God's Doodle

by Tom Hickman

  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 c
hest 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.

  Modern psychiatry has for the most part turned away from phallic symbolism, deeming it subjective and unscientific, and so it may be. But for most people, at a superficial level, ‘phallic’ is a reflex descriptor for anything rigid and upright, be it flagpole or lamppost, tower block or skyscraper; the heroine of Amanda Craig’s novel Foreign Bodies says dubiously on seeing an erection for the first time: ‘It is, I suppose, the basis of a great deal of architecture.’ And phallic symbolism remains beloved by writers of high-end literature, and of course filmmakers: tumescence (trains enter tunnels, rockets shoot into space, fireworks climb into the sky, wave-peaks race towards land), ejaculation (volcanoes erupt, champagne corks pop, fireworks spray, waves pound rocks or shore), and detumescence (hot-air balloons deflate, detonated chimney stacks topple, fireworks fall, waves withdraw). But archaeologists and anthropologists are conceivably the most committed of phallic symbolists. As anthropologist Richard Rudgley admitted a few years ago in a television programme looking for secrets of the Stone Age in the ruins of a Maltese temple built three and a half thousand years ago: ‘It’s an occupational hazard. We tend to see willies pretty much everywhere.’

  Without doubt the best-known phallic symbol of modern times is the cigar. Indeed Freud, a cigar smoker who despite mouth cancer refused to give them up (yes, he affably agreed with his friends, smoking them was akin to homosexual fellatio), became so tired of hearing ‘phallic’ and ‘cigar’ in conjunction that he sighed: ‘Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar.’ But then, as the Bill Clinton and Monica Lewinsky affair goes to show, sometimes it isn’t.

  FLAUNT IT!

  GIVEN THE ANCIENT Greeks’ admiration for the penis, it’s unsurprising that men exercised naked in the gymnasium (gymnos means naked) and took part naked in athletic contests. But in the fifth century BC, the period of the greatest flowering of Attic culture, foreigners were astonished to see that Athenian men, when young, habitually displayed their genitals in everyday life. While older men wore a tunic (chiton) under winter and summer cloaks, young men did not. And the light summer cloak (chlamys), which came only to the thigh, was frequently lifted by normal activity (not to mention a breeze). The Athenians did consider the head of the penis to be unseemly in public, which is why young men pulled their foreskin over it and tied it with a thong or held it closed with a circular clip called a fibula.

  Small boys everywhere can be observed regularly delighting in pulling off their clothing to display their bud of flesh; and why not? asked the sexologist Alex Comfort, ‘after all [penises] are some of the best things we’ve got’. If mature penis-possessors have an innate desire to do as little boys do,social convention ensures they do not, as it ensures that they refrain from the overt tactility that was also a constant feature of their earliest years (professional footballers the exception to this rule). When drunk, however, some penis-possessors have a compulsion that is irresistible. The list is long and grows. In 1581 John Harris of Layer Breton, Essex, was taken to court because he ‘behaved himself very disorderly by putting forth his privities’; in 1590 Henry Abbot of Earls Colne, Essex, also appeared before the magistrates for undoing his breeches ‘in his drunkenness claiming that his privities or prick was longer by 4 inches than one Clerke there’. In the following century Pepys recorded the trial of Sir Charles Dydley for debauchery after he had appeared drunk and naked in daylight on the balcony of a brothel,

  Acting all postures of lust and buggery that could be imagined . . . saying that here he hath to sell such a powder as should make all the cunts in town run after him . . . And that being done he took a glass of wine, washed his prick in it and then drank it off: and then took another and drank the King’s health.

  In our own time, the constantly inebriated actor Oliver Reed, who displayed his ‘wand of lust’ (which in moments of sobriety he admitted was nothing out of the ordinary) in bars, on planes, at parties and on television and film sets, once did so to a woman reporter who was interviewing him. In reply to her scornful: ‘Is that it?’ he said, ‘Madam, if I’d pulled it out in its entirety I’d have knocked your hat off.’ On another occasion when he exposed himself in a Caribbean bar the locals took the tattoo of an eagle’s claws on his penis for a voodoo sign and he was forced to flee.

  Men with a penis of considerable size don’t need their inhibitions loosened by alcohol to make the fact known or to demonstrate the evidence at the drop of a trouser. James Boswell, the to-be biographer of Samuel Johnson, in London from Edinburgh for the first time in 1762 and ‘really unhappy for want of women’, picked up a girl in the Strand and took her into a dark courtyard with the intention of enjoying her ‘in armour’ (he feared the pox). But neither he nor the girl had a sheath so they only toyed with each other and in his journal Boswell recorded, ‘She wondered at my size, and said if I ever took a girl’s maidenhead, I would make her squeak.’ Prince Grigori Alexsandrovich Potemkin, the outstanding eighteenth-century Russian statesman and lover of the Empress Catherine, used to stride through the Winter Palace naked beneath his unbuttoned Turkish dressing gown, demonstrating that his reputation was not exaggerated; the priapic Russian holy man Grigori Rasputin, once accused in a packed Moscow restaurant of not being who he claimed to be, said ‘I will prove who I am’ and did – another whose reputation went before him.7

  Eric Gill, the twentieth-century artist/sculptor and another journal keeper, like Boswell recorded a prostitute’s comment about his size – in her case because ‘it was too big and hurt her’. Gill habitually wore a short stonemason’s smock without underwear and was wont, when showing visitors around his commune, to urinate in the grounds, which gave him the opportunity to display ‘the water tap that could turn into a pillar of fire’. There is an entry in his 1925 diary concerning his secretary Elizabeth Bill: ‘Talked to Eliz. B. re size and shape of penis. She measured mine with a footrule – down and up.’ So proud was Gill of his endowment that he drew it constantly, made a carving of it, and used its proportions in wood engravings of Jesus who, he said, as man ‘had to have proper genitals’. Proper genitals were what Gill gave the stone figure of the Shakespearean sprite Ariel when he carved him (accompanying the magician Prospero) above the entrance of the BBC’s Broadcasting House. The BBC governors, gathered to see the work unveiled, were startled when Gill removed the tarpaulin behind which he worked – and ordered the sculptor back up his ladder to cut things back.

  According to the autobiography of Hollywood mermaid Esther Williams, her one-time lover Johnny ‘Tarzan’ Weissmuller was so childishly delighted to be well hung that he lost no opportunity to flash his genitalia on and off the set, as did swashbuckler Errol Flynn, whose penis was such a heavyweight that his party trick was to play the piano with it. Yet another ‘exhibitionist extraordinaire’, according to his biographer James H. Jones, was Alfred Kinsey who

  seldom passed up an opportunity to show off his genitals and demonstrate his masturbatory techniques to staff members. One insider…told an interviewer that Kinsey ‘had very large genitalia, and that means both penis and balls’. The man added, ‘Several of the staff members used to say, “Maybe that’s why h
e whips the goddam thing out all the time to show you the urethra or the corona”.’

  At least Kinsey had a quasi-scientific excuse; the American president Lyndon Johnson had no excuse at all, other than pride in his size. He loved to conduct official business while he was in the shower (his White House staff squeezed into the bathroom) and often emerged fingering the considerable presidential appendage saying, ‘Wonder who we’ll fuck tonight? . . . I gotta give Ol’ Jumbo here some exercise.’ (The Years of Lyndon Johnson, Robert A. Caro). Once, frustrated at a press conference at which he was being pressed as to why America was still fighting in Vietnam, Johnson pulled out his pecker (one of his favourite words), saying, ‘This is why,’ presumably because he thought it did his talking more coherently than he did. (If men do some of their thinking with their penis, it goes without saying that their penis talks to them, as Gray Jolliffe’s cartoon character Wicked Willie – whose exploits have sold over five million books – so cleverly shows; the additional biological impossibility is neither here nor there.)

  The aforementioned Scottish actor Ewan McGregor was only marginally less inarticulate than the presidential penis when he was interviewed after playing a rocker in the film Velvet Goldmine. For the role he had been required to moon at the audience; for good measure during shooting he flaunted not just his posterior parts but his anterior too. Asked why he had an irresistible urge to exhibit himself McGregor said:

  I don’t go round thinking: Hey, I’ve got a huge cock, go on, show me yours and we’ll compare sizes. But at the same time, when people ask me if I’d be keen to flash my willy if it was small, I always think:Well, how the fuck am I supposed to know?