The History of Sex: Seville -- Beware Satanic Fashions! -- (Chap. VI, Pt. 11)

So it was that students in seminaries and religious colleges were told to beware the 'diabolical serpent' of the penis and the 'Satan's den' of the vagina.

As in medieval times, books on morality divided the female body into three zones: the 'honest' or 'decent' parts (the hands, feet, face and arms up to the elbow); the 'less decent' bits (such as the upper arms); and the downright 'indecent' bits.

The Archbishop of Toledo issued a dress code declaring that 'it's against modesty not to wear stockings,' while posters warning against the evils of MODERN DANCES showed a besuited young man waltzing unknowingly with a horned and winged devil, as a woman in a dress does likewise.

('YOUNG PERSON… AMUSE YOURSELF ANOTHER WAY' it commanded, though it must have been a toss-up between close dancing and masturbation.)

All the media were censored, and most magazines and newspapers hired touch-up experts to doctor photos.

Rita Hayworth above, Ava Gardner below:
both before and after the censors

Gone With the Wind wasn't shown until 1950—eleven years after its debut—and even Biblical fare like Samson and Delilah had to be made decent for los españoles (the temptress' midriff was covered up in posters).

However, just as Goya had dodged the old Inquisition by painting a double portrait of La Maja (one nude, the other clothed), Spanish filmmakers found a way around Franco's censorship: shooting two versions of the same scene.

In The Return of Clint the Stranger, one of many spaghetti Westerns shot in Spain, the international version included a scene with a blonde lying on a bed, exposing everything from her breasts to the top of her pubic triangle.

In the Spanish edition, a sheet covers her up to her armpits.

What with modern Spain's fame for 'Ibiza Uncovered'-style debauchery, it's hard to fathom that one of the main battlefronts in the war on sin was the country's beaches.

Up until at least the Fifties, many swimming areas were divided between the sexes: boys would have to bathe separately with their fathers, and girls with their mothers.

In Las Palmas, the bishop ordered his priests to deny absolution to anyone who insisted on playing on la playa in mixed company.

As late as 1976—a year after Franco's death—a religious magazine in Valencia denounced 'Satanic Fashions:'

Bikinis and tight trousers
Mothers sin by buying them for their daughters.
The girls sin by using them.
Men sin by looking at them.

A modern condemnation of 'infernal fashion':
Woman: 'Hey! Why are you cutting my dress?'
Demon: 'It's to make you more attractive...
but especially to send men to hell!'

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- The World's First Sex Plague (Chap. IV, Pt. 21)

Far more importantly, La Specola's collection taught generations of doctors how to save lives.

And it's awe-inspiring that such fragile artworks—made of wax!—have survived for more than 200 years.

One mannequin—known as 'The Doll'—can be taken apart layer by layer to reveal the embryo in utero.

In fact, the sequence showing the development of the embryo is one of the few mistakes in the whole collection: it was based on an ancient theory of baby-making—the idea that sperm contained an itty-bitty perfectly formed human being called a homunculus (or 'little man') that just needed incubation to grow into a baby.

But my main destination is the museum's last room.

Lest you think me a total goremonger, let me explain: one of the ironies of the Renaissance is that the rediscovery of the human body coincided with its ruination, courtesy of the world's first sex plague.

To me, syphilis is all the stranger because my ignorance of it is surpassed only by the devastation it caused.

The first 'venereal disease'—the morbus venereus, or 'sickness of Venus'—seems to have been similar to AIDS but arguably worse because it affected far more people at a time when medicine was still locked in the Middle Ages.

Doctors have been debating how syphilis got started pretty much since its discovery.

No one knows whether the vicious spirochetes were already lurking in the New World or Columbus and his crew introduced them during their raping and pillaging.

As the disease mutated into a decimator of men, though, people tended to name it after their enemies with amusing consistency.

As an early sexologist put it, civilization spread 'syphilization.'

The History of Sex: Venice and Florence -- Feasting and Profanity at Carnival -- (Chap. IV, Pt. 14)

May be—but try not to spoil the ride, okay?

In a desperate attempt to find some trace of the city's decadent past, Lena and I are going to a Carnival ball.

As in the rest of Europe, the tradition dates from the Middle Ages, when the normal rules of society were upended for a week of feasting and profanity before the forty days of fasting and piety ahead of Easter.

In its current tourist-trap incarnation, though, 'the World-Famous Carnival of Venice' dates from 1979, having been resurrected after Mussolini's Fascists stamped it out.

Rather than the city's Renaissance heyday, the modern Carnival harks back to its Age of Decadence in the eighteenth century, when Casanova was one of numerous chancers trawling its canals for an easy lay and/or lunch ticket.

Venice had become the playground of Europe because it was politically impotent.

Foreign aristocrats could indulge their whims without having to worry about the consequences: what happened in Venice, stayed in Venice.

The Enlightenment had created the notion of high society—of seeing and being seen in public—but in Venice, even that was optional.

Between Carnival and the theatre season, Venetians spent roughly five months of the year promenading around in masks.

At a time when Paris had only three public theatres, Venice had thirteen—not to mention Europe's first public gambling establishment, plus dozens of private 'little houses' hidden around the city.

By the time the Venetian Republic fell to Napoleon in 1797, Venice had no fewer than 136 of these 'casinos.'

One of the last surviving casinos from Casanova's heyday... now an office
(Note the portrait from Pompeii, supposedly of Sappho)

The city was particularly popular with British high rollers, partly because their Protestant government frowned on them dallying in Rome but also because of the city's fame as a fleshpot.

Its very name lent itself to puns on 'Venus' and her venereal pleasures.

Long before Byron set up home there (Shelley complained about him haggling with parents for their daughters), Elizabeth I's tutor reported that Venice had 'more liberty to sin than I heard tell of in our noble City of London in years.'

Which was saying something.

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 -- Roma vs. Amor -- (Chap. III, Pt. 7)

I don't know if William's prayer was answered, but I was certainly smitten.

So I've come to the langue d'oc itself to meet a real, live troubadour.

Fittingly, Gerard Zuchetto hails from Carcassonne, one of the last medieval walled cities in Europe, deep in la terre du troubadour.

His parents were Italian Communists who moved to southwest France after the War.

'For us, it was easier to become integrated speaking Occitan than it was speaking French.' He smiles wistfully. 'Back then Occitan was widely spoken. Now it's mainly spoken in the market.'

As a modern-day minstrel, Gerard sings in medieval Occitan with his wife and their Troubadours Art Ensemble, having fallen in love with the music of the twelfth and thirteenth centuries at university in the 1970s. 'It was the era of Woodstock and revival, when people focused on the roots of music and poetry.'

LOVE ME DO

Sitting in a café just inside the magnificent main gate of the old town—it has a drawbridge and everything—Gerard scribbles a Latin palindrome on a piece of paper: ROMA and AMOR.

For the troubadours, love wasn't a spiritual ideal dictated from on high by Rome but a romantic—and carnal—emotion experienced by individuals.

'The troubadours didn't invent love itself, of course, but they invented the idea of writing about the emotion of love. For them, love was a feeling that existed outside of God, between two people, who could be a woman and a woman, a man and a woman, or a man and man. It was very original and revolutionary. It was the first time that artists thought as artists: they wrote as people whose work would last down the centuries.'

'When you listen to the songs of Lou Reed or Joe Cocker,'—he continues, dating his own tastes to the late twentieth century—'they're the same themes: "my love may not really love me" or "I'm not sure I love her" and so on. All of these things were written by the troubadours. In pop or punk music, the same sentiments are written about in different words, but they're the same sentiments.'

Maybe it's just me, but that sounds a bit sad.

'So you mean after all these centuries, men and women are still asking the same questions about love?'

'The music has changed—but the lyrics, not much. It seems we haven't evolved much. The sentiments are the same as they were in antiquity.'

You can sample some of Gerard's troubadour music here.

The History of Sex: South of France -- Poetry Slam Meets 'Fight Club' -- (Chap. III, Pt. 6)

Now, I've been fascinated by the troubadours ever since I found out they weren't just men in tights flouncing around and sucking up to lords and ladies.

In reality, they were musician-warmongers, eloquent hellraisers who stirred trouble with both the pen and the sword: think 'poetry slam' meets Fight Club.

At a time when the French king ruled just a miniscule splodge around Paris, the troubadours thrived in the prosperous, independent fiefdoms of the south, soaking up Moorish influences and love poetry from Spain while regarding their northern counterparts as barbarians—the marauding offspring of Viking raiders.

This north-south division was reflected in linguistic differences so basic that they boiled down to the way people said 'yes.' Southerners used oc in the affirmative, while northerners said oil and later oui.

The language of the north evolved into modern French, while the southerners sang of courtly love in the langue d'oc, or Occitan, a now-endangered language that has more in common with Catalan on the other side of the Pyrenees.

The troubadours are often called the first 'modern' poets because they wrote in everyday language rather than highfalutin Latin, spreading their songs throughout Europe and influencing later greats ranging from Dante to TS Eliot.

But the first minstrels are also the spiritual ancestors of every modern pop musician with literary aspirations, artists who can fuse music and verse in a way that makes written poems seem half finished.

The troubadours came up with the ultra-idealistic notion of fin amor, a unique union of souls that countless lonely-hearts still seek today.

But their vision of love wasn't limited to admiring from afar. The first troubadour was a seasoned womanizer—and the grandfather of Eleanor of Aquitaine, the 'Grandmother of Europe.'

When I came across this verse by William of Aquitaine, I was staggered to think it had been penned by someone born in 1067 AD:

Our love is like the hawthorn branch 

That trembles upon the tree in the night in the rain and ice 

Until the sun stretches across the green leaves and branches. 

I can still recall a morning when we put an end to warring 

And the great gift she gave to me—her love and her ring. 

God, just let me live to get my hand under her cloak again.

William of Aquitaine

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.

* * *