Our most important member, harassed, berated,belittled, and dspised.

Man’s relationship with his defining organ” may, as Friedman suggests, have “all the elements of an epic Hollywood film”, and certainly there are some great moments in the early days of this history: the penis triumphing over death in Egyptian accounts of the afterlife; the penis as the symbol of divine intelligence in ancient Sumer; the circumcised penis as the sign of the affinity that Pharaonic priests, and all Israelite males after their eighth day, had with God. But, for the most part, the penis has proven to be the wimpiest of heroes, pathetically short-lived, harassed, berated, belittled and despised. Already by page twenty-five and the advent of the “Christian penis”, its halcyon days are numbered; by page thirty and St Augustine, who “transformed the penis more than any man who yet lived”, they are gone for ever.

In the first Christian centuries, “the sacred staff became the demon rod”.

Source Times Literary Supplement