exhibitionist carvings
on mediæval churches

by Anthony Weir, author of "Images of Lust"

male figures: part I

Interior corbel, church of Sainte-Radegonde, Poitiers (Vienne), France

The word Fascination derives from the Roman fascinum:
a tiny model of an erect penis often contained in a bulla or locket
for boys to wear around their neck in anticipation of their mature virility and its gender-status.

But for the fourth-century former 'Cathar' Saint Augustine of Hippo, erectile male lust was both the cause and the effect of Original Sin.

The male erection was both the sympton and the innate disease caused by the insuperable power of Satan which was displayed by the involuntariness of penile erection. This involition was most dramatically demonstrated by the erection of the Hanged Man. The most notorious hanged man was Judas, the betrayer for money, the victim of Satan through greed for money, and the unredeemable suicide. Judas thus embodied the three most terrible sins of Christian Europe: avaritia, concupiscentia and suicide.

Many male exhibitionists on Romanesque churches have scrotal sacs disproportionally larger even than their disproportionate penises. The modern French for scrotum is bourse, the word also for money-bag or purse. (Spanish bolsa, Italian borsa.) Purses were made from the scrota of boars, bulls, rams and goats. Thus the 'licentious' motif of the male exhibitionist incorporated, through the medium of the pun which has been largely ignored in Romanesque art, the motif of the Moneybags, the hoarder of jewels.

The product of the diabolical power of the penis was semen, a pollution which ensured that every human born was contaminated by evil. Augustine thus - contrary to scripture - asserted that, despite the possibility of our 'redemption through Jesus', men and Man had no Divine gift of Freedom of the will.

Augustine's horror of the erection - at odds with almost every culture on the planet, and even with the declarations of the contemporaneous Council of Elvira - dominated European thought and society from the fifth century to the twentieth, at least.

Some collegiate churches attached to important monasteries featured hundreds of figures illustrating and warning against all sorts of sin from gluttony and drunkenness, dancing and lewd behaviour to calumny, simony and sodomy - and most particularly wealth and the sins of luxury to which wealth inevitably leads.

Male exhibitionist with moneybag, Domfront (Orne) France

 

Male exhibitionist with barrel, Givrezac (Charente-Maritime), France

Guzzlers of wine from barrels, acrobats and musicians (for to Christian - as to some Muslim - clerics of the time, all secular music was 'the devil's tunes', and the ubiquitous bagpipe was an obvious - if later - metaphor for male genitals, as, to a lesser extent was the flute.)

click to enlarge

Santa María de Morquintián, Muxía (La Corunha), Spain

rub shoulders with beasts such as pigs and dogs and bears who, even when not ithyphallic, represent lusts and degradation.

click for more

Plaisance-sur-Gartempe (Vienne)

for more

Ithyphallic bear on the church tower at Aston Somerville (Gloucestershire)

Bear-cults were as important as Wolf-cults in Classical and pagan pre-Romanesque times. Just as the Roman Republic claimed its origin in the suckling of two abandoned twins by a she-wolf, so princes, leaders & heroes used to claim that their genealogy began with union of a bear with a female ancestor. Since, of course, the cult was seen as a threat to the church, it wanted bears to be domesticated, dominated and humiliated. This accounts for the hundreds of years of appalling cruelty to bears in Europe - as to wolves - which still has not ceased, (and in China amounts now to a pseudo-scientific holocaust, for magical reasons).

click to enlarge

Window-voussoir, Annaghdown (Galway), Ireland

click to enlarge

Anglards-de-Salers (Puy-de-Dôme)

 

Mauriac (Cantal), France: absidiole corbels
and a detail of a sinful variant of the Ouroboros or Ourobolos

click for high-resolution enlargements by Tina Negus - and another example

Amongst the beasts symbolising lascivious concupiscence is the hare, in Classical times the animal associated with Venus. A rare and primitive depiction of hares with a male exhibitionist can be seen on a chancel-arch capital of an early Romanesque church in Auvergne.

Saint-Etienne-de-Vicq (Allier)
click for an enlargement

On an English church a classic vulva-pulling female exhibitionist (of the type now commonly known as a Sheela-na-Gig) is approached with intent by an ithyphallic, bearded man-beast, somewhat resembling a Babylonian lion. The large limestone carving has been cut to form a window-top on a tower built mainly from flint. Above it is the church clock: Temporality combines powerfully with lechery and concupiscence.

Whittlesford (Cambridgeshire), England
click for a high-resolution enlargement

Apes, coming from Barbary, represented the barbaric and blaspheming (if not demonic) Moors, and, to emphasise the point, displayed their circumcisions.

click for more apes

Droiturier (Allier), France

As well as fabulous beasts, beard-pullers, foliage-spewers, mouth-pullers, tongue-stickers and column-swallowers are also well-known from hundreds of churches. But comparatively rare are the exhibitionist versions of these motifs, such as the megaphallic barrel-toter (Givrezac, above), mouth-puller...

León, Spain

Thorpe Arnold (Leicestershire), England
click for high-resolution enlargement by Tina Negus

...or cake-eater.

Champagnolles (Charente-Maritime), France
click for high-resolution enlargement

 

click for another view

Megaphallic glutton, Barahona (Segovia), Spain

Even some remote churches feature remarkable figures in frozen demonstration of mortal sins - especially the sins of carnality, wealth and consumption - to be avoided on pain of eternal punishment.

Saint-Contest (Calvados), France
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Studland (Dorset), England
click to see some corbels

 

part 2>

This web-page is dedicated to the late Martha Weir,
who was amazed but unfazed by these carvings,
and without whom "Images of Lust"
would never have been researched or written.

Click here for a related essay: POTENCY AND SIN : IRELAND AND THE PHALLIC CONTINUUM

 

LIST of PHOTOGRAPHS of MALE and FEMALE EXHIBITIONISTS
on this site