Lunar and
Sex Worship

A favorite symbol and accompaniment of the yoni is the dove.
“From the affectionate intercourse between the sexes, it was
sacred to Venus, and was her constant attendant.”
Inman however, seems to think that it is because the dove’s
“note, coa or coo has, in the Semitic, some resemblance to an
invitation to amorous gratification.”

Still a third reason may be found in the fact that the parent
birds among doves, as well as the rest of the pigeon family, nourish
the young with the curd-like contents of the crop, secreted by
special glands like the milk in mammalia; and that “a young dove,
like a young mammal, will die if deprived of its parents in the first
week of its life.” Since this “pigeon’s milk” is secreted by both
the father and the mother dove, it must have rendered this bird
markedly a type of motherhood, and, therefore, of the yoni. We
need, therefore, not be surprised at learning that the Hebrews
called a dove yonah, and that the very name yoni is applied to this
bird in Sanskrit. Nor need we wonder that the Hebrew woman,
after bringing a child into the world—an act deemed symbolically
so “unclean” as to require her religious purification and
abstaining from all hallowed things, including the sanctuary, for
thirty-three days—should be commanded by Jehovah to bring
either “a young pigeon or a turtle-dove for a sin offering unto the
door of the tabernacle of the congregation”; since this was but a
symbolic homage exacted by the masculine Hebrew deity from a
type of the more ancient deity of the female principle; and it was
necessary to show that the young mother was too impure a
creature to be admitted, even as a worshipper, into Jehovah’s
sanctuary without a purification extending over a lunar-menstrual
month of 28 days plus five days = 33 days, to make sure of her
complete sexual purification from the blood-source both of present
and of future motherhood.

The Hebrew word yonah bears such a marked resemblance to
the name John or Ion (pronounced Yon) that the dove at the
baptism of Jesus in the Jordan must have seemed, to the Oriental
mind, only a natural accompaniment of John the Baptizer. The
same word Yonah appears in the name of the prophet Jonah or
Ionah, whose name the Oxford Bible Vocabulary translates as
dove….

Since the dove was emphatically a symbol of Venus and other
amorous goddesses, it naturally came to occupy a place in the
phallic triad on the left-hand side of the central pillar—i.e., the
left-hand testicle or “egg” from which, it was said, girls were
produced. And when Christianity began to preach its doctrine of
the Trinity in Unity, it was small wonder if the dove of Venus fell
heir to the same place in the Christian as in the old pagan
triad—on the left hand of the Father God (the Son, of course,
continuing also to hold his old position on the right, since the
Church teaches concerning him that he “sitteth on the right
hand of God the Father Almighty”). Here the dove received the
name of the Holy Ghost, or Holy Breath, or Holy Wind or Holy
Spirit—in some aspects an equivalent of the Hindu Shakti, a
term applied long centuries before to the female inspirer of passion
in the male. Christianity, however, made the Holy Spirit the
male inspirer of the Virgin Mary, when she conceived Jesus.
Nevertheless, it was sometimes masculine, and sometimes feminine.
Origen expressly makes the Holy Ghost feminine, saying,
“the soul is maiden to her mistress, the Holy Ghost.” ….
The mother of Confucius, 551 B.C., when walking in a solitary
place, was impregnated by the vivifying influence of the heavens.
Great Zeus himself, it is said, visited Pythia under the form of a
dove. That these ideas all meet in the traditions concerning the
conception of Jesus is shown by the fact that the Arabic legends
relate that Mary was conceived by the breath of Gabriel, the
angel of annunciation.

(pp. 266-270)