No drooping rate of profit here

 Meiners’s book on the history of religions was another theoretical resource that Marx thoroughly studied. Heavily influenced by de Brosses’s account of fetishism, Meiners had ambitiously extended de Brosses’s catalogue of fetish objects to cover religious sexuality. When taking excerpts from Meiners’s book, Marx focused in particular on Meiners’s chapter, “History of Phallus and Lingam,” which was placed under the general heading, “History of Fetishism.” Anticipating Sigmund Freud’s account of penis envy, Meiners viewed fetishist phallus cults as a symptom of “impotent men or barren women or prospective spouses [who] have chosen the phallus as their fetish, or sorcerers and priests [who] have recommended the phallus as a fetish to one and to the other.” Marx, in his notes, appears to have paid special attention to the phallus fetish in various cultural geographies, from India and Egypt to Greece and medieval Europe. Concerning an Indian phallus rite, for instance, Marx noted Meiners’s observation that “Indian brides sacrificed their virginity to feelingless priapium.” In the more recent Indian tradition, it was not uncommon to witness Indian kings who were “not allowed to have intercourse with the bride…until she had dedicated her virginity to the deity.”14 The sublimity attached to the fetishized phallus in the Indian rites was important enough to Marx to excerpt the following passage in full:

Married women from the sect of yogi pilgrimaged to a naked gigantic penitent who accepted the worships of the pious under the shade of a tree near Surat [in India]. The priapium of this penitent which seemed to belong more to an ass than to a human being was pierced at the foreskin and tamed, as it were, with a golden ring. The young women fell down in adoration before the mighty priapium, took it devoutly in their hands and kissed it, receiving the blessing of the yogi. The yogis are the most ardent and at the same time the most sacred worshippers of the lingam.

Contrary to the positive attachment to the phallus cult of India, the Romans, Meiner noted, “honored and crowned the ass for protecting [the virgin goddess] Vesta from the violence of priapium.” Marx transcribed his claim that medieval Europe was not foreign to this phenomenon of priapism, as “barren women honored a St. Guerlichon [a priapic statue]…in Normandy St. Giles and in Anjou a St. René.… Even in modern times, the sacred Cosmo and Damiano were dedicated to Isernia in the Neapolitan phalli and priapii. Priests offered for sale at the holy festival whole baskets full of waxed priapii. The buyers dedicated the priapii to the saint after having kissed it devoutly. This festival was abolished only in 1781.”15

It is quite striking that in this narrative, the phallus object emerges not only as an artifact of worship, but also as a commodity to which religious meanings were attached. Yet it was Constant, rather than Meiners, who discussed fetishistic religion in broader commercial language.