Category Archives: Sexuality

Sister of a God

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I teach the same material year after year, and it never gets old, in part because I like it so much, and in part because I’m always discovering new things. This year, during a discussion of the Code of Hammurabi, my students fixated on the laws in that dealt with the concept of the “Sister of a God.” I had to confess that I didn’t know exactly what was going on with this expression, and had to retreat to my spiel about how there are no right answers in history and even professionals are often deeply divided on what documents mean. On the surface, “sister of a god” would suggest something equivalent to our own concept of a nun – that is, a woman dedicated to the service of a god, who acquires a certain social capital in return for accepting restrictions on what she can do. This is seemingly reflected in law 110:

If a “sister of a god” open a tavern, or enter a tavern to drink, then shall this woman be burned to death.

Taverns being disreputable places, and religious women thus forbidden to associate with them. See also law 127:

If any one “point the finger” (slander) at a sister of a god or the wife of any one, and cannot prove it, this man shall be taken before the judges and his brow shall be marked. (by cutting the skin, or perhaps hair.)

Here “sisters of a god” are on the same level as wives, with their honor (presumably their reputation for sexual continence) entitled to legal protection.

But then there is the strange case of law 179:

If a “sister of a god,” or a prostitute, receive a gift from her father, and a deed in which it has been explicitly stated that she may dispose of it as she pleases, and give her complete disposition thereof: if then her father die, then she may leave her property to whomsoever she pleases. Her brothers can raise no claim thereto.

What is going on – nuns on the same level as prostitutes? Is this a law applying to “unmarriageable” women, whether for an honorable reason or a dishonorable one? Or does “sister of a god” actually mean something else? (The Mesopotamian practice of temple prostitution allegedly featured people having sex on the top of the ziggurat, so that the god would get excited and send rain. This is probably an urban legend, but always makes students sit up and pay attention! I suppose that it’s possible that women devoted to the god were not required to be celibate the way that nuns are).

Other laws refer to temple-maids and temple virgins (181), and to a “wife of Mardi of Babylon” (182). Are these then different from the “sister of a god”? Are these the real “nuns,” in our sense of the term, with “sister of a god” being a euphemism for prostitute – and the prohibition of them entering taverns was a law to prevent taverns from becoming even more disreputable than they already were? Or do we embrace the power of “and” – that prostitution was indeed a sacred profession, and a “sister of a god” could not sell her product to just anyone?

It seems that that might indeed have been the case. I’ve looked through what books I have and the best answer I can find is provided by Georges Roux (Ancient Iraq, third edn., 213-14):

Unfortunately, we know almost nothing about the temples of female deities. There is no doubt, however, that the temples of Ishtar, the goddess of carnal love, were the sites of a licentious cult with songs, dances and pantomimes performed by women and transvestites, as well as sexual orgies. In these rites, which may be found shocking but were sacred for the Babylonians, men called assinu, kulu’u, or kurgarru – all passive homosexuals and some of them perhaps castrates – participated together with women who are too often referred to as “prostitutes.” In fact, the true prostitutes (harmâtu, kezrêtu, shamhâtu), such as the one who seduced Enkidu, were only haunting the temple surrounds and the taverns. Only those women who were called “votaress of Ishtar” (ishtarêtu) or “devoted” (qashshâtu) were probably part of the female clergy.

Fascinating stuff – although I would not be surprised if there are competing theories out there.

Medieval Porn

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From El Pais:

Deciphering the sex scenes in Spain’s medieval churches

Experts meet to discuss the meaning of highly explicit sculptures made 1,000 years ago

Why is that man showing off his enormous phallus, which seems to be pointing straight at us? What about that other bearded fellow who is apparently masturbating? And what is the meaning of that woman who is exhibiting her vulva? And is that couple really in the middle of intercourse?

These figures have all been there for nearly 1,000 years, sculpted into churches in northern Spain. They are in plain view on the façades, on the corbels that hold up the cornices, on the capitals crowning the columns, and even on the baptismal fonts.

But why did the stonemasons of the Middle Ages craft this cheeky iconography? What was the Roman Catholic Church trying to convey? A group of experts gathered inside the monastery of Santa María la Real in Aguilar de Campoo (Palencia) tried to answer that question last weekend at a seminar called “Art and sexuality in the Romanesque centuries.”

Unfortunately, there seem to be no clear answers….

You’ll have to click the link to see any images.

Chastity Belt

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The iron maiden, the one-handed flail, the droit de seigneur, and now the chastity belt – all examples of the “weird Middle Ages” that never actually happened. From the ever interesting Atlas Obscura:

Everything You’ve Heard About Chastity Belts Is a Lie

Including their very existence.

BY SARAH LASKOW

WHAT WAS THE CHASTITY BELT? You can picture it; you’ve seen it in many movies and heard references to it across countless cultural forms. There’s even a Seattle band called Chastity Belt. In his 1969 book Everything You Always Wanted to Know About Sex (But Were Afraid to Ask), David R. Reuben describes it as an “armored bikini” with a “screen in front to allow urination and an inch of iron between the vagina and temptation.”

“The whole business was fastened with a large padlock,” he writes. With this device, medieval men going off to medieval wars could be assured that their medieval wives would not have sex with anyone else while they were far, far away, for years at a time. Yes, it sounds simultaneously ridiculous, barbarous, and extremely unhygienic, but … medieval men, you know? It was a different time.

This, at least, is the story that’s been told for hundreds of years. It’s simple, shocking, and, on some level, fun, in that it portrays past people as exceedingly backwards and us, by extension, as enlightened and just better. It’s also, mostly likely, very wrong.

“As a medievalist, one day I thought: I cannot stand this anymore,” says Albrecht Classen, a professor in the University of Arizona’s German Studies department. So he set out to reveal the true history of chastity belts. “It’s a concise enough research topic that I could cover everything that was ever written about it,” he says, “and in one swoop destroy this myth.”

Here is the truth: Chastity belts, made of metal and used to ensure female fidelity, never really existed.

When one considers the evidence for medieval chastity belts, as Classen did in his book The Medieval Chastity Belt: A Myth-Making Process, it becomes apparent pretty quickly that there’s not much of it. First of all, there aren’t actually all that many pictures or accounts of the use of chastity belts, and even fewer physical specimens. And the few book-length works on the topic rely heavily on each other, and all cite the same few examples.

“You have a bunch of literary representation, but very few historical references to a man trying to put a chastity belt on his wife,” says Classen. And any literary reference to a chastity belt is likely either allegorical or satirical.

References to chastity belts in European texts go back centuries, well into the first millennium A.D. But until the 1100s, those references are all couched in theology, as metaphors for the idea of fidelity and purity. For example: One Latin source admonishes the “honest virgin” to “hold the helmet of salvation on your front, the word of truth in the mouth … true love of God and your neighbor in the chest, the girdle of chastity in the body … .” Possibly virgins who took this advice went around wearing metal helmets and keeping some physical manifestation of the word “truth” in their cheeks, like a wad of tobacco, in additional to strapping on metal underwear. Or, possibly, none of this was meant to be taken literally.

More, including pictures, at the link.