The History of Sex: Prague -- Sex with Crocodiles in the USSR -- (Chapter X, Part 4)

Just as the West was settling into the conservativism of the Fifties, Stalin's regime also tried to recast the bourgeois family unit in the Soviet mold, instituting what Stern mockingly refers to as 'the reign of virtue.'

'Young Pioneers' vowed to stay 'pure in thought, word and deed,' while novelists and filmmakers cranked out heroic tales of Soviet supermen and women who saved their energies for the Party, resisting sex—and the temptation of marrying someone from a dubious (bourgeois) background.

'If you want to be like me--just train!'
A Soviet poster from 1951

A university tract on Youth and the Revolution declared that 'to be sexually attracted to a being who belongs to a different class which is hostile and morally alien is just as much a perversion as it would be to feel sexual attraction for a crocodile or an orangutang.'

Personally, I'd go with the orangutang.

In private, however, the new Party elite were far from abstemious.

Beria, the chief of Stalin's secret police, had cut his teeth in the Cheka, the forerunner of the KGB.

The 'Chekists' were loathed by ordinary Soviets, and Stern gives a good idea why.

The poster for Chekist,
a Russian movie from 1992

The mother of one of his patients was a peasant who left the countryside during the great famine of the early 1920s, a time when people in the Volga region had supposedly resorted to eating children to survive.

While she was at the train station, an armed Chekist bullied her into accompanying him home, and she consented, thinking he would at least give her a crust of bread if she had sex with him.

Instead, 'he ordered her to strip—and gave her to his dog.'

After his pet had his way with her, the Chekist kicked her onto the street, without any food or money.

The History of Sex: Seville -- The Bible's Saucy Bits -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 7)

To their credit, Torquemada and Co. also cracked down on the clergy.

According to one expert on the Inquisition, of the 1,735 cases tried by the Tribunal of Barcelona between 1578 and 1635, nineteen percent were for crimes by the clergy.

In Seville, a priest was prosecuted in 1603 for claiming that sodomy wasn't a sin so long as you paid your partner—something he often did while alone with boys in confession.

In fact, complaints about predatory priests were a major reason for the invention of the confessional as we know it: a box that physically separated priests from penitents.

One noteworthy case involved a monk and the most erotic book in the Bible (which, not coincidentally, is also one of its shortest).

In 1572, an Augustinian was hauled up in Valladolid for having translated The Song of Solomon into Spanish.

An auto da fe in front of the Cathedral of Valladolid
in the Covent Garden Opera's production of Don Carlo

Of course, the Church frowned on allowing commoners to interpret the Word of God for themselves, but Fray Luis de León had actually translated the raciest bits into language that any fornicator could understand.

Even some of the translation-happy 'heretics' of Geneva had taken issue with The Song of Solomon and declarations of love such as:

'Your breasts (are) like clusters of fruit… I will climb the palm tree; I will take hold of its fruit.'

Curiously, De León told the Inquisition that he'd translated these fruity passages as a favor for a nun.

However, his cleaner—a fellow monk—found the work in his room and copied it in secret.

The Spanish Song of Solomon soon began circulating as religious samizdat, spreading to Portugal and as far away as Peru.

De León eventually got off with a warning—after five years in jail.

* * *

The History of Sex: Geneva -- John Calvin's Old-Fashioned Remedy For Lust -- (Chap. V, Pt. 4)

Born the year before Luther's pilgrimage to Rome, Calvin is usually depicted as thin and sickly, with a long, drawn face, a needle nose and a pointy beard, as if he's half dead already but sticking it out just to make life miserable for the rest of us.

Notably, the first book in his extremely prolific career was a commentary on that old Stoic, Seneca (the one who warned against rushing 'headlong into copulation').

Having been run out of Paris because of his Protestant ties, Calvin found himself kicking around the Continent in 1536 when he made a fateful detour to Geneva, then an independent city-state divided by political and religious squabbling.

The city council had officially plumped for Protestantism, but it initially resisted Calvin's radicalism and soon expelled him. 

Calvin then migrated to Strasbourg, where he surprised some of his friends by falling in love—or as close to it as he could.

Having been schooled in Renaissance humanism, Calvin preached that beauty was a gift from God; consequently, it wasn't inherently 'wrong for men to regard beauty in their choice of wives;' equally, it wasn't 'wrong for women to look at men.'

But he also added a common-sense caveat: 'Those who excel in beauty are exposed to many dangers, for it is very difficult for others to restrain themselves from lustful desires.'

Calvin promoted marriage among his followers as a 'remedy' for lust—'Satan dazzles us… to imagine that we are polluted by intercourse'—while also telling husbands and wives that they should not 'withhold sex from each other.'

Personally, though, Calvin seems to have been inclined toward celibacy, having married mainly to practice what he preached.

'The only beauty that seduces me is of one who is chaste, not too fastidious, modest, thrifty, patient, and hopefully she will be attentive to my health,' Jean wrote to a friend.

After a few false starts (including a young woman with a large dowry—Calvin thought it would be 'crazy' to marry her just because of her wealth; she didn't even speak French), he settled on a widow who had two children of her own.

Not only did Idelette tick all the Calvinist boxes (pious, frugal, etc.), Jean's friends were surprised to find that she was 'actually pretty.'

Idelette de Bure, Calvin's wife,
on a Belgian stamp

The plague cut short their honeymoon, and all their children were stillborn or died young, but they seem to have genuinely loved each other.

When Idelette passed away, Calvin never remarried.

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Martin Luther and the Clergy Pimps -- (Chap. V, Pt. 3)

One of the most fundamental shifts in male-female relations stemmed from the new Protestant view of the Virgin Mary.

Luther and other Reformers accepted that Jesus' mother had been a virgin because the Bible said so.

However, they condemned any Catholic traditions that weren't backed up by the Scriptures.

So they rejected the doctrine that Mary had been a lifelong Virgin—noting that the Bible mentions her having other children.

By nixing the Veneration of Mary, Protestants effectively knocked the Mother of God off her pedestal and chipped away at the old saint/whore dichotomy of Mary vs. Mary Magdalene.

For the Reformers, it was more important for a bride (or groom) to be spiritually pure than a physical virgin—Zwingli himself had married a widow—and Luther argued that the Church's impossible standards regarding virginity and marriage turned the clergy into pimps:

'What is it they sell? Vulvas and genitals,' he declared.

Instead, fully human marriages became the new relationship role models for the godly, while education for women was encouraged, if only so they could read the Bible for themselves.

Though Martin and Katie were by no means equal in the (probably impossible) sense that we use the term—he referred to her affectionately as his 'rib'—the Luthers represented a Protestant template for what marriage should be: an 'equally yoked' man and woman pulling together toward a common goal.

SEX OBSESSED?

Having sex and companionship as selling points didn't hurt when it came to attracting young priests and nuns to the Protestant cause.

To try and stop the exodus, Rome denounced Luther and Zwingli as sex-obsessed devils.

They were certainly more highly sexed than their successor, who turned out to be arguably the most influential leader of the Reformation.

If Luther was an archetypal German (for better or very much the worse), then Jean Calvin ranks as possibly the Worst Frenchman Ever.

Hardworking, honest and not overly fond of wine or women, in retrospect, the archetypal French Protestant seems a hard man to like.

Even worse, he was a lawyer.

Nevertheless, subsequent generations revered Calvin, and his legalistic interpretations of the Bible were studied almost as religiously as the Good Book itself in both the Old and New Worlds.

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Marriage: The Healthy Alternative? -- (Chap. V, Pt. 2)

Luther and his fellow Reformers railed against Rome's corruption and preached marriage as a healthy alternative to celibacy.

Within five years, Luther's Swiss counterpart, Zwingli, openly committed heresy by marrying, breaking five centuries of tradition within the Catholic Church.

And in 1525, Luther himself went one better by tying the knot with a former nun he'd helped smuggle out of a convent.

The excommunicated Augustinian broke with the teachings of St. Augustine when it came to marrying his twenty-six-year-old bride.

By all accounts, Luther was still a virgin at the age of forty-two and, rather than 'descending with a certain sadness' into their matrimonial bed, he and Katharina seem to have gladly hopped to it.

They had six children, raised four orphans and had a very happy marriage—even though Luther could be a bit of a boor.

Martin and Katharina Luther, painted by Lucas Cranach the Elder
(Martin liked to call her 'My lord, Katie')

A student recalled him teasing 'Katie' at the table, announcing: 'The time will come when a man will take more than one wife. A woman can bear a child only once a year while a husband can beget many.'

'Let the devil believe that!' she replied, quoting the Bible to him: 'Paul said that each man should have his own wife.' 

But the theologian kept on kidding her, noting that Paul had written 'his own wife;' not his 'only wife.'

'Before I put up with that,' Katie shot back, 'I'd rather go back to the convent.'

The History of Sex: Geneva -- Protesting Too Much?: From the 'Protestant Rome' to 'Le Petit Paris' -- (Chap. V, Pt. 1)

Chapter Five

PROTESTING TOO MUCH?

From the 'Protestant Rome' to 'Le Petit Paris' in Geneva 

'Twice a week is the woman's due.
Makes in a year twice fifty-two.' 

--ex-monk Martin Luther, the 'Father of the Reformation,' advising husbands on how to keep their wives happy, c1530 

At the same time that Renaissance men were turning Venice into the world's porn capital, a greater threat to Rome was gathering force on the far side of the Alps.

Whether it was Martin Luther getting hitched to a nun or Henry VIII getting rid of his wives, sex played a crucial role in the world-changing split between Catholics and Protestants.

Though mainly a spiritual movement, this other cultural 'Re-Birth' also focused on matters of the flesh: particularly the age-old debate about celibacy.

By establishing a rival 'City of God' on earth, the Reformation ended up revolutionizing sexual mores around the world, paving the way for gender equality and creating laws on marriage, divorce and sex crimes that survive to this day.

In 1510, a provincial German monk hiked 850 miles across the Alps during winter to make a once-in-a-lifetime trip to Rome.

Martin Luther soon returned disillusioned, not least because of the sexual hypocrisy he'd seen in the home of his Mother Church.

St. Peter's was on the verge of being rebuilt in the glorious incarnation we know today, financed partly by the proceeds from prostitution.

Sixtus IV, the man who commissioned the Sistine Chapel (hence its name), had also been the first Pope to tax prostitutes (and sanction the Spanish Inquisition).

And when that still wasn't enough, the Vatican stepped up its sale of indulgences, effectively doubling its money on whoremongers.

The History of Sex: South of France -- Nazism and the Paganization of Europe -- (Chap. III, Pt. 14)

A Catholic theologian summed it up nicely for an Anglican in the 1800s: 'A priest sacrifices himself for the sake of his parishioners. He has no children of his own, in order that all the children in the parish may be his children.'

Granted, the bit about a priest having all the children in the parish sounds unfortunate nowadays, but you get the drift.

What's more, sexual self-sacrifice also exists in the secular world—from football teams that ban sex before matches to artists who forgo parenthood to concentrate on their art.

Balzac churned out nearly 100 tomes for his Human Comedy but believed he could have produced even more if it hadn't been for carnal distractions: after sex, he would sigh, 'There goes another novel!'

A SEXUAL DRAFT DODGE?

In my fallen state, I should also admit that when Father Denis mentions that his class of twenty-two priests in 1946 was the last big ordination at his (now-defunct) seminary, I immediately wonder if the war had been a big motivator.

I ask him if going to seminary was a way of dodging combat.

Au contraire, he replies. 'We were a very patriotic generation before the war. We felt that the war was caused by heathenism—a paganization of Europe—and Nazism was a symbol of that.'

The Nazi Party's 'Horoscope of the Week'

'We believed in something: France—French culture, in the broad sense of the term. We couldn't imagine happiness without faith.'

He pauses. 'Now there is no faith in anything.'

'So did you and your companions view celibacy as a sacrifice on behalf of your congregations?'

'In a way, it was simpler than that,' he admits. His classmates acted as a support network for each other, providing chaste peer pressure.

'Celibacy now is quite an individualistic problem. A young man who dedicates himself to religious celibacy is—well, in French, we call it un bloc erratique.'

In geology, an 'erratic block' is a boulder that's carried along by a glacier but left stranded after the ice recedes. Given Christ's famous quote about founding the Church on a rock, the image seems particularly poignant: with Catholicism in long-term retreat, its priests have been left behind.

I mention the former Pope's reference to celibacy as a 'stumbling block' that keeps men from joining the clergy. 

'Celibacy can exist only if you believe in something to make a sacrifice for,' Father Denis says matter-of-factly. 'For the current generation, very little is done to introduce them to any ideal worthy of the name.'

* * *

The History of Sex: South of France -- The Total Eclipse of All Values? -- (Chap. III, Pt. 13)

Serves the Church right, you may think. 

And sure enough, this massive reversal could be karmic—or even Christian, with Catholicism finally reaping what it's sown.

But if the Church dies out in France (and Europe), I can't help but wonder what will come next.

Nietzsche, the son of a Lutheran pastor, famously declared God dead (and subsequently lost his mind), but also warned that the spiritual void would lead to 'wars the likes of which have never been seen on earth' followed by 'the total eclipse of all values.'

So I've traveled to Toulouse, the hometown of the Inquisition, to meet a priest who's witnessed a bit of both in his eighty-five years on earth.

A BEAUTIFUL CONCEPT

Father Yves Denis was born after World War One and took his vow of celibacy as a priest after World War Two.

I meet him just around the corner from the cathedral, where Guirdham's past-life lover was supposedly held against her will.

For me, it's been so long since I've talked with a priest, I feel awkward, not least in asking Father Denis about his avowed lack of a love life.

Before coming here, I tried to bone up on celibacy, and I'm embarrassed to admit that I'd forgotten why Rome adopted it in the first place.

Somehow, I'd absorbed the conventional view that celibacy was the Church's way of keeping its men in check—literally holding them by the privates.

The last time I went to Mass, with Lena the Latin South African, I kept thinking of the bearded, bespectacled priest in the pulpit as a sexual misfit at best; either way, he seemed, well, less than a man. How could someone who's never had sex possibly relate to me? 

After refreshing my memory on the subject, though, I can assure you that apart from the no-sex bit, celibacy is a beautiful concept.

Apart from the no-sex bit.

The History of Sex: South of France -- Sexing up the Messiah -- (Chap. III, Pt. 12)

Of course, Catholics might have argued, just as believably, that Mrs. Smith's spirit guide was a demon deluding her about the afterlife, but she and Dr. Guirdham preferred to see her visions as proof of reincarnation. The psychiatrist subsequently became something of a neo-Cathar guru.

In his follow-up book—centered on another younger woman—Guirdham touted the idea of group reincarnation, telling the incredible tale of how he and seven other people in the West Country came to realize that they'd all known each other as Cathars in the thirteenth century.

And here's a curious coda.

Another Oxford-educated psychiatrist who reviewed Guirdham's work initially chalked it up to a bad case of 'shared delusion' and pooh-poohed his 'reincarnational soap opera.'

Several years later, though, he started having his own flashbacks and decided that he'd been a mercenary crusader who'd converted to Catharism and wound up being burnt at the stake.

In addition to clinics on regression therapy and other exotica, this reincarnated Cathar now leads 'pilgrimages' through the south of France 'in search of the Magdalene, the Black Madonna, and the Lost Goddess' charging gullibles—I mean, believers—around £2,000 a pop ('special early bird price:' £1,700—around $2,600).

And that's nothing compared to the success of books like The Da Vinci Code, which resurrected an obscure Cathar legend—namely, that Jesus had sex with Mary Magdalene—and miraculously transformed it into a popular 'school of thought.'

A still from Martin Scorsese's Last Temptation of Christ

Perhaps a sexed-up Messiah better suits our post-Freudian mindset: we simply can't imagine a leader who wouldn't try it on with his more comely disciples.

So latter-day heresy is big business.

THE LAND OF OO-LA-LA

Meanwhile, the Catholic Church is in danger of dying out in France, with doomsday reports predicting that half the country's priests will meet their Maker within a decade, while the few seminaries that are still open produce a paltry 150 or so pères a year to serve the entire country.

In a special address in 2004, Pope John Paul II commiserated with the bishops of Toulouse and Montpellier about 'the particularly alarming situation that your country is going through,' noting that 'the question of ecclesiastical celibacy and the chastity associated with it is often a stumbling block for young people.'

In the land of oo-la-la, celibacy is a tough sell.

At last count, the diocese of Carcassonne—the old stamping grounds of the Cathars and troubadours—had only seventeen priests under the age of sixty-five.

And whereas Toulouse had more than 700 priests serving 100,000 inhabitants in the 1850s, it now has less than 200 for a population of over a million.

The situation is so desperate the Church has actually started importing African priests to the French countryside.

The History of Sex: South of France -- Born-Again Buggers -- (Chap. III, Pt. 11)

If anything, though, the heretics and hedonists were way ahead of their time.

Nowadays in Languedoc, road signs and brochures welcome you to Le Pays Cathare: 'The Land of the Cathars' or—if the etymologists had their way—'Cat-Ass-Kisser Country.'

Since the early nineteenth century, the Cathars have served as all things to all men, spiritual rebels for any cause ranging from the Reformation to the French Revolution (not to mention Nazism and the French Resistance).

Modern DIY spiritualists like to romanticize the Cathars as proto-hipsters or Gallic Buddhists: pacifist vegetarians who believed in past lives, feminism, and even free love—despite the fact that they were probably more like the Puritans, only without all the sex.

THE CATHAR CRAZE

There's no shortage of 'reincarnated Cathars' in the scenic south of France these days—though curiously there's no corresponding glut of born-again Buggers in the Balkans.

Life after life, it's all about location, location, location.

'Cathar Crystals'
part of the '2010 Cathar Resonator Collection'

An Oxford-educated psychiatrist kickstarted the Cathar craze in the 1970s with a couple of books claiming he'd known one of his patients in the Biblical sense in a past life.

In The Cathars and Reincarnation (tactfully dedicated to his wife), Dr. Arthur Guirdham recounted that a thirtysomething 'Mrs. Smith' was referred to his practice in Bath: 'She was good-looking, open, communicative and smiling.'

And an excommunicated Catholic.

Miraculously, the bad dreams plaguing Mrs. Smith disappeared after she met Guirdham, and she eventually convinced him that they'd been lovers in a former life.

Aptly enough, his Cathar name was Roger.

Dr. Arthur Guirdham

With the help of a spirit guide, Mrs. Smith beguiled the doctor over the years with uncanny details about Cathar life, some of which supposedly even stumped historians.

She often dreamt about her 'Roger' (no doubt to the consternation of Mr. Smith), crying out his name in her sleep and pronouncing it 'in the French fashion.'

According to Mrs. Smith, their love had been a tale of forbidden passion. Roger had been much older than her and a highborn Cathar, whereas she was just a poor Catholic peasant named—wait for it—Puerilia.

Defying her father, she shacked up with Roger and lived in blissful simplicity until the Church got hold of them. Puerilia was locked up in Saint-Etienne Cathedral in Toulouse, while Roger died of a chest infection during interrogation.

Dr. Guirdham had always wondered why he hated Catholicism…

The History of Sex: South of France -- The Christian v. Christian Crusade -- (Chap. III, Pt. 10)

By 1209, the Church decided it had to act.

A Pope with an ironic name—Innocent III—launched the West's first Christian-v-Christian Crusade, giving his blessing to a blood-and-guts campaign by the French king and his northern allies, who were more than happy to steal the land of the lords who harbored heretics.

Cathars being driven out of Carcassonne in 1209

In one infamous episode, the town of Béziers was sacked and its 20,000 inhabitants slaughtered at the behest of a monk who reputedly ordered: 'Kill them all, God will know his own.'

The Church followed up the Albigensian Crusade by inventing an even more insidious institution that would terrorize Catholic Europe (and the New World) for centuries to come.

Based in Toulouse, the Pope entrusted the Inquisition to the rabidly loyal Dominicans, pitting the so-called 'Dogs of God' against the supposed cat kissers.

St. Dominic himself had got his start trying to win back Cathar sympathizers with open-air debates and preach-offs against the Perfects.

In this preach-off, the books of St. Dominic and the Cathars were thrown into the fire--
guess whose miraculously survived
(Pedro Berruguete, 1480)

To his credit, the Spaniard had realized that one of the Cathars' key selling points was that they lived simply, like Christ himself, so he tried to copy them, traveling throughout the south of France as a dirt-poor preacher. Even so, he didn't have much success.

His successors, in contrast, opted to use force.

HUMAN BONFIRES

In 1234, the Dominican Bishop of Toulouse had just finished saying mass in honor of the newly canonized St. Dominic when he received a tip-off that a dying woman in the city had requested the final sacrament from a Cathar.

So he and his friars responded like good, medieval Catholics: they marched to her house, had her carried to a meadow, and burned her alive on her deathbed.

They then returned to their convent, gave thanks to God and St. Dominic, and 'fell cheerfully upon the food set before them.'

The human bonfires raged for decades, but the Cathars were effectively defeated when their last major safe haven fell in 1244.

Unfortunately, the fortress of Montsegur wasn't as secure as its name implied.

After surrendering, the surviving Perfects were led to a clearing at the base of the mountain and burned en masse—all 220 of them.

By the end of the century, the Cathars had been wiped out and most of Languedoc annexed to the north, creating the forerunner of the modern French nation while destroying the culture that first linked France with romance.

The last troubadour died in 1294, lamenting that 'I have come into the world too late.'

Montsegur: the Cathars' last stand

* * *

The History of Sex: South of France -- A License to Sin -- (Chap. III, Pt. 9)

Given the Catholics' own peccadilloes, of course, it was more than a little rich for them to denounce the Cathars for their sexual hangups.

As with most good things, though, apparently it was possible to have too much celibacy.

Rome forced its priests to stay celibate to enable them to convert more children of God, but it realized that the Cathars' teachings could wipe out the human race—and long before that, the Church itself.

Like the troubadours, the Cathars spoke the language of the people rather than Latin.

More damningly, their ragged dark robes and ascetic lives showed up the materialism and debauchery of the 'Christian' clergy.

'LASCIVIOUS LOVE'

Consider this tale of courtly love gone wrong.

A young English cleric was riding through France with the Archbishop of Rheims in the 1180s when he spotted a beautiful maiden alone in a vineyard.

An Essex man at heart, Gervase of Tilbury decided to mosey over and chat her up, or as he blithely recalled, to 'speak to her at length in a courtly way about lascivious love.'

Gervase/Gervais: any relation? 

The shocked girl averted her eyes and told him solemnly, 'God preserve me, young man, from ever becoming your mistress, or anyone else's, for if I lost my virginity and my body was once corrupted, there is no doubt that nothing could save me from eternal damnation.'

Gervase took this to mean that the girl was a Cathar—as opposed to, say, a good Catholic—and denounced her to the archbishop.

For resisting the lecherous 'man of God,' she was burned at the stake.

Not surprisingly, abuses like that didn't endear the Church to the locals.

The Cathars continued to breed sympathizers, if not offspring, for a number of reasons: they practiced what they preached, they rebelled against Rome, they welcomed women as Perfects, and—most importantly—they didn't upset their protectors.

Fundamentally, Catharism was a do-your-own-thing religion, built on the precept that people wouldn't want to come back to live another miserable mortal life.

However, that didn't take into account those sinners who were more than willing to take their chances with reincarnation.

Tolerating the Cathars had to count for something in the afterlife, and even if a jaded aristo had to come back as a milkmaid, well, that would have its own novel appeal.

In a medieval version of Radical Chic, the original Perfect hostesses would invite Cathars to their castles to edify their guests during the day, followed by raunchy songs at night.

As historian Stephen O'Shea puts it in his book, The Perfect Heresy: people could go 'from the dualists' "love your neighbour" to the troubadours' "love your neighbour's wife"' in less than 24 hours.

For adulterous lords and ladies, Catharism provided a license to sin—without having to pay Rome for the privilege.

The History of Sex: South of France -- The Cult of the Cat-Arse-Kissers -- (Chap. III, Pt. 8)

What's confounded modern minstrel buffs is whether the troubadours' love for their ladies, or donnas, was consummated or unrequited.

Most likely, it depended, but Gerard says many relationships were undoubtedly sexual.

His favorite troubadour worked the court in Carcassonne around 1200, when minstrels were top of the pops.

'Raimon de Miraval wrote songs saying "I like to talk with you, I like to write songs for you, but—I like kissing and fucking you better."'

He grins. 'And he wasn't the only one—there were many others who wrote like that. They demonstrated the power of the pen not only to make war but also love.'

Raimon's big head got all the girls

For the record, Raimon had at least five loves on the go, including his wife (a songwriter in her own right), a brown-haired donna and, most significantly, a lady belonging to the sect that ultimately brought about the end of the society that kept the troubadours in love and lute strings.

These spiritual and sexual rebels styled themselves simply as 'good Christians'—an inherent rebuke to the corruption of the organized Church—but their enemies had plenty of other names for them.

Some called them Albigensians, even though their influence spread much further than the town of Albi and the south of France.

In fact, the heresy seemed to have come from the East, having been relayed across the Balkans by a sect of Bulgars who reputedly had a penchant for sodomy; given that their French counterparts also disdained procreation, their opponents assumed that they too were bougres—or 'buggers.'

NO COCK-UPS ALLOWED

However, the best-known epithet for these heretics—Cathar—comes either from the Greek for 'pure' or a German term meaning 'cat-worshipper:' the practicants supposedly paid homage to felines by kissing their backsides.

The hate campaign against this small sect of pacifist vegetarians reveals just how much of a threat their teachings posed to the Church of Rome.

Like St. Augustine's early mentors, the Cathars were Manicheans who taught that the physical world was entirely evil; only the spiritual world was good.

They believed that human souls were reincarnated until they reached perfection; rejects were sent back to Hell—the here and now—until they were ready to join the ranks of the Cathar elect, known as Perfects.

Whereas plain ol' imperfects were free to live pretty much as they pleased—having sex without marriage, for instance—the Cathar leaders were meant to live as spiritually as possible, shunning meat and intercourse as they prepared for their souls' final cosmic journey: any cock-ups, and the ascetics risked another go on bad old planet Earth.

The History of Sex: South of France -- How Notre Dame Got Its Name -- (Chap. III, Pt. 5)

By the eleventh century, though, the sexual indiscretions of the clergy and their sisters in Christ had become so flagrant that reformist popes tried to force priests to stop fornicating for once and for all: if necessary, with the aid of angry mobs.

The turning point occurred around 1075, when Pope Gregory VII made celibacy the rule for Western clergy (even though many of his successors were less than chaste).

Around the same time, the image of women in the West received a long-overdue makeover.

The Turks' conquest of the Holy Land triggered the Crusades, and many knights who made it back to Europe returned with a newfound admiration for the Virgin Mary.

(from Ominous Ellipses)

The Mother of God had long been venerated in the East, while the Western Church tended to portray her as merely the lowly female vessel for the male God's Immaculate Conception.

However, the newly imported cult of Our Lady helped put all of womankind on a pedestal—Paris even named its new cathedral after Notre Dame.

Whether a renewable virgin was the best role model for women is debatable, but at least it made a change from being judged guilty by association with Eve.

The Virgin's ascendancy also raised the profile of a less-than-virginal Mary, who may or may not have been a fallen woman but was definitely close to Christ.

According to Gallic legend, Mary Magdalene fled Jerusalem after Jesus' death and settled in the south of France (carrying the Holy Grail with her, if you believe the likes of The Da Vinci Code).

Centuries later, this sensual, fractious corner of Europe served as the crucible for the West's first modern love poetry—courtesy of the troubadours—and a sexual rebellion that spawned the Inquisition.

* * *

The History of Sex: South of France -- The Ultimate STD -- (Chap. III, Pt. 4)

At the time, you see, the future saint was living in sin with a concubine who'd even given him a son.

Eventually, Augustine's mother convinced him to come back to the fold and get married, so he rather un-Christianly dumped his lover of fourteen years and got engaged to a more respectable prospect—a ten-year-old virgin.

Unlike the founder of Islam, though, the 'Father of Christian Psychology' (God help us) never deflowered his prepubescent fiancée: unable to wait the two years until she came of age, Augustine took another mistress.

And before he could get married at the age of thirty-three, he miraculously got religion.

The new convert embraced celibacy and spent the rest of his life telling Christians to do as he said, not as he'd done.

RE-ENACTING THE FALL

Tormented by fantasies and wet dreams (not to mention his early Manichean leanings), Augustine pinpointed lust as the manifestation of original sin—and its means of transmission. Sin became the ultimate sexually transmitted disease.

According to the newly chaste Augustine, copulation was necessary to produce more Christians, but it should be a passionless, lust-free affair: you could have sex; you just couldn't enjoy it. The truly Christian couple should 'descend with a certain sadness' into intercourse, as if re-enacting the Fall from grace.

Old-fashioned nightshirts:
note the strategically-placed slits

Not surprisingly, it took nearly a thousand years for the Church's take on chastity and celibacy to bed down.

In denying the flesh, though, the first Christian theologians inadvertently made it all the more desirable. By forbidding sensuality, they helped fetishize it, inspiring generations of monks, nuns and other ascetics to make the earth move by flagellating and mortifying themselves into ecstasy.

The first attempt to impose a sex ban on the clergy came around 306 AD at a church council in Spain near Granada.

The same meeting also instituted a female 'pact of virginity' that involved a bishop cloaking a woman's head and pronouncing her 'a chaste virgin to Christ.'

The veiled woman was then locked away—an odd parallel with the Islamic harem—to become what we now know as a nun.

St. Augustine and Monica (his mother)
by Ary Scheffer

The History of Sex: South of France -- A Fundamental Itch -- (Chap. III, Pt. 3)

Whether it's ancient pagans or modern eco-puritans trying to purge the planet of humanity, virtually every social system has tried to control people's bedroom behavior in one way or another.

Conspiracy theorists argue that this is a plot by The Man to harness the Life Force, but I reckon the urge to regulate sexuality is a fundamental itch.

By definition, intercourse is one area of life where the private affects the public: sexual unions and the children they produce (or don't) inevitably have an impact on their communities.

THE STICKING POINT

As a high-concept religion with the celibate son of a virgin as its role model, Christianity was always going to have a hard time reconciling the physical and the spiritual.

And all too often sex was the literal sticking point.

A zealot could give up all his earthly possessions and go live in the desert for fifteen years just like the founder of Christian monasticism (and possibly the first eco-warrior) but, being a social animal, he would still crave carnal companionship: 'He who wishes to live in solitude is delivered from three conflicts: hearing, speech and sight,' concluded St. Anthony of the Desert after his years in the wilderness.

'There is only one conflict for him, and that is with fornication.'

The reclusive Father of All Monks diligently battled 'the itch of youth' and 'the demon of fornication' for decades; for his troubles, he somehow wound up being named the patron saint of infectious diseases. 

The Temptation of St. Anthony by Hieronymous Bosch...

... and Salvador Dali's take on the theme

However, St. Anthony's ascetic example did spread to other young men; most notably, a wild child who, for better or worse, became one of Christianity's most influential thinkers on sex.

Though he was always religiously inclined, the early years of St. Augustine were anything but saintly.

Born into a Christian family in North Africa during the decline of the Roman Empire, the young scholar fell in with the Manicheans, members of an Eastern sect who believed that the human body and the material world were innately evil, having been created by a god of darkness to imprison the spiritual god of light.

For the Manichean Elect, celibacy was the way to salvation—the idea being that they would abstain from condemning other unborn souls to flesh-and-blood prisons.

As much as he liked what he heard, though, Augustine couldn't bring himself to practice what they preached: 'Lord, give me chastity and continence,' he prayed, 'but not yet.'

The History of Sex: South of France -- St. Paul and the Pagan Kill-Joys -- (Chap. III, Pt. 2)

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The History of Sex: South of France -- A (Relatively) Chaste Interlude (Chap. III, Pt. 1)

Chapter Three 

A (RELATIVELY) CHASTE INTERLUDE Romance and Celibacy in the South of France 

'To be always with a woman and not have intercourse is more difficult than to raise the dead.'

--St. Bernard of Clairvaux, persecutor of the Cathars and venerator of the Virgin Mary, c1100 AD 

So where do we in the West get our notions of romance from?

A friend of mine has a theory. 'Jack' is a good decade older than me, and he was confessing how he'd put an entire continent (and ocean) between him and his wife.

But somehow, it wasn't enough. They've been married for over twenty years, plenty of time for their love to ferment into a sour mash of kids, bills and mutual recrimination.

Divorce is out of the question, partly because Jack can't afford it, but mainly because his wife is Irish Catholic.

'D'y'know why ye-olde poets used to write all that crap about romance?' he slurred into his beer. 'It's because the average age back then was 25. Most men didn't live long enough to see what love looks like when it has liver spots and cellulite.'

'They didn't have to put up with wives moaning "What about my needs? What about my Botox? What about the SUV to drive to the supermarket to buy food I can't even cook?" They didn't have to deal with that, did they? Lucky bastards.'

You'll have gathered that Jack was having a midlife crisis.

Buffoon Playing a Lute by Frans Hals

Anachronisms aside, though, I wondered if he didn't have a point.

Whereas the Islamic East enjoyed polygamy—at least the men did—the Christian West begrudgingly sanctioned sex as a reproductive necessity.

A Muslim man might have four wives and a slew of 'favorites,' but a Christian was meant to have just one spouse his entire life: ideally, his soulmate.