Celebrating International May Day: Customs, Facts
One day I'll make sex respectable, Bunnies. |
Spring's giant pole?
Pole size contest in Munich, Germany (Duncanogi) |
Some observers have also proposed phallic symbolism, an idea expressed by Thomas Hobbes.
Hobbes erroneously believed that the poles dated back to the Roman worship of the Greek fertility god Priapus, whose name gives us priapism, the painful condition of an unyielding erection brought on by Viagra and similar drugs.
Red-and-white pole, UK |
But phallic symbolism was attributed to the maypole as early as the later Early Modern period.
One sexual reference is found in John Cleland's controversial erotic novel Fanny Hill: Memoirs of a Woman of Pleasure:
"...and now, disengag'd from the shirt, I saw,
with wonder and surprise, what?
not the play-thing of a boy,
not the weapon of a man,
but a maypole
of so enormous a standard,
that had proportions been observ'd,
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