by Tom Hickman
No wonder, you might think, that women like watering the flower beds.3
SEMINAL INFLUENCES
THE ATHENIANS BELIEVED that the small penis was not only preferable aesthetically and sexually to anything bigger, but was also a superior delivery mechanism for human conception. Aristotle provided the scientific rationale. Having a lesser distance to travel along it, he argued, semen arrived in the hot condition required at its destination (another argument that still might stand a small-penised man in good stead, in some circumstances).
In the ancient world semen, like the penis itself, was regarded with something approaching wonder. Semen was the most precious of substances. The Greeks were convinced that the semen of an older man received by a younger in a homosexual encounter helped to build the recipient’s manliness and passed on wisdom. The Romans celebrated a son’s first ejaculation as part of the Liberalia festive holiday. Just as they protected their fields with replicas of penises, Romans, like the Greeks and other peoples, sprinkled semen to make the crops grow, a practice that still occurs in regions of Africa. As recently as the early part of the last century the New Mexico Zuni tribe were still leading one of their cross-gender priests on horseback onto the plains in the spring and masturbating him to ensure the return of the buffalo.
In East and West down the centuries, semen was considered to have magical properties. The Roman naturalist Pliny the Elder regarded it as a cure for scorpion stings; 1,400 years later, the Swiss-German physician and alchemist known as Paracelsus was convinced that a man could be created purely from semen, cutting out the middle man or, more accurately, woman. He wrote:
Let the semen of a man be putrefied in a gourd glass. Seal it up in horse-dung for 40 days, or so many until it begins to be alive, move and stir . . . After this time it will be something like a man, yet transparent, and without a body. Now, after this, if it be every day nourished with man’s blood, and for 40 weeks be kept in a constant, equal heat of horse-dung, it will become a true and living infant, having all the members of an infant born of woman.
When he was dying Paracelsus had his penis cut off and buried in manure, hoping to be resuscitated as a virile young man, a trick even less likely than turning base metal into gold.
Given the exalted view that men took of penises and semen, it’s less than surprising that the ancient world was dismissive of women’s part in the matter of conception. Both Hippocrates, the Greek father of medicine, and Galen believed that women, like men, produced semen but, while theirs played some part in the matter, it was cold, watery and insignificant; menstrual blood, on the other hand, was women’s essential contribution, because it nourished the foetus. Its availability, Galen said, was due to women not being ‘perfectly warm’, as were penis-possessors, resulting in them having a surplus of blood left over from their comparatively cold bodily needs.
Semen in both Greek and Latin means seed and the word alone defined the respective part that the sexes were believed to play in making babies. As a Hindu text of around AD 100 decreed: ‘The woman is considered in law as the field and the man is the grain.’ Aristotle likened man to a carpenter and woman to the wood he worked. A woman, he also said, was ‘a mere incubator’. ‘The mother is not the true source of life,’ Aeschylus has the god Apollo say in Eumenides. ‘We call her the mother, but she is more the nurse: she is the furrow where the seed is thrust. He who mounts is the true parent; the woman but tends the growing plant.’
The question that exercised all ages was: where, within the male anatomy, did semen come from? The Sumerians thought it derived from the bones; the Egyptians, more specifically, the spinal column. Hippocrates taught that semen came from the brain direct to the penis, which Galen later amended, saying that it arrived from the brain to the left testicle, where it was purified and warmed to ‘the peak of concoction’, before being passed to the right to await usage. This led Aristotle, who believed that as spinal marrow and the brain were both white in substance, semen owed something to both, to conclude that a male child emanated from the perfect semen in the right testicle and a female child from the incompletely processed semen in the left. By extension, he concluded, boys grew on the right side of the woman’s body, girls on the less-favoured left. The Japanese, Chinese and Hindus, meanwhile, also identified the brain as the seminal source, even believing that if a man refrained from ejaculating at the crisis moment he could reverse the flow of his vital essence and send it in the opposite direction to nourish its source (according to Indian tradition, a highly developed ascetic who sustains a cut bleeds not blood but semen). The Chinese and Hindus, like Galen, considered semen to be extracted in the testicles from blood – the Chinese said ten drops produced one drop of semen, the Hindus said forty.
No culture was of the opinion that the seed was manufactured in the testicles.
The view that all families in a manner of speaking were one-parent families did modify with the centuries, but the woman’s input continued to be regarded as secondary. By the sixteenth century the conviction was that a man’s semen transmitted not just life but a child’s characteristics. Ideally, the male child possessed the man’s complete identity. The view persisted right to the end of the eighteenth century that if a man fathered a weakling or a daughter, then the woman was likely to be at fault for not being submissive enough, or that the man’s concentration had been broken and he’d been put off his stroke – as befell Tristram Shandy’s father in the act of begetting his heir:
Pray, my dear, quoth my mother, have you not forgot to wind up the clock?– Good G–! cried my father, making an exclamation, but taking care to moderate his voice at the same time, – Did ever woman, since the creation of the world, interrupt a man with such a silly question?
(The Life and Opinions of Tristram Shandy, Laurence Sterne)
During the Renaissance and even later, medical thought in the main followed the Aristotelian tradition; one of da Vinci’s anatomical drawings, based on dissection though it was, showed a seminal channel – which does not exist – from the spinal column to the genitals (the spinal connection meant that semen had long been called ‘marrow’). But there were other assumptions. Nicholas Culpeper’s book on anatomy in 1668 noted there were those who believed that semen was produced in the kidneys, ‘because hot kidneys cause a propensity of fleshy lust’. Yet others believed that the ingredients of semen originated in various organs, combining at orgasm – this being concluded from the observation that orgasm appeared to involve the whole body.
Aristotle disagreed with Galen’s two-seed theory; he believed all life came from eggs and taught that a foetus grew from the male semen that coagulated into an egg inside the female ‘testes’. It wasn’t until the late seventeenth century that the Dutch surgeon Regnier de Graaf discovered that an egg was indeed necessary to conception – but it was the woman’s. Even though he realised that this egg travelled from ovary to womb he rejected the notion that female biology was directly responsible. What he was dealing with, he decided, was the aura seminalis – an ancient concept of philosophy that believed the ‘nature, quality, character, and essence’ of a future human being was not corporeal but spiritual, a kind of astral agent. What de Graaf decided was that the aura seminalis was corporeal after all – that it was ‘the pungent vapour’ of semen.
Three years later in 1678 another Dutchman, the microscopist Antonie van Leeuwenhoek, was the first to see the millions of spermatozoa in a sample of semen (which, he primly noted, came from ‘the excess with which Nature provided me in my conjugal relations, not sinful contrivance’). He too rejected egg theory, proclaiming that a minuscule, fully formed human – a homunculus – resided in every single spermatozoon. So right did this appear to other men of science that soon there were further sightings of homunculi; and theologians pondered whether the contents of Adam’s ‘fecundating fluid’ had had little humans inside little humans, like a set of Russian dolls.
Another two hundred years would pass before the basic story of human concepti
on – ovum meets single spermatozoon,each contributes half the foetus’s building blocks – was understood. When it was, it put paid to the ancient world’s shibboleth that a woman’s orgasm was essential for conception and that this depended entirely on the generation of heat. The Greeks believed that man, by virtue of his perfect warmth and the vigour of his intercourse (‘the chaffing of the stones’), provided his heat naturally, making the ‘permatic humour foam’; but woman, cold creature that she was, needed a man’s ministrations to warm her up. Every culture continued in this belief (the Saxons even called the penis the ‘kindling limb’) and wasn’t short of advice on how a man could achieve combustion. ‘Handle her secret parts and dugs, that she may take fire and be inflamed in venery,’ wrote John Sadler in 1636, ‘for so at length the wombe will strive and wave fervent with desire.’4
The Chinese, believers in the heat/orgasm connection, were additionally keen on a woman’s orgasm, for her own pleasure but more particularly for the man’s well-being: her orgasm ensured that her yin reached maximum potency, thus strengthening his yang. ‘The more women with whom a man has intercourse,’ counselled The Way, The Supreme Path Of Nature, a philosophy that dominated Chinese thought for more than two thousand years, ‘the greater will be the benefit he derives from the act.’5
RELIGIOUS PHALLUSY
AT THE HEIGHT of British colonial rule in India, the wives of Victorian missionaries, merchants and military men were shocked to observe that every day a priest of Shiva emerged naked from the temple and went through the streets ringing a little bell – the signal for all the women to come out and kiss the holy genitals.
Westernisation has eroded the cult of the lingam, but India remains the only region of the world where penis worship, its rituals and its legendary narratives have continued from prehistory without interruption. In the more mystical tantric reaches of Hinduism and Buddhism, spreading eastwards through India’s neighbours and the South Pacific, devotees are still said to regard themselves as merely ‘phallus bearers’, each the servant of his sex organ, which he regards as a separate living entity, a divinity, even, in its own right. Worshippers of Shiva seek not so much hydraulic assistance as an uplifting union with the world’s seminal creativity.
As basis for faith, phallusism would undoubtedly strike almost everyone today as either disturbing or ridiculous. But according to the respected orientialist Alain Daniélou, the first translator of the Kama Sutra since the Victorian Sir Richard Burton, ‘there is probably no religion in which a substratum of the phallic cult does not exist’. And that includes Christianity. The wives of Victorian colonialists would have been reaching for the smelling salts had they been told that the cross, the very centre of Christian belief, is, in fact, a stylised representation of male genitalia, the upright the penis and the side pieces the testicles – a pagan symbol antedating Christianity by countless millennia. Penis and testicles are also the origin of the Christian Trinity, parodied by the novelist Henry Miller in Black Spring: ‘Before me always the image of the body, our triune god of penis and testicles. On the right, God the Father, on the left and hanging a little lower, God the Son, and between them and above them, the Holy Ghost.’
The ancient world was convinced a man had to be ‘complete in all his parts’ to make it into the afterlife and took a dim view of a woman damaging the male compendium. Assyria even had legislation:
If a woman has crushed a man’s testicle in an affray, one of her fingers shall be cut off; and if although a physician has bound it up, the second testicle is affected and becomes inflamed, or if she has crushed the second testicle in the affray, both of her breasts shall be torn off.
Judaism took a similar view. In the only verses in the entire Old Testament that forbid a woman to help her husband, the Book of Deuteronomy warns that if two men engage in a street fight ‘and the wife of the one draweth near for to deliver her husband out of the hand of him that smiteth him, and putteth forth her hand and taketh him by the secrets: Then though her hand shalt be cut off, thine eye shall not pity her.’ Christianity didn’t follow suit but followed Deuteronomy in balefully warning that ‘He who is wounded in the stones or hath his privy member cut off, shall not enter the assembly of the Lord.’
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 mock
ed 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.
