Worship of the Generative Powers: Sexual Demons

Sexual Demons

There were personages connected with the worship of Priapus who appear to have been common to the Romans under and before the empire, and to the foreign races who settled upon its ruins. The Teutonic race believed in a spiritual being who inhabited the woods, and who was called in old German scrat. His character was more general than that of a mere habitant of the woods, for it answered to the English hobgoblin, or to the Irish cluricaune. The scrat was the spirit of the woods, under which character he was sometimes called a waltscrat, and of the fields, and also of the household, the domestic spirit, the ghost haunting the house. His image was probably looked upon as an amulet, a protection to the house,

ficarii was also applied to them in mediæval Latin, either from the meaning of the word ficus, mentioned before, 59 or because they were fond of figs. Most of these Latin synonyms are given in the Anglo-Saxon vocabulary of Alfric, and are interpreted as meaning "evil men, spirits of the woods, evil beings." One of the old commentators on the Scriptures describes these spirits of the woods as "monsters in the semblance of men, whose form begins with the human shape and ends in the extremity of a beast." They were, in fact, half man, half goat, and were identical with a class of hobgoblins, who at a rather later period were well known in England by the popular name of Robin Goodfellows, whose Priapic character is sufficiently proved by the pictures of them attached to some of our early printed ballads, of which we give facsimiles. The first  60 is a figure of Robin Goodfellow, which forms the illustration to a very popular ballad of the earlier part of the seventeenth century, entitled "The mad merry Pranks of Robin Goodfellow;" he is represented party-coloured, and with the priapic attribute. The next  61 is a second illustration

62 It is Priapus reduced to his lowest step of degradation.

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Footnotes

76:59 See before, p. 70.

76:60 See Plate XII, Fig. 5. From a copy of the black-letter ballad in the library of the British Museum.

76:61 Plate XII, Fig. 2. From the same ballad.