By the end of the fifteenth century, however, the baths were being closed throughout Europe; within half a century more they were gone.39 (The Spanish, in particular, had never supported regular bathing, public or otherwise, associating it with Islam and thus regarding it as “a mere cover for Mohammedan ritual and sexual promiscuity.”)40 Similarly, brothels had been tolerated and even given municipal institutional status in some European communities during the fourteenth and early fifteenth century. But, just as bath houses began being closed by authorities in the 1470s, so too were the brothels; like the public baths, open brothels effectively had disappeared by the mid-sixteenth century.41 As for bare-breasted or other revealing fashions, they also quickly became a thing of the past. Spain led the way here as the fifteenth century was drawing to a close. Mantles or mantos for women became the approved attire, Hans Peter Duerr notes, and they
completely enveloped the female figure, leaving only a small peephole. Black became the colour of choice, the expression of the face froze into a mask, bodices had iron staves sewed into them, even the hint of a bosom was shunned. Lead plates served to keep breasts flat and to impede their development.42
In other parts of Europe “there was even a return to the medieval caps and chin bands,” Duerr writes, “revealing nothing of the hair beneath.” Behind this shift back to traditional Christian denial of the body and rejection of things sexual, says loan P. Couliano, was the persistent ideology that
woman is the blind instrument for seduction of nature, the symbol of temptation, sin, and evil. Besides her face, the principal baits of her allure are the signs of her fertility, hips and breasts. The face, alas, must stay exposed, but it is possible for it to wear a rigid and manly expression. The neck can be enveloped in a high lace collar. As to the bosom, the treatment dealt it closely resembles the traditional deformation of the feet of [Chinese] women, being no less painful and unhealthy. . . . Natural femininity, overflowing, voluptuous, and sinful is categorized as unlawful. Henceforth only witches will dare to have wide hips, prominent breasts, conspicuous buttocks, long hair.43
Couliano’s passing reference to witches in this context is worth pausing over, for it is precisely here that Christianity—and in particular the Christianity that structured life, culture, and ideas at the time that Columbus was making ready his plans to sail to Cathay—located the only proper home in the contemporary world for nudity and eroticism. Both of the major texts on witchcraft produced at this time—Jakob Sprenger’s famous Malleus Maleficarum in 1486, and Fray Martin de Castenega’s Tratado de las Supersticiones y Hechicherias in 1529—observed that “all witchcraft comes from carnal lust.” Indeed, “the literature and imagery relating to witchcraft border on the pornographic,” Couliano says: “the inhibitions of an entire era of repression are poured into it. All possible and impossible perversions are ascribed to witches and their fiendish partners”—“perversions” both heterosexual and homosexual, for as Jeffrey Burton Russell has observed, one “commonplace” allegation that appears “again and again” in witchcraft trials was the charge of sodomy.44
The ritualized gatherings of witches in Europe during this time were known as “synagogues,” and later as “sabbats”—both terms, of course, derived from Judaism, which was itself regarded as a form of devil worship. There are numerous supposed accounts of such gatherings (the so-called Great European Witch Hunt was building toward its peak by the end of the fifteenth century), but Norman Cohn has put together a representative collage of what Christians from this time believed took place during a typical witches’ sabbat:
The sabbat was presided over by the Devil, who now took on the shape not of a mere man but of a monstrous being, half man and half goat: a hideous black man with enormous horns, a goat’s beard and goat’s legs. . . . First the witches knelt down and prayed to the Devil, calling him Lord and God, and repeating their renunciation of the Christian faith; after which each in turn kissed him, often on his left foot, his genitals or his anus. Next delinquent witches reported for punishment, which usually consisted of whippings. . . . Then came the parody of divine service. Dressed in black vestments, with mitre and surplice, the Devil would preach a sermon, warning his followers against reverting to Christianity and promising them a far more blissful paradise than the Christian heaven. . . . The proceedings ended in a climax of profanity. Once more the witches adored the Devil and kissed his anus. . . . Finally, an orgiastic dance, to the sound of trumpets, drums and fifes. The witches would form a circle, facing outwards, and dance around a witch bent over, her head touching the ground, with a candle stuck in her anus to serve as illumination. The dance would become a frantic and erotic orgy, in which all things, including sodomy and incest, were permitted. At the height of the orgy the Devil would copulate with every man, woman and child present.45
Needless to say, sex with Satan—or even with one or more of the incubi or succubae who assisted him—was not something one easily forgot. Nicolas Remy, a sixteenth-century expert on these matters (he had made a fifteen-year study of approximately 900 witchcraft trials) reported to an eager Christian public the experiences, recounted in official testimony, of some witches who had endured the ordeal:
Hennezel asserts that his Scuatzebourg (those were the names of succubae) gave him the impression of having a frozen hole (instead of a vagina) and that he had to withdraw before having an orgasm. As to witches, they declare that the virile organs of demons are so thick and hard that it is impossible to be penetrated by them without dreadful pain. Alice Drigée compared her demon’s erect penis with a kitchen tool she pointed out to the assembly and gave the information that the former lacked scrotum and testicles. As to Claudine Fellée, she knew how to avoid the piercing pain of such intercourse by a rotary movement she often performed in order to introduce that erect mass, which no woman, of no matter what capacity, could have contained. . . . And nevertheless, there are some who reach orgasm in this cold and loathsome embrace.46
It is not hard to imagine the effect—or, indeed, the function—of listening to this sort of thing, day in and day out, among people adamantly committed to intense sexual repression as the fundamental key to eternal salvation. In the event that verbal description might prove insufficient, however, artistic works abounded, depicting the disgustingly thrilling orgiastic rites and rituals that occurred during witches’ sabbats. So too, of course, were visual representations readily available of the horrendous postmortem fate—including violent assaults by demons on the genitals—that was in store for ordinary mortals who might have succumbed to the temptations of lust and lechery.
There was, however, a third artistic genre in which sexual behavior was often central—depictions of the long, lost Golden Age. Thus, in the midst of the sixteenth century’s culture of sexual denial, Agostino Carracci—among others—could openly depict explicit and voluptuous sensuality and eroticism so long as it was labeled Love in the Golden Age and contained appended verses with language like: “As the palm is a sign of victory, so the fruit of congenial love is that sweetness from which is produced the seed whence Nature and heaven are glorified.”47
By definition, of course, the Golden Age belonged safely to the past—although there was always the very real possibility that displaced remnants of it existed, and could be found, in distant parts of the world that had not yet been explored. If somewhere on the earth’s outer fringes there lay a land of demigods and milk and honey, however, there also lurked in distant realms demi-brutes who lived carnal and savage lives in a wilderness controlled by Satan. Which one, if either, of these a medieval or Renaissance explorer was likely to find, only time and experience would tell.
III
Contrary to a notion that has become fashionable among American historians, the concept of race was not invented in the late eighteenth or nineteenth century. Indeed, systems of categorical generalization that separated groups of people according to social constructions of race (sometimes based on skin color, sometimes with reference to other
attributes) and ranked them as to disposition and intelligence, were in use in Europe at least a thousand years before Columbus set off across the Atlantic.48 Even a thousand years earlier than that, says historian of ancient Greece Kurt von Fritz, since it was, he contends, during the time of Hippocrates in the fourth century B.C. “that race theory first raised its head.” Others might argue for an earlier date still, but certainly it is true, as Fritz points out, that from Hippocrates to Callisthenes to Posidonius several centuries later, the concept was elaborated and refined until it was held that “not only the populations of different continents constituted different races, but every tribe or nation had its racial characteristics which were the product of hereditary factors, climate, diet, training and traditions.” As a consequence of this, Posidonius contended, the behavior of individuals and groups was attributable to a variety of factors, one of which was their “racial character.”49 Moreover, as Orlando Patterson has shown, “strong racial antipathy was not uncommon in Rome,” and in particular, “Negro features were not an asset in the slave-holding societies of the Greco-Roman world.”50
Long before this era, however, at least as early as the late eighth century B.C., Homer and Hesiod and other Greek poets were describing a time, as A. Bartlett Giamatti puts it, “when Cronos reigned and the world was young, the age of the Golden race, and said it still existed to the north in the land of the Scythians and Hyperboreans.” The poets were not alone in speaking and writing of these Fortunate Islands of delight, repose, and physical bliss, for “as poets sang of this happy place, ancient geographers and historians charted and described it—sight unseen, save with the mind’s eye.”51
Unseen, perhaps, but there was no doubt that the earthly paradise was an actual place situated in a distant realm, a group of islands or a peaceful plain at the end of the earth. As Menelaus was promised in the Odyssey:
[I]t is not your fate to die in Argos, to meet your end in the grazing-land of horses. The Deathless Ones will waft you instead to the world’s end, the Elysian fields where yellow-haired Rhadamanthus is. There indeed men live unlaborious days. Snow and tempest and thunderstorms never enter there, but for men’s refreshment Ocean sends out continually the high-singing breezes of the west.52
In other traditions the Elysian Fields were in the Islands of the Blest where, according to Hesiod, there lived the fourth age of men, the “godly race of the heroes who are called demigods,” to whom Zeus had “granted a life and home apart from men, and settled them at the ends of the earth.” And still today, says Hesiod, there they “dwell with carefree heart in the Isles of the Blessed Ones, beside deep-swirling Oceanus: fortunate Heroes, for whom the grain-giving soil bears its honey-sweet fruits thrice a year.”53
These were demigods because they were half god, half human, descended from unions between gods and mortal women. Their existence had been preceded by that of three other races. First, there were the “Golden race” of people who “lived like gods, with carefree heart, remote from toil and misery” and who, at the end of their reign, were transformed into “divine spirits . . . watchers over mortal men, bestowers of wealth.” Then there followed the Silver race, “much inferior” to the Golden race, “but still they too have honour.” The third race, the race of Bronze men, was “a terrible and fierce race,” characterized by violence and a lack of agriculture—a clear sign of civilization’s absence—a people who ate only meat and whatever grew wild. They were “unshapen hulks, with great strength and indescribable arms growing from their shoulders above their stalwart bodies.” They did not have iron, or at least they did not know how to work it, and they now lived in “chill Hades’ house of decay.”54
The present is located in the fifth age, the age of the race of Iron men. In terms of moral character, the world of Hesiod’s Iron race contemporaries seems to have been situated somewhere between that of the deformed and violent and primitive Bronze race and that of the demigods who lived in the Blessed Isles: although troubled with vice and selfishness and dishonesty, at least the Iron race is civilized, though in time it too is fated to be abandoned by the gods because of its insistent sinfulness. However, as Giamatti notes, Hesiod later introduces the notions of justice and morality as paths that mortal men and women can choose to follow and in which “a kind of Golden Age is open to [those] who deserve it by their just and virtuous lives.”55 Neither war, nor famine, nor blight will fall upon those whose communities select the path of virtue:
For them Earth bears plentiful food, and on the mountains the oak carries acorns at its surface and bees at its centre. The fleecy sheep are laden down with wool; the womenfolk bear children that resemble their parents; they enjoy a continual sufficiency of good things. Nor do they ply on ships, but the grain-giving ploughland bears them fruit.56
This is about as close as humans are likely to get to a paradise on earth. For “those who occupy themselves with violence and wickedness and brutal deeds,” however, godly retribution is in store: “disaster . . . famine and with it plague, and the people waste away. The womenfolk do not give birth, and households decline.”57
The theme evolved from Greek to Roman thought and, as Giamatti observes, the “note of morality,” of virtue and its reward as a choice humans could make, “rendered Golden Age places ‘safe’ for Christian adaptation.” In time Christianity did indeed integrate the idea into its own ideology. Although in Christian legend the terrestrial paradise was linked to the Garden of Eden, as Giamatti says, “early Christian descriptions of the earthly paradise owed as much to ancient literature as to Christian Biblical literature, and finally the two strands became inseparable.”58 Whatever the variations imposed by the different European cultures that adopted it, the terrestrial paradise was always a place linked to the past, but still existing somewhere on the other side of the world in the present—a place of simplicity, innocence, harmony, love, and happiness, where the climate is balmy and the fruits of nature’s bounty are found on the trees year round.
Other, less pleasant realms and their inhabitants existed in distant lands as well, however, for mixed in among the varied races of the world was a special category of being collectively known as the “monstrous races.” They are described in the writings of Homer, Ctesias, Megasthenes, and others dating back at least as far as the eighth century B.C.—along with earlier parallels that can be found in the ancient Near East—but the first major compilation describing the appearance and character of the different monstrous races was that of Pliny the Elder in his first century A.D. Natural History. In thirty-six volumes Pliny soberly and seriously informs his readers about the existence of different peoples living in far off lands whose feet are turned backwards; whose upper or lower lips are so large that they curl them back over their heads to use as umbrellas; who walk upside down; who walk on all fours; who are covered with hair; who have no mouths and nourish themselves by smelling their food; who have neither heads nor necks and whose faces are embedded in their chests; who have one eye—or three, or four; who have the heads of dogs, and breathe flames; who have only one leg on which they nevertheless run very fast, a leg containing an enormous foot that they use to shield themselves from the sun; who are gigantic or miniature in size; who have six fingers or six hands; who have hooves instead of feet; whose ears are so long that they use them as blankets; and more. Other such alien races have women who conceive at age five and die by the time they are eight, or children who are born with white hair that gradually turns to black as they grow older.59
It is important to recognize that these creatures were truly believed to exist and to exist not in some supernatural or demonic realm, but within the larger context of humanity—if often on its outermost margins. Beyond the matter of gross difference in physical type and biological characteristics in general, the monstrous races were distinguishable by cultural patterns that varied from European ideals. They spoke strangely; “barbarians” were, after all, literally barbaraphonoi, or those whose speech sounded like “bar bar” to Greek ear
s. They ate and drank strange foods and potions, from insects to human flesh to dog’s milk. They went about unclothed, or if clothed they usually were covered by animal skins. They used crude weapons of war, clubs or other wooden objects, or they were ignorant of weaponry altogether. And they lived in small communities, not urban environments—and thus were largely ungoverned by laws.
Once integrated into Christian thinking, the monstrous races came to be associated with the lineage of Cain; that is, they were actual creatures whose strangeness was part of their deserved suffering because of their progenitor’s sin. Whether Greeks, Romans, or medieval Christians, moreover, the Europeans of all eras considered themselves to be “chosen” people, the inhabitants of the center and most civil domain of human life. The further removed from that center anything in nature was, the further it was removed from God, from virtue, and from the highest essence of humanity. Thus, the fact that the monstrous races were said to live on the distant extremes of the earthly realm was one crucial element in their radical otherness, and also in their being defined as fundamentally unvirtuous and base. So great was their alienation from the world of God’s—or the gods’—most favored people, in fact, that well into late antiquity they commonly were denied the label of “men.”60
This eventually became a problem for Christianity, eager as the faith was to convert all humanity to God’s revealed truth. The classic statement of the early church on this matter was the work of Augustine who, in The City of God, affirmed that “whoever is born anywhere as a human being, that is, as a rational mortal creature, however strange he may appear to our senses in bodily form or colour or motion or utterance, or in any faculty, part or quality of his nature whatsoever, let no true believer have any doubt that such an individual is descended from the one man who was first created.” Though often regarded as a fairly unambiguous statement of support for the humanity of distant peoples, Augustine’s linking of humanity to “rationality” left open a large area for definitional disagreement. Nor did his closing words on the subject help: “Let me then tentatively and guardedly state my conclusion. Either the written accounts of certain races are completely unfounded or, if such races do exist, they are not human; or, if they are human, they are descended from Adam.”61 All that really can be concluded from this is that, for Augustine, someone who worships within the fold of Christianity certainly is rational and certainly is human, though there clearly are races that in some respects might seem to be human, but are not.
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