Authors: Tom Hickman
Genital oath-taking appears not to have extended outside Roman and Middle Eastern cultures, but a related custom during the Middle Ages in Europe was for a woman who accused a man of rape to swear to the charge with her right hand upon the relic of a saint – and her left upon ‘the peccant member’.
The über organ penis may no longer have been the arbiter of all things by the Renaissance but it was still fundamentally lord of all it surveyed. During the Enlightenment and beyond, however, advances in medicine and understanding of the human condition, as well as the lessening of superstitions, gradually eroded its power base. But at the beginning of the twentieth century came the entirely new field of psychoanalysis and the penis, if not exactly back on its pedestal, was again on the up, thanks to Sigmund Freud’s conclusion that women suffer from penis envy. As small girls, he hypothesised, women see the penis of a brother or playmate, at once recognise it as the superior counterpart of their own ‘small and inconspicuous organ’, and fall victim to jealousy – an emotion only resolved when their subconscious desire for a penis ‘changes into a wish for a man’. Freud also concluded that women are jealous of the penis as a urinary device. In childhood they witness small boys relieving themselves and flourishing their penis as if playing a game (the Jedi’s light sabre has nothing on it) – and feel disappointment that they’re denied the same pleasure of inventive manipulation (non-penis-possessors have to sit down, too; Freud felt sorry for them). Like others in his profession, Freud believed that this early experience made many women associate a garden hose with the penis because, as one of Havelock Ellis’s patients explained, using a hose ‘seems delightfully like holding a penis’.
No wonder, you might think, that women like watering the flower beds.
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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 conception – 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.’
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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.’
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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.’