iests
ever since the fall of the Aztec Empire! Take the case of the Peruvians.
Although the Place of Gold and the beautiful Virgins of the Sun are not
even memories to the descendants of the Incas, the religion which gave
rise to them is not wholly forgotten; "phallic rites and ceremonies are
to be observed interwoven with their Christian ritual and belief!" Take
the case of the Roman Catholic devotees of Isernia, of Varailles, of
Lyons, of hundreds of other places during the latter half of the
eighteenth century. Priapus died when the first Christian emperor took
his seat on the throne of Imperial Rome, and yet, hundreds and hundreds
of years thereafter, we behold some of the mysteries of Eleusis almost
within the shadow of St. Peter's!

[103] Biart: _The Aztecs_, p. 110.

Now, why is this? There can be but one answer, and that is that these
people simply inherited a portion of the _psychos_ of their
forefathers, which made the tenets of this religion natural and easy of
belief. I have demonstrated, I believe, that religious feeling was not a
psychical trait in the beginning; like a number of other mental
attributes, it was the result of evolution.[104] Mental abstraction,
especially as associated with religious feeling, was the result of
psychical growth, of psychically inherited experiences.[AH] As _psychos_
grew beneath the fostering influence of ages of experience, the mind
became able to formulate abstract thought. In the beginning, the process
of ratiocination was, necessarily, very simple; but, simple as it was,
it was able to recognize the source of life--first, in the sun, then, in
the second place, in man himself; and, finally and _abstractly_, in a
source outside of, but connected with, man. This abstract source, which
sprung from sexuality, _ab initio_, they deified and worshiped. Thus we
see that, in the very beginning, the worship of the generative principle
sprung from, and was a part of, man himself. Throughout thousands and
thousands of years, religious feeling and sexual desire, the component
parts of phallic adoration, were intimately associated; finally,
religio-sexuality became an instinct, just as a belief in the existence
of a double or soul became an instinct.

[104] Huxley: _Essays_; Haeckel: _The History of Creation_;
Haeckel: _The Evolution of Man_; Peschel: _The Races of Man_; De
Quatrefages: _The Human Species_; Draper: _The Conflict Between
Religion and Science_