In Religion and Lust author James Weir Jr. (1856–1906), investigates the origins of religious feeling, the once world wide spread fertility worship and the physical correlation of religious emotion and sexual desire. A major part of the work is filled with a colourful collection of religious, or semi-religious, sexual rites, once practiced all over the globe, connecting the most “primitive” tribe to the most “civilized” nations. Some of them are really bizarre, like an extremely exhausting Pueblo masturbation-ritual, or the poring of wine over the phallus of a saint in France to make a medicine against barrenness.