Opening note

 On October 3-6, 2002, it was held in the City of Ponta Delgada, St. Michael, Azores,  the XXXI International Congress of the Academies of the Codfish with delegates from North and South Americas, Europe and Africa. Total 35 Academies. My wife and I went there to represent the Academy of Codfish of New England. My wife as the Secretary and I as the President. 

We had a grand time! It was our seventh visit to the Azores. The Island of St. Michael is truly a paradise of beauty! We had occasion to walk at leisure through out the city, observing  every thing such as its architecture, monuments and several churches.

We had time to visit the Mother Church called Matriz which is located in the center of the city.   I was delighted to see inside the altars very well decorated and also on the  outside  the beautiful marble doors Manueline style.  I was surprised to see that this church, not being a cathedral, possesses eight gargoyles, four on the  south side and four on  the  north side. Perhaps because I was  not expecting to see gargoyles in a church of this size,  I paid  more attention to them. With this state of alertness I found that the gargoyle number eight, on the north side,  presents, very visible,  a phallic symbol, with a penis one  foot long,  with two testicles  of  sizes of tangerines.  I called my wife to this finding and she raised her both hands to the side of her head and said. “Oh, No”!  She knew immediately that I was going to write an article about it. So I did. I wrote an article  in Portuguese, on the second week of October 2002, explaining the meaning of the phallic symbol.  I wrote it in a form of a dialogue between two compadres, Gaspar and  Miguel to be more accessible to the readers.  

I sent by Internet this article to the “Portuguese Times” of New Bedford, Massachusetts, and also to four newspapers in the Azores and NONE had the guts to publish my article. Only the magazine “Mundo Português” from New York dared to  publish it.  Why the editors of the Portuguese newspapers decided not to publish my article? Because it is too pornographic?  Or because of their own hypocrisies? I hope you have the guts to read this article now in English and decide for yourself  if  this article  is decent enough to be  read by children and adults alike!  Thanks! 

Here is the article, in a dialogue form,  between Compadre Gaspar and Compadre Miguel  who went to the International Congress of the Academies of Codfish in Ponta Delgada: 

Miguel—Good morning Compadre Gaspar. What a beautiful day!

Gaspar – Good morning to you. Yes, indeed it is a gorgeous day! Well today we are going to visit more churches?  Right?

Miguel – How many parishes there are in Ponta Delgada?

Gaspar –Three: St. Sebastian, in the main church or Matriz,  St. Peter’s and  St. Joseph’s. I  should add one more, Santa Clara.

Miguel – For me St. Peter’s Church  is the most original. It has no columns.  Has only one arch roof. From every place within  the church anyone  can see the service in the  main altar. It is really very pleasant. When was it built?

Gaspar – It was inaugurated on July 25, 1845, as a new church, because it was erected on the place of an old one.

Miguel – And St. Joseph?

Gaspar – It was inaugurated somewhere between 1710 and 1714, when the Holy Sacrament was transferred  into it.

Miguel -- OK. Let us go now and see the Matriz or the Mother Church, which is considered the oldest.

Gaspar – It is the oldest. It was built  between 1533 and 1545. It has the shape of a Latin Cross and its patron is St. Sebastian, the Martyr, pierced with arrows, who influenced much the creation of similar parishes in Baía, Rio de Janeiro and São Paulo, Brazil. 

Miguel – Boy,  you know all these religious facts! Let us enter.

Gaspar – This Main Church inside has a grandiose aspect. The  work of art of its altars is indeed rich and original!  Great masters did this magnificent  display. And we do not  see the name of these masters anywhere! Ingratitude! And   they did all this work for the Love of God! 

Miguel – Compadre,  the architecture on the outside is also very impressive. Let us take a closer  look.

Gaspar – The sides of the  main door are  made of white stone, which came from Continental Portugal, worked in Manueline style. Beautifully done!  The south door is also made of the same material and same style, but the north door is made  of black basalt and in Manueline style.

Miguel – It has the category of a large church because it possesses eight gargoyles: four on south side and four on north side.

Gaspar – What is a gargoyle?

Miguel – Gargoyle derives from big and long throat. The common people calls it ugly face. The gargoyles  have the purpose of draining the rainy water from the roofs of the big churches so the water does not run down along on the walls of the church. The gargoyles  of Notre Dame in Paris, France, and of Mosteiro da  Batalha in Portugal are very famous. Have you noticed that some of these gargoyles  are very similar to  the mouths of cannons, that the Portuguese used on the castles   they built in Africa, and Brazil during their empire!   But, Compadre Gaspar,  there is here,   on the north side,  the  gargoyle number eight,  which presents, very clearly,  a phallic symbol with a penis of one foot in length and at its base has two testicles the size of tangerines! 

Gaspar – What a hell, Compadre! I never noticed this shameful exposure on the Main Church or Matriz of Ponta Delgada!!!

Miguel – Unfortunally there are still many people that criticize the masons for  erecting  churches and cathedrals  with phallic symbols.   The critics call these works  “pornographic figures”. Why? Because they do not know the mystic and religious meaning of the phallic symbols. Too bad!

Gaspar--  I confess my ignorance on this phallic  subject. My skin is goosy, just because we are speaking  of this obscene object so close to the Mother Church! 

Miguel – Stay calm, Compadre. I will explain to you everything in detail.  Put all the fanatism aside and concentrate on the true  and  historical facts.  I want  you to remember that  before Jesus Christ was born and crucified, the symbol of god all over the world was not the cross, but the phallic symbol!

Gaspar -- Tell me who started   this  strange business of the phallic  symbol?

Miguel – The word phallic (or penis) is a Phoenician word. The Phoenicia was  where today Lebanon exists, north of Israel. The Phoenicians were a very important people of Antiquity. They were the ones that invented the consonants and the Greeks created the five vowels of  today’s vocabulary.

Gaspar – I did not know this very important information.

Miguel – The anthropologists, scientists that study the development  of the civilized men, state that the primitives peoples chose as their representative of God  the phallic  symbol à  the penis and the testicles!

Gaspar – What was the reason why  they chose such a symbol?

Miguel – The empirical reason is indeed very simple. Please remember that all this happened before the use of the cross as the symbol of God!  Every men observed in the antiquity that the only part of his body that changed, or became erected, was his penis, causing men to  become virile and potent!  This  was a simple observation  but very important.  Men begun to associate this physical change of erection, as the symbol of power, and it did not take long for the human brain to go further and start considering  the phallic symbol as the  symbol of the maximal force, and  omnipotence and  was easily adopted as the symbol of God! 

Gaspar—Even though your explanation seems to be logical, I confess that for me it is difficult to compare the phallic symbol with the symbol of the cross!

Miguel— Don’t become nervous.  Haven’t you noticed that the words Old Testament and New Testament,  that composed the Bible, the most important book in the world,   are both derived from testicles or from  the phallic symbol?! 

The statue of “David” by       Michelangelo  in the Academia        of  the city of Florence, Italy	Phallic symbol in    a church in southern Italy

Gaspar – This conversation is getting worse by the minute.

Miguel – Do not be fanatic. Let us be pragmatic and truthful. Relax. There are no pious women listening to  us....  Let me continue. When a person goes to  court  as a witness to testify,  and raises  the right hand to  swear to tell the truth, nothing else  but the truth, it does that  based on the honor his  testicules or of  the  phallic symbol. Do you know why? Because the word  testify is derived from the  testicle, which is a phallic symbol! 

And further more. The testicles are the human anatomical parts that exerted  the greatest  religious and social  impact in all humanity for many centuries. We all know that the last name of the father is what determines the name of the family. Universally the son is preferred to the  daughter in order to perpetuate the name of the family.   In old  Judea and in old Greece, the virility of men was  always represented   by  phallic symbols – the penis and the testicles – which became to symbolize also honor, respect and even  was sublimed to the  idea of  representing  God Omnipotent! The people in the antiquity had much more respect towards the male genital organs than we have in the modern world today. Let us observe the many naked  beautiful human  statues that exist in public plazas in the old Greece and the Roman Empire! The best example is the statue of David by Michelangelo, in Florence, Italy.

  Gaspar – I have not yet understood clearly  how did people of antiquity celebrated their festivities honoring their phallic god, as you call it!

Miguel – They did processions as  people do them today for Santo  Christo, Saint  Anthony or  Lady of Fátima.  They built a wooden  framework to carry  a large penis and large testicles  and  march with it  on the streets of the villages and cities, forming a caravan behind  this phallic statue, just as the Catholics do today, for their devoted saints in the processions!…

Gaspar – Oh, Compadre, but your description of such phallic  procession seems so ridiculous and makes me laugh.  It seem like a carnival of bad taste!

Miguel – Call it whoever you want.  These are the true  historical facts, my friend!

Gaspar – I have not yet  understood  why we have  such  obscene phallic statue on the Mother Church or Matriz  of Ponta Delgada.  

Miguel – Compadre, you should make a trip to the famous and historical city of Pompeii, in southern  Italy.  This  city was totally destroyed  by the ashes of the Vesuvio Volcano on the year of 79 after Christ. Pompeii was fully built  before Jesus Christ was born. The symbol of Christ, the cross,  did not existed then in Pompeii. Do you know what was the religious symbol used by the people of Pompeii? The phallic symbol! Everywhere, inside the houses and outside, on the furniture, on the dishes, on paintings, in the kitchen, in the dinning rooms, in the living rooms,  in the temples, at the entrance of the commercial establishments and even on the pavements on the streets, there were phallic symbols. Why not, if the phallic symbols represented their God! Please note that Pompeii two thousand years ago had the same population as the city of Ponta Delgada has today. Imagine if Ponta Delgada existed two thousand years ago, we would find phallic symbols everywhere not just on the Mother Church of Ponta Delgada. The way the Azorean people  are so religious we would find  many thousand of phallic symbols all over the city and even  in all the other islands!

Gaspar – I do no know if I should laugh or if I should cry with your theological and bombastic explanations…

Miguel – Compadre, I want you to note that the first catholic churches had inside and outside, made in three dimensions, phallic symbols with penis and testicules as religious symbols. This is the same reason why the phallic symbol exists on the Mother Church or Matriz in Ponta Delgada, and not because you and, unfortunately many  thousands of people, think that it is because of pornographic reasons!…   Haven’t you  observe  that even today in every village, town or city we are surrounded by phallic symbols?!  The steeples of the churches, the obelisks, the Eiffel Tower in Paris, France, the Empire State in New York City, the Washington  Monument in the Nation’s Capital, are all phallic symbols! Why? All these  structures  reveal an expression of potency, force, power, not only religious, but  also economical and political! 

Gaspar – I am overwhelmed with  all these comparisons! 

Miguel – I do not want to give you an indigestion. I just want to conclude by informing you that the phallic symbol also means “to ward off the evil eye!”   Today if we want to ward off the evil eye, we bless ourselves by making the sign of the cross. But in the antiquity, the people made the phallic symbol!  Do you know how they made the phallic symbol? They closed their hand by making a fist and  then bending the forearm over the arm!  Like this,  see. Today, this is considered an obscene gesture.  But this meant to ward off the evil eye! Today when we make the sign by showing our thumb in a vertical position we are revealing a phallic symbol, and wishing the best to the person  because we are  making phallic sign to!  Today when we give the finger to someone we are offending that person. Before Christ  with such a gesture we were blessing that person, by making the phallic symbol!… And when we give to a little baby  a golden chain with a figa, or amulet,  we do it with the intension of warding off the evil eye from that child. This gesture by placing the thumb between two closed fingers  stood  for intercourse in the antiquity, which  was  considered the ultimate, the dearest  phallic sign, therefore the best for good luck!  Today we have all these signs upside-down, considered them  obscene, because the cross sign  took over!  

Gaspar – Compadre, after all these  strange revelations,  I think we should stop at a café nearby  and have a relaxing drink of maracujá.

Miguel  -- I Agree, but let me finish with  this declaration: Compadre, let the phallic symbol stay where it is on the Mother Church or Matriz! It is in good place and has a beautiful message of warding off the evil eye. What we have to do next time we come here is bring a camera  with a  strong lens so we can get a close up photo and   show  it  to our Compadres and Comadres of our Academy of Codfish of New England, so when any of them, visiting Ponta Delgada, can come here  and greet the  beautiful  and unique phallic symbol of the Matriz!...

Gaspar – Compadre, with all this knowledge that you  just revealed to me,  is there any other church in the Portuguese world,  such as in the Continental Portugal, Madeira, Brazil,  Africa that  might have phallic symbols?

Miguel – I do not know the answer to your question, but it is a challenging  one. I hope the  Portuguese priests and Seminaries would  investigate this. This is part of the evolution and the history of religion.   But I doubt very much if they have the guts to do it. I was going to say – if they have the  phallic symbols – to grab the bull by the horns, but I do not think so. It is  only with the truth that we can conquer the faithful, some one said that in the Old Testament, and you know  by now where that  word Testament comes  from!

Gaspar – What a beautiful day, today.

Miguel – Let us walk to the seaport and see the seagulls flying over  us while we sit on the benches relaxing.

Gaspar – Very good idea,  until becomes time for our lunch!…Today I want to have barbecue Azorean sardines, with a mixed salad,  corn bread and local  wine from  Pico!..  

Miguel -- Me too!.

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