A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus, and its Connection with the Mystic Theology of the Ancients (a New Edition), to which is added An Essay on the Worship of the Generative Powers During the Middle Ages of Western Europe (Large Paper Edition, #25 of 25 Copies)

London: Privately Published, 1894. Facsimile Edition. Hardcover. Large quarto (12.5 x 9.5 inches). 1894 facsimile of the 1865 edition. Bound in contemporary quarter leather over brown buckram boards. Spine titled in gilt. This edition limited to 500 numbered copies, printed from type, twenty-five of which are large paper copies. This volume is one of the large paper copies and is numbered "Twenty Five." Marbled endpapers. 254 pages plus 40 pages of black and white erotic plates presented throughout the text (some copies of this edition had all the plates bound at the end). Printed on thick paper. Some wear to the leather on spine and along spine edges. Edge and corner wear. Small catalog listing of this title affixed to front pastedown. Front hinge cracked but does not affect the binding. A very good of this large paper edition. This work, which was Knight’s first book (first published in 1786) sought to recover the importance of ancient phallic cults. Knight's apparent preference for ancient sacred eroticism over Judeo-Christian puritanism led to many attacks on him as an infidel and as a scholarly apologist for libertinism. This ensured the persistent distrust of the religious establishment. The central claim of The Worship of Priapus was that an international religious impulse to worship 'the generative principle' was articulated through genital imagery, and that this imagery has persisted into the modern age. In some ways the book was the first of many later attempts to argue that pagan ideas had persisted within Christian culture, a view that would eventually crystallize into the neo-pagan movement over a century later. The second work included in this volume (Worship of the Generative Powers) is along the same lines but specific to the middle ages in western Europe. This was written by Thomas Wright.