Soter Kosmoi
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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Soter Kosmoi[1] [or Kosmou] (English: The Saviour of the World) is the informal title to a bronze bust of a human torso with the head of a rooster, including a comb and wattles which are the testicles. Instead of a nose or beak, the creature has a phallus. It is held at the Vatican, indicates 2012 research by Acharya S[2].
The bust is known as the Albani bronze[3].
It was first visually represented in Richard Payne Knight's A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus[4] (1786). It is verbally described on page 61 of that same book, as follows:
- "the celebrated bronze in the Vatican has the male organs of generation placed upon the head of a cock, the emblem of the sun, supported by the neck and shoulders of a man. In this composition they represent the generative power of the Eros(in Greek), the Osiris, Mithras, or Bacchus, whose centre is the sun, incarnate with man. By the inscription on the pedestal, the attribute this personified, is styled The Saviour of the World [Soter Kosmoi); a title always venerable, under whatever image it be represented."
The first photograph of the Soter Kosmoi[5] (or a very similar one) is found in Otto Augustus Wall's Sex and Sex Worship.
Malcolm Jones in The Secret Middle Ages calls these kind of sculptures priapi gallinacei, studied by Lorrayne Baird in "Priapus Gallinaceus: The Role of the Cock in Fertility and Eroticism in Classical Antiquity and the Middle Ages." (1981).
See also
