Previous centuries did not miss the fact that obelisks make a visual rhyme with a certain male body part. In the 1520s, for example, the brilliant poet and pornographer Pietro Aretino was quite speciļ¬c about the association, using the same word, guglia, for both. Even the sex-obsessed and sex-denying 19th century made the connection with greater frequency than those looking for evidence of Victorian prudery might expect.
This article is excerpted from the book “Obelisk: A History.”
There is a faint but persistent undercurrent in 19th-century scholarship about the relationship between obelisks and the phallus, though that connection was usually relegated safely to the far distant past. Hargraves Jennings, who hinted at such associations in his pamphlet, “The Obelisk,” was also the author of a series of privately printed books documenting similar ancient monuments throughout the world, part of his attempt to recover the legacy of what he saw as a worldwide prehistoric phallic religion.
