Secretum (British Museum)
The Secretumcode: lat promoted to code: la was a British Museum collection of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries that held artefacts and images deemed sexually graphic. Many of the items were amulets, charms and votive offerings, often from pre-Christian traditions, including the worship of Priapus, a Greco-Roman god of fertility and male genitalia. Items from other cultures covered wide ranges of human history, including ancient Egypt, the classical era Greco-Roman world, the ancient Near East, medieval England, Japan and India.
The Secretumcode: lat promoted to code: la in the latter part of the twentieth century, after its transfer to the Department of Medieval and Later Antiquities
Ancient and modern amulets, from Knight's 1786 work A Discourse on the Worship of Priapus
A nymph and satyr statue donated by Townley
Roman terracotta lamp, decorated with a winged phallus
George Witt FRS was a medical doctor, banker and mayor known for his collection of erotic objects.
The Witt family tomb at Swaffham Prior
Terracotta lamp from central Italy, decorated with a winged phallus
Frontispiece of Discourse on the worship of Priapus and its connection with the mystic theology of the ancients by Richard Payne Knight as republished by Witt in 1865
George Witt's Turkish bath
