Creativity and lies: phalli, fiction and fakery in the British Museum’s Secretum

In 1865 George Witt offered his ’Collection Illustrative of Phallic Worship’ to the British Museum. Witt’s collection illustrated his theory of the development and spread of sex worship throughout all the world’s religions, and, especially, the survival of sexual symbols and ceremonies in modern Christianity. Incorporating authentic antiquities alongside replicas (plaster casts, electrotypes, drawings and photographs), as well as modern artworks representing ancient symbols and rites, Witt’s collection was explicitly illustrative and designed to arouse homosocial conversation. Thirty years before Sigmund Freud, Witt’s illustrative museum stimulated his friends to invent the concept of the phallic symbol. Witt and his collaborators produced illustrated books deciphering Victorian material culture. Freud and Jung read and discussed these books decades later when they developed similar ideas in psychoanalysis. This paper uses the case of Witt’s phallic museum to consider how the creative potential of items in collection is modified when things move between contexts. Witt’s ’Collection Illustrative of Phallic Worship’ was transferred from his home to a new sub-department of the British Museum – the Secretum. Witt’s vision was that the creative relations between artefacts in his collection would encompass the British Museum’s specimens ’illustrative of the same subject’, extending the illustrative utility of his museum. However, the network of people and things authenticating items in Witt’s private museum did not transfer well to the British Museum. Isolated in a ’secret chamber’ in the museum’s basement, the relations between Witt’s artefacts were refashioned. Witt’s replicas and inventions were re-registered as ’false’. Shorn of their previous relationships, Witt’s illustrations were dismissed as forgeries and fakes.