God's Doodle (10 page)

So precious, indeed, were male genitalia that the Middle Ages believed a new pontiff was obliged to sit in a specially constructed chair, a
sedia stercoraria
, which had a circular hole through which a cardinal reached up to ensure His Holiness had the qualifications for the job, before solemnly announcing
‘Testiculos habet et bene pendentes’
– He has testicles and they hang nicely.

The tale is simply too good not to be true, but sadly it is. That such a chair was once used in the papal enthroning is fact – but it was originally either a Roman ‘dung chair’ (commode) or birthing stool predating Christianity. The rest can only be called papal bull: a fiction stemming from another fiction, the existence of Pope Joan, an Englishwoman who, around 850, was supposed to have disguised herself as a man to enter holy orders and rose to the Church’s highest office. It was as a result of this duplicity, the Middle Ages believed, that the chair test was introduced, to ensure no non-penis-possessor could try it on again – a case not of phallic worship but certainly an enshrinement of phallic supremacy.

Early Christians were slow to give up phallic worship; in fact, until the fifth century
AD
their phallic and monotheistic beliefs existed happily side by side: phalluses were carried in Christian religious processions and continued to be carved on churches; candle grease was dripped into the font at baptisms, representing semen. Over time the Church absorbed and transmuted aspects of phallicism and began trying to squeeze it out, but with scant success: at the beginning of the eighth century the theologian/historian the Venerable Bede wrote that Redwald, the most famous king in East Anglia, had two
altars
, ‘one for Christ, one for devils’. The Church issued edicts galore against phallic practices and levied increasingly harsh penances, but failed to get the majority of the faithful to change their ways, or, indeed, many of the clergy. In the thirteenth century the minister of the church in the Scottish town of Inverkeithing was hauled before his bishop for leading a fertility dance round a phallic figure in the churchyard at Easter; in the fourteenth, the bishop of Coventry was accused before the pope of ‘homage to the devil’.

Just after the end of the Second World War, Professor Geoffrey Webb, formerly Slade professor of fine art at Cambridge and at the time secretary of the Royal Commission of Monuments, was given the job of surveying those English churches that had been bomb damaged. In one, a blast had shifted the altar slab, revealing the interior for the first time in eight or nine hundred years and inside Webb found a carved penis. After investigating many other churches he found carved penises in 90 per cent of those dating up to around the Black Death that ravaged Europe in the mid fourteenth century.

Medieval Europe, devoutly Christian or not, simply continued to believe in the penis as a talisman and an insurance policy against bad luck. Priests directed parishioners with a problem in the sexual department (barren women, wives of impotent men, impotent men, men and women with venereal disease) to the local phallic stone, evidently thinking that touching it opened a channel of communication with a greater authority than they could muster. Across Europe and Britain people wore phallic amulets and women baked phallic cakes, just as in ancient Athens and Rome. And during spring planting and summer harvest, people took part in fertility festivals, as had happened throughout human existence, in Rome as the Saturnalia (which became notorious it got so out of hand). During such festivals, when sexual shenanigans were a cathartic release, and couples
took
to the wood ‘to make green-backs’ as Shakespeare put it, men went through the streets carrying wooden phalluses, prodding passing women with the tips or entering houses to prod the females (at one time the prodding was real, according to historical claims, and welcomed).
⁶

And then there was the extraordinary ceremony known as the Feast of Fools, celebrated in December, an occasion that mocked the Church and frequently ‘descended into lewdness and harlotry’, with the clergy as well as some of their parishioners throwing off all their clothes. According to the French scholar and bibliophile Jean-Baptiste du Tillot, the bishops were powerless to stop these goings-on though they attempted to moderate them. Thus a ruling, in 1444, of the cathedral authorities in Sens in northern France, that ‘those who wish to copulate go outside the church before doing so’.

The tussle between Christianity and phallicism continued. Pragmatically, the Church absorbed phallic cakes at Easter by ordaining they be marked with a cross (the phallic origins long forgotten) – lo, hot cross buns. Pagan feast days were transmuted into saints’ days and the Feast of Fools became the Feast of the Circumcision. And Christianity fought penis with penis or, rather, prepuce, claiming to have discovered that of the baby Jesus, removed at circumcision – the only part of him, of course, that couldn’t have ascended with him into heaven.

The earliest record of the holy foreskin was in
AD
800 when the Emperor Charlemagne crowned Pope Leo III and presented it to him. Thereafter there was considerable rivalry for possession of the relic. Depending on what you read, there were eight, twelve, fourteen, even eighteen holy foreskins in various European towns in the Middle Ages. The most celebrated was sent in 1100 to Antwerp by King Baldwin I of Jerusalem, who purchased it during the First Crusade. Another,
in
the Abbey Church in Chartres, was borrowed by Henry V (of Agincourt) when his wife Catherine was about to give birth, to ease her labour. When asked in the twelfth century to rule as to which was the genuine article, Pope Innocent III declined, on the grounds that only God knew. However many holy foreskins were claimed, all but one were destroyed or lost during the Reformation and the French Revolution. The one that survived was carried in a reliquary through the streets of the Italian village of Calcata, north of Rome, until 1983 on the Feast of the Circumcision (though this was officially removed from the Church calendar in 1954). That year it was apparently stolen from the home of the parish priest. Popular opinion was that the report of the theft was the Vatican’s way of ending the practice – which threat of excommunication issued in 1900 had failed to achieve.

Throughout the Middle Ages as throughout the centuries before them, the baby Jesus’s penis was depicted by hundreds of artists – but only ever uncircumcised, as if the Son of God could not be envisaged anything but whole. The Church forbade the direct depiction of the adult Jesus’s genitals (hence the unlikely loincloth while he hung otherwise naked on the cross) but during the Renaissance found it theologically acceptable when Dutch and German artists showed the suffering or crucified Christ with an erection. In the last Western age of true penis power, Christ’s erection was a double image: of God’s virility as the source of life and of the humanity of his Son as man – a double meaning, too, of the Passion (and, unintentionally, of Christ risen).

It took the Church until at least the eighteenth century to knock overt phallic practice out of the faithful. Up until then people in many areas of France, Belgium, Italy and Switzerland prayed to phallic deities. The Church’s ingenious answer was to say that the statues of these deities (Foutin, Eutrope, Arnaud
and
Ters among others) were really those of Christian saints and even provided legends about them. And childless women were sanctioned to visit their local phallic ‘saint’. This they did, not just to pray but to scrape his large wooden phallus, mixing the scrapings with water: a drink that would miraculously remedy their infertility – or put lead in their husband’s pencil. When the phallus became too worn down, the priest renewed its dimensions with a few surreptitious taps with a mallet to the end behind the altar. In Montreux in Switzerland, a custom on the feast of the local phallic saint was for young men to mix their semen with water and try to get the girl they fancied to drink it.

That phallusism was alive and well – and doing good business – only two hundred or so years ago was verified in 1786 by the British envoy in Naples, Sir William Hamilton, who wrote to the president of the Royal Society explaining how in a little explored part of Isernia he found the peasants worshipping ‘the great toe of Saint Cosmo’. And he deposited proofs of his findings with the British Museum.

During a three-day fair in September, Sir William had found, the relics of two phallic saints (the other, Damian) were carried in procession from the cathedral to an outlying old church, where ‘a prodigious concourse of people’ came carrying wax penises, ‘some even of the length of a palm’, purchased from street sellers. In the church vestibule, those who carried them – mostly, Sir William noted, women – kissed their votive offering before handing it, together with a piece of money, to a priest sitting at a little table.
‘Santo Cosmo benedetto, così
lo voglio,’
many murmured as they did so: Blessed Saint Cosmo, let it be like this – a prayer with several possible interpretations. At the church altar men and women uncovered any infirmity of their body, ‘not even excepting that which is represented by the ex-voti’, to be anointed by another priest with the ‘oil of
Saint
Cosmo’. The oil of Saint Cosmo was held in high repute, especially ‘when the loins and parts adjacent are anointed with it’. On Cosmo’s feast day the church got through 1,400 flasks of the stuff.

A clash of symbols

Are the spires, minarets and domes that rise above places of worship phallic symbols? Given that when the earliest of them were being erected religion hadn’t shaken free of phallic worship, they almost certainly were, according to most authorities. Like the cross and the hot cross bun, and an almost endless list of religious artefacts claimed to have phallic origins (in some cases admittedly disputed), penile spires and minarets and testicular domes have long since lost their meaning. But to deny that that meaning was once very real would be, as the respected J.B. Hannay wrote (
Sex Symbolism in Religion
) in 1922, rather like discussing
Hamlet
without the prince.

Phallic symbolism is as old as phallic worship and almost everything with a resemblance to male genitalia in the natural or animal kingdom has been accorded phallic significance at some period in history – there’s a lot of crossover with the metaphorical. The literature of every culture runs riot with phallic symbolism. In Greek mythology, Zeus’ thunderbolt, Poseidon’s trident and the caduceus of Hermes, not to mention the ‘massy clubs’ carried by the likes of Hercules and Theseus, the ancient world’s superheroes, were all symbols of the potency and power of the penis, just like Norse hammers, Tibetan
dorjes
, Chaldean swords, Chinese dragons, the witch doctor’s or wizard’s wand and the monarch’s sceptre (this reinforced by the ‘witnessing’ orb, topped by a cross for further reinforcement).

Many phallic symbols have been only of their time. The setting sun was in prehistory seen as the engorged tip of
the
penis plunging into the female earth and the rain that moistened and fertilised the female earth a kind of heavenly semen – something that appears in the oldest layers of many literatures. When moonbeams were considered phallic, women would not sleep in their light in case they were made pregnant by them. Before household door locks became commonplace, well-to-do ladies carried a ‘chatelaine’ key chained to their girdle – symbol of the authority of the household penis-possessor by proxy – to lift door latches, when a finger would have done the job as easily.

Time has neutered the majority of phallic symbols including the village maypole. A part of pagan fertility worship in prehistory and still a copulatory symbol in the Middle Ages, the maypole was burnt by evangelical Protestants at the Reformation, banned under Cromwell (‘a heathenish vanity, generally abused to superstition and wickedness’), and while restored at the Restoration, lost any remaining sexual significance so that by the nineteenth century, which added the ribbons for dancing couples to intertwine, it was erroneously taken to be an innocent reminder of a Merrie England that never was.

By the nineteenth century phallic symbolism had largely dropped out of general consciousness. But psychoanalysis brought it back in a big way – by locating it as hardwired in the subconscious. In his
Interpretation of Dreams
Freud listed many phallic symbols common to history and added many others including neckties (‘which hang down and are not worn by women’) and ‘balloons, flying machines and most recently Zeppelin airships’ because they all shared the ‘remarkable characteristic of the male organ . . . to rise up in defiance of the laws of gravity’.

In the rise of rock music during the 1960s, the anthropologist Desmond Morris identified the electric guitar as a new phallic symbol. The traditional acoustic guitar, he noted in
The Human
Zoo
,
with its curvaceous, waisted form, was essentially feminine; the electric guitar, however, had affected a sex change:

the body (now its symbolic testicles) has become smaller, less waisted and more brightly coloured, making it possible for the neck (its new symbolic penis) to become longer. The players themselves have helped by wearing the guitars lower and lower until they are now centred on the genital region.

And, of course, where the acoustic guitar is usually caressed at chest height, the electric guitar, manipulated at an erective angle, is repeatedly stroked violently in a manner that can be described as masturbatory.

What is phallic is sometimes only in the eye of the beholder. Habitually Salvador Dalí mentally superimposed three church belfries that were meaningful in his life to help him masturbate; when Aubrey Beardsley had a tooth pulled he made a sketch of it and wrote in his diary, ‘even my teeth are a little phallic’ (entirely coincidentally the American poet Walt Whitman described the penis as a ‘tooth-prong’). Innocent objects often took on a phallic appearance to the Earl of Rochester when he was drunk. Weaving across Whitehall Garden after a nighttime drinking session with the king and others, he saw His Majesty’s most highly prized possession, the rarest sundial in Europe, made of glass spheres, screamed ‘Does thou stand here to fuck time?’ and smashed it to smithereens with his sword.