In a time of neurotic male dominance and jealous defensiveness, it's difficult to recommend honoring the phallus, but we have to get beyond personal matters and gender battles if we want to tap into the deep soul of sex. We should be able to distinguish between neurotic abuse of phallic power and genuine honoring of sexuality. Ancient myths and rituals give us a taste of the vast meaning of the phallus that far transcends our current biological and psychological attitudes toward the penis. This new appreciation for sex and its imagery encourages us to leave behind our nervous and life-suppressing prudishness. Our anxiety about sexual imagery is not as righteous and high-minded as it appears to be; it may contain more than a little fear of life's basic fruitfulness and vitality.
     The phallus is not an image of the male ego; it is a representation of earth's potency and life's capacity for creativity and pleasure. Ancient and primitive celebrations of the phallus were carried out with joy, laughter, comedy and celebration. This phallus is not exactly symbolized by the ancient images of trees, bulls and lightning that are associated with it. Rather it represents the power of life we encounter in these overwhelming revelations of nature. The phallus is in fact that power coursing through us, men and women, and in that spring of vitality we can find the creativity and energy we need to get along, survive and thrive. Ancient humans knew that the ego is insufficient for making a truly creative life. They knew through their ideas of magic, in which the phallus is profoundly implicated, that we need nature's power in us, and that there is no better example of nature dwelling in us effectively than our sexuality, with its autonomous responses and its ineffable capacity to generate new human life.
     The penis we see in pornography is not the true phallus; it is rather a poor attempt to restore the phallic dimension to the penis. Pornographic penises are symptomatic of our need to rediscover the phallus and with it a religious appreciation for life's mysterious potency. Like the ancients carrying huge penises in their processions, we fantasize penises of unusual dimension and photograph them in ways that make them seem huge and detached from individual personality. But we don't yet have a religious appreciation for the penis as the presentation of life's almighty power. Religious institutions remain close to pornography, sometimes in their art and sometimes in their ingenious means of repression, because ultimately both are concerned with life's deepest meaning and mystery. Like Isis in search of her brother Osiris' lost organ, we are in search of the penis that cannot be imagined by medicine, the penis that leads us deep into life in all its procreativity and dynamic pleasure.