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Given, as we have seen, the Old Testament's easy acceptance of a veritably throbbing carnality, plus the New Testament's blithe lack of concern with the matter, the Christian difficulty with sex is even odder. It extended, what was more, to all forms of pleasure: the third-century Lebanese philosopher Porphyry, regarded by St. Augustine as the father of Christian morality rather than Musonius Rufus, condemned not only sex, but horse racing, the theatre, dancing, marriage and mutton chops, averring of the latter that, ‘those who indulged in them were servants not of God but of the Devil'. (In a bizarre footnote to the history of sexual abstinence, there exists to this day a vegan group in Christchurch, New Zealand, called Porphyry's People.)

In the shining, sexless new Christian world which Musonius ushered in, the obsolete, yet still extant, holy books of the old Hebrews became something of an embarrassment. In their drive to understand human beings as a finer, more cerebral, more moral form of wildlife than they were in the past, the writers of the Gospels, the radically-minded
post-mortem
historians of Jesus, had a problem with antique, but still undeniably holy, relics such as the ‘Song Of Solomon.' It could hardly be struck out of the Bible without offending God, who must have had his reasons for allowing such muck to be published in his name. So instead it was reinterpreted as a metaphor of Christ's love of his Church, just as the more hardline Jews rebranded such verses as an explanation of God's love of Israel. The story of Onan was similarly adapted for the new creed's benefit by being used fallaciously to denounce masturbation, especially by the male, who has always, in line with Musonius's idea of a repolarisation of the sexual status quo, been condemned more vigorously for sexual sin than the female.

These modern spiritual regimes across the Christian world triggered a form of what can only properly be regarded as madness, spiralling down the generations, as bodily pleasure (or, at least any admission of indulging in bodily pleasure) became progressively more taboo. The prohibitions were so numerous – no sex (or, needless to say, masturbation) on Sundays, Wednesdays and Fridays, which effectively removed five months in the year. Then it was made illegal during Lent (the forty days before Easter), during any penance, during the forty days before Christmas, for the three days before attending Communion, during Saints' days and from the time of conception to forty days after giving birth, or until the end of breast feeding in some cases, which ruled sex out for at least a year. It seems the Church elders wanted ideally to turn all Christians into semi-professional monks. But even then, they needed to take care; if a man experienced a nocturnal emission,
he was required to intone thirty-seven psalms on awakening. The absurdity of all this was ably mocked by the Italian poet Boccaccio in his
Decameron
.

The veto on masturbation was just as puzzling. Here was a harmless act that did not lower the value of a woman, did not break either her hymen or her heart, and did not produce unwanted, illegitimate children. All masturbation does is to produce an orgasm. If any proof were needed that it was the pleasure of orgasm more than, say, false intimacy or illegitimacy that was being targeted by the killjoy Christians, and would continue to be right up until the present day, it is surely the unfathomable obsession with orgasm.

Like all bad political policies, the drive to marginalise sex and those who enjoy it threw up conundrums for the policy makers. For example, absolutely all practices – diverse sexual positions, oral sex, anal sex – that a man and woman might discover they enjoyed were outlawed. But at the same time, a second cardinal rule in almost direct opposition to the first had to be instilled in the public.

Because marital sex may have been a shocking thing, but was not half as shocking as adultery, the Church found itself having to insist strenuously on the concept of ‘marital debt'. Married people were told, confusingly, that they
must
grant sex to one another on demand. Other isolated incongruities in the monolithic Christian party line on sex can be found. In Christian Byzantium, for example, it was believed that a woman's erotic pleasure could positively determine her baby's health and temperament. But the overwhelming weight of belief was on the side of sex being highly regrettable, and the pursuit of satisfactory orgasm, especially in women, a near atrocity.

The communal drawing back from the lascivious delights of the old world and rejection of the bodily equipment their God had provided them with was a strange phenomenon. It was as if human beings had been given by God, Nature, evolution, whichever, a sports car to enjoy and chosen to use it as a tractor.
Why should one of mankind's most intellectually advanced ideas to date – Christianity was revolutionary in so many other ways – have imploded on itself in this way? The historian of sex Reay Tannahill can only suggest that authoritarian societies had worked out that in disciplining sexual relations, it was possible to control the family and thus, critically the stability of the fragile new phenomenon that was the state. However, she says that even so, the legislators of matters sexual limited themselves to intervening only when sex impacted on areas of public concern such as legitimacy, inheritance and population control.

Setting aside its peculiar obsessional Nature, the new Christian morality ran perversely counter to human psychology in the way it denied any legitimate outlet for sexual feelings. The terrible distortions and corruptions of personality that this would create were not unknown to contemporary physicians. Soranus of Ephesus remarked in the second century, ‘If the body feels no sexual desire it seems to suffer just as the spirit does.' Much later, Ambrose, the official poet of the Third Crusade, confirmed the medical belief that lack of sex was bad for the health. ‘A hundred thousand men died there', he wrote of the Crusade, ‘Because from women they abstained / They had not perished thus / Had they not been abstemious'. Furthermore, around the time of
Magna Carta
in England, the Church, whilst proscribing sex at practically all times, simultaneously set down detailed instructions on how husbands should have sex with their wives to best effect.

A sage known as Giles of Rome, according to a 2003 book,
1215: The Year of Magna Carta
, advocated Galen's venerable advice on raising the ‘temperature' of women by foreplay so as conception might successfully take place. When the wife began ‘to speak as if she were babbling', Giles said, it was time for the husband to make his grand entry.

The idea that missing orgasms was unhealthy was almost certainly the perception of the ordinary man and woman. This sentiment continues to be a commonplace in the contemporary
West, where it co-exists a little uncomfortably with Christian abstemiousness and fear of sexual desire. To choose but one example of semi-scientific confirmation that denial of sex is harmful, a 1983 survey,
Sex and Self-Esteem, Medical Aspects of Human Sexuality
, noted in conclusion: ‘Orgasm and other forms of sexual expression are such a source of self-affirmation that two-thirds of psychiatrists believe people “nearly always or often” lose self-esteem when deprived of a regular outlet for sexual gratification.'

Yet the madness traceable to one peculiar obsession of a few misguided, if idealistic, men 2,000 years ago did not abate. The damaging effects of lack of sex have continued to rear their ugly Hydra head for thousands of years now, in a range of unpleasant manifestations. The obscene paedophilic excesses of a handful of Catholic clergy the world over in the modern age is just one of the more dramatic and corrosive of these. Some of the most egregious examples of the twisted behaviour engendered down the centuries by the Christian cult's rejection of sex and, worse still, denial of the enjoyment of orgasm, occurred when Europeans attempted to export their ‘civilised' Christian ideals to colonial subjects whose ideas on sex, to our current view, were rather advanced and sophisticated.

Spanish colonists in particular encountered an ancient tradition of sexual equality and reverence for the orgasm in South and Central America. They attempted to introduce the radical new idea to the ‘primitives' that women's genitals were
partes vergonzozas
, ‘the shameful parts,' and that female sexuality was an abomination.

The indigenous people sometimes argued the case for their own ways. There is a description of a cleric, Fray Tomas Carrasco, preaching to a crowd against their ‘promiscuity' and urging them to embrace monogamy. A woman bravely stood up and spoke out against the new European ways of male domination and female sexual shame. Unfortunately, she was killed by lightning in mid-oration, which the friar interpreted
as proof she was a witch, while her own people saw it as evidence that she was quite right.

As Naomi Wolf has written: ‘Europeans who witnessed these native women's assertion of their sexuality saw not divinity but depravity. According to the colonisers, Pueblo women could not even conceive of modesty or shame in relation to their bodies. Since, in the Western tradition, human beings in Eden were redeemed by shame, and particularly, as Christian theology evolved, by feminine shame, Europeans were inclined to see Hell where the Pueblo saw everyday pleasure.'

One of the world's most grotesque examples of a community warped to near destruction by the belief that Christianity and shame about sex go hand in hand is provided by the primitive island of Inis Beag, off the west coast of Ireland, as it was when anthropologists discovered its bizarre sexual culture in the 1960s.

Nudity, the researchers found, was abhorred by the islanders, even among small children, and animals regarded as sinful for going about undressed. Dogs would be whipped for licking their genitals. Girls and boys were separated at all times. Bathing was unknown, dressing was done only under bedcovers, and breastfeeding was highly uncommon. Any type of sexual expression needless to say, masturbation even to open urination, was severely punished by beatings. Parents believed that after marriage, ‘Nature would take its own course'. As a result, there were many childless couples due to neither spouse knowing what was expected of them. Marriages were arranged and forced on couples, their average ages at marriage being thirty-six for men and twenty-five for women. A man was still considered a ‘boy' until he was forty. The Church taught women that sex was a duty to be endured and that to refuse sex with their husband was a mortal sin. Underwear was kept on during sex and menopause regarded as an inevitable madness that afflicts women, some of whom confined themselves to bed at forty and lived as invalids until old age.
Psychologists studying the island found that its inhabitants sought escape from sexual frustration by masturbation, drinking, and alcohol-fuelled fights.

There is a popular view of the human psyche as a mattress; if our desires are thwarted in one area, they will simply prompt something else to pop up like a broken spring elsewhere in our behaviour. The mattress theory is famously illustrated in antiquity by Teresa of Avila, the fourteenth-century Spanish saint, who experienced rapturous visions of ‘angelic visitation' which sound suspiciously like nothing more or less Godly than a rather spectacular orgasm.

As St Teresa put it: ‘In his [the angel's] hands I saw a long golden spear and at the end of the iron tip I seemed to see a point of fire. With this he seemed to pierce my heart several times so that it penetrated to my entrails. When he drew it out, I thought he was drawing them out with it and he left me completely afire with a great love of God. The pain was so sharp that it made me utter several sharp moans; and so excessive was the sweetness caused me by this intense pain that one can never wish to lose it.'

Orgasmic-style, rapturous bodily sensations may be more common in those of a religious disposition than has been generally acknowledged. We spoke earlier of the oddly copulatory rocking of Orthodox Jews praying and reading the holy scriptures. Burgo Partridge, in his history of orgies, wrote wisely in reference to the early days of Christianity: ‘Abstinence from sexual activity leads to an almost total mental preoccupation with the subject and psychoneurotic symptoms and sexual hallucinations were developed on a really astonishing scale. A terrific outburst of “incubi” and “succubi” swept the bedrooms of Europe. These were nocturnal visitors, connected in the minds of the Christians with witchcraft and devilry, who indulged in liberties with the afflicted person, always of a sexual Nature. They were particularly common in nunneries, and seemed also to be highly infectious.'

Common sense prevailed widely, though; many medical men
were aware that incubi were delusions, and it was frequently said at the time that, ‘incubi infest cloisters'. More telltale still was the fact that these nocturnal ‘spirit visitors' often left the nuns with a phantom pregnancy; a more eloquent example of the subconscious trying to impose itself through bodily processes would be hard to find.

It took Geoffrey Chaucer to point out satirically that incubi became much less spoken of after ‘limitours' – wandering friars notorious for sleeping with women while their husbands were absent – appeared on the medieval scene. R.C. Zaehner in his 1957 book
Mysticism Sacred and Profane
further noted: ‘There is no point at all in blinkering the fact that the raptures of the theistic mystic are closely akin to the transports of sexual union, the soul playing the part of the female and God appearing as the male. The close parallel between the sexual act and the mystical union with God may seem blasphemous today. Yet the blasphemy is not in the comparison, but in the degrading of the one act of which man is capable that makes him like God both in the intensity of his union with his partner and in the fact that by this union he is co-creator with God.'

Amongst women, nuns unsurprisingly seem to have been particularly unhinged by voluntary orgasmic deprivation. In 1565, an epidemic of erotic convulsions reportedly affected a convent in Cologne. According to a Dr De Weier, who was called in to investigate, the nuns would throw themselves on their backs, shut their eyes, raise their abdomens erotically and thrust forward their pudenda. Partridge mentions imaginary night-time visitations among the sex-starved by ‘witches' and their demons, but ‘witches' themselves who testified at various times in the Middle Ages to ‘night-flying' were probably (broomsticks notwithstanding) using hallucinogenic drugs and ointments and enjoying LSD-like firework displays. But there were accounts too of self-proclaimed witches, often sexually inactive crones, swearing that they had flown when they outwardly appeared to be asleep; it is very possible that they were experiencing self-induced orgasm.