contact sports, including boxing and wrestling, redirect male aggressive energy and sexuality into a form which is both affiliative and safe. Men into sex wrestling and boxing understand that at the end of the match, aggressive energies are expended and that through frottage they achieve a comradely bond with their opponent. And frottage itself permits a safe yet celebratory release of semen.

sex wrestlers
art by erosv

In order to survive, then, our species and its cultures will have to recognize and celebrate anew the ancient concept of the phallus, one that acknowledges its divinity and its capacity for both destruction and life, and that honors phallus-to-phallus sex as the highest expression of the male spirit.

For if men understand that the phallus is sacred, we will understand too that it is not to be misused to spread disease or for empty, meaningless sex, but rather to connect physically and spiritually with the creative power of another man, to unite through phallic mating, an act that is literally awesome and cosmic.

The concept of masculinity has been damaged by a mis-identification, encouraged by some elements of the Women's Movement, of masculine qualities with patriarchy, and by a confusion of true masculinity, which is the ability to act effectively in the world, with machismo, which is an exaggeratedly "male" posturing that covers up insecurities and weakness.

masculine, not macho

The wisdom of the ages has taught that part of the male's life task is to integrate his masculinity with his hidden feminine self, that is his nurturing, intuitive, and feeling qualities. While it is the woman's to cultivate the masculine ability to be effective in the world.

But neither is supposed to give up the essential, biologically-rooted qualities of their sex. Thus women are to remain nurturers, men effective actors.

We can see the failure of contemporary feminism when we look at the sort of women we are all too apt to meet in corporate America, who've had to surrender any sense of nurturance in order to survive.

Similarly, among gay men there is a mistaken notion that somehow masculinity is politically incorrect, and that gay men must respect effeminacy.

Yet the fact is that most gay men are denied masculinity twice, first in growing up, when they are labeled or label themselves gay and thus less than masculine, and then when they come out or are turned out in to a gay male culture that inculcates self hate through effeminacy and anal sex.

The result is men whose sense of their masculinity is weak, and who incorporate an image of femininity that's not nurturing, but is rather a parody of the feminine - most clearly seen in drag, but heard from all the time in the her, she, miss mary language of gay men, and reinforced by the self-loathing bitchboy mancunt pussypunk stereotypes adopted by "bottoms."

Men into frot reject the false femininity and the top/bottom hierarchies of mainstream gay male anal culture.

Instead they value a relaxed and informed masculinity. They are at home with their maleness, and in sex most seek not to dominate their partner, but to play in a joyful though at times intense and even combative equality of phalluses. Nothing could be more different than these two concepts of sex, the one based on penetration and submission and an essentially male-female dichotomy, the other on male communion and celebration of the uniquely masculine act of phallic mating.

The heroic ethos values bravery, loyalty, and comradeship, while the hero himself is blessed with the twin virtues of courage and compassion.

And with simplicity as well. Like Siegfried, Parzival, the "Great Fool" who is the hero of the search for the Grail, is, according to Joseph Campbell, a "forthright, simple, uncorrupted, noble son of nature, without guile, strong in the purity of the yearning of his heart."

Through the months of gathering personal statements from the men in this club, what I've heard over and over is how deeply our warriors value the simplicity and naturalness of frot, and how strong they have remained, despite almost overwhelming pressure, in the purity of the yearning of their hearts for that one act, and for the one man with whom they can share it and their vision.

From the beginning I knew that purity and that yearning were there. That's why I asked in the Founder's Message, the very first statement I wrote for the club, "Do you sense or suspect that maybe, just maybe, there's something heroic about your dreams and your life and homosex and that somehow the stuff you love - the bodyrubbin, the cockrubbin, the frot, the wrestling - that maybe all that stuff is tied together?"

Because of course it is. Frot isn't just about sex. Frot is about life, about our lives, about who we most inwardly are.

At its heart is phallic loyalty, the opposite of anal promiscuity, and though some partnered men into frot may play sexually with others, their emotional loyalties to their lovers are clear and well-defined. At the same time, frot, in its innocence, equality, and naturalness, promotes a comradeship among partners that is far harder for those locked into the top-bottom hierarchies of anal to achieve.

So the heroic ideal expressed by men into frot is both brave and loyal, martial and true.

It stands in rebuke to the superficiality of mass gay anal culture, and its obsession with money, age, looks, race, and fame; and to the predatory promiscuity of anal, which leads inevitably to disease and unhappiness.

Men into frot know a better way.

As Cockrub Warriors, we acknowledge the divinity of the phallus, the strength of masculinity, and the power of the heroic. We embrace them all.

Bill Weintraub, March 2002

bill

© 2002 by Bill Weintraub. All rights reserved.