entered into systems of religious worship.

+386+. The relation of vegetable life to religious cults is referred to
elsewhere,[706] and a brief survey may now be given of usages and ideas
that have been connected with the production of human life.

+387+. It is obvious that not all customs that include the function of
generation are of the nature of religious observances. The promiscuity
that obtains in many savage communities before marriage is a naive
unreflective animal procedure. Exchange of wives (as in Central
Australia) and the offering of a wife to a guest are matters of social
etiquette. Festivals in which sexual license is the rule are generally
merely the expression of natural impulses. Holidays, being times of
amusement, are occasions used by the people for the satisfaction of all
appetites: there is eating and drinking, buffoonery, disregard of
current conventions, unbounded liberty to do whatever exuberant
animalism prompts. Such festivities abound among existing savages,[707]
were not uncommon in ancient civilized times,[708] and have survived in
diminished form to the present day.[709] In the course of time they
often become attached to the worship of gods, are organized, explained
by myths, and sanctified. In such cases of coalescence we must
distinguish between the true worship offered to a divine being, and the
observances, generally originating in desire for animal amusement and
enjoyment, that have been attached to them.

+388+. _Cult of generative organs._ Men's attention must have been
directed very early to those organs that were believed to be connected
with the genesis of human life. At what stage this belief arose it is
hardly possible to say; there are peoples among whom it seems not to
exist;[710] but it is found over a great part of the world, and was
doubtless an outcome of popular observation.[711] As it was intimately
connected with life it passed naturally into the domain of religion, and
in process of time became a more or less prominent part of religious
observances; the organs in question, both male and female, became
objects of religious devotion.

+389+. Here again it must be noted that not all usages connected with
the organs of generation were religious of origin. It is pointed out
above[712] that the origin of circumcision and excision is to be sought
in another direction. Ithyphallic images are sometimes merely attempts
at realism in art; a nude figure (as in modern art) mu