Occasionally, the association could become a bit more explicit, as when the poet Algernon Charles Swinburne noted that: “Her majesty has set up - I should say erected - a phallic emblem in stone a genuine Priapic erection like a small obelisk.” But in the 19th century such pointed talk was reserved for letters and pub chat. But in this context the obelisk was a phallus, not a penis. 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. 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. This article is excerpted from the book “ Obelisk: A History.”
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