In India the lingam was also symbolized and worshiped in the shape of lotus flower or the lotus bud. The lily is often the symbol of The Father in the Christian church art. It was come from the Pagan origin which transplanted into Christian art. The Madonna and the child with lily symbolical of the holy family and the Assyrian god Ashur having a pine cone in the hand is worth mention. The lingam is also shown as a divine rod or a two forked stick the two forked stick represents the penis with two testicles and the Clover leaf or shamrock also represents the same.
The Russian and the Greek orthodox cross is with three cross bars, that was later the cross of the pope of the Roman church and that was also a religious symbol of Ancient Egypt and on the lids of Sarcophagi. The Shamrock is the emblem of Trinity in Irish.
In ancient times in India there are many shrines with realistic figures of lingam where the sterile women go on pilgrimage and touch those holy images with their vulvas with the hope to conceive. Some sects in Hinduism believes that a woman who dies as virgin cannot go to the heaven (remember child marriage is predominant in those days and the widow children could not re marriage). Such girls goes to those temples with scared stone phallus and ruptures their hymen with the belief the angles guarding the gates of heaven will examine them and they will find that she had done her duty(coition) in earth and allow them to proceed.
According to Menander, a pre Christian believer in Gnosticism, Of all the wild beasts on the land and water, the greatest is the woman. Even many of the Christian priests held the same views and early saints also preached that woman are unholy and made to tempt the man hence men should deliberately avoid her. According to St. Paul (I Cor. vii, 1), It is good for a man not to touch a woman. Hence everyone thought that sexual connection was the greatest sin by that time.
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