VI. Gender Through Time

VI. Gender Through Time

id="vi-gender-through-time">VI. Gender Through Time#

Culture evolves just as language does; it implies a sui generis evolution. If the term “culture” has any meaning for all anthropologists, it says at least this.103 There exists some form of behavior that is free from genetic programming, and that is not totally determined by instinct Culture bespeaks a level of life that cannot be rendered in biological terms; genetic endowment and cultural heritage evolve according to opposite laws. Natural selection operates under undirected variation that leads into genetic divergence; cultural evolution passes to the next generation traits that the present one has shaped. Biological evolution sprouts new branches that do not cross-fertilize, branches that never again unite once they have become solid. Culture evolves along another route; its form is anastomosis: Like a river, its waters divide, meander, and reunite. Biological evolution remains engraved; culture implies the memory of things past, which survive only in myth or history or custom.

At the Mexican National Museum there is a beautiful chart of such a river system, a river of malacates. Malacates are round, ceramic spindle-weights with a hole for the shaft in their middle; Mexican plows dig them up by the thousands each year, and they belong to different millennia. At the museum, an archaeologist has arranged these spindle weights into a circular system of rivers: Starting out from distant, archaic, and very different shapes, the malacates adapt, absorb each other’s features, become more ornate and also more specialized. For centuries in some regions the malacate seems unchanged, and then suddenly it acquires a mestizo face by incorporating features characteristic of a distant valley. I like to stand in front of this chart and wonder who it was, man or woman, who contributed the new feature.104

In some cases, perhaps the change was a chance invention. The new notch in the spindle-weight resulted from an accident that then proved practical. But, more probably, a stranger from the lowland passed through and left his malacate. Or a slave was captured, along with his different malacate. The new notch from the foreign model was seen, tested, and adopted. And so, the weight of the spindle changed. The hand that held and turned the shaft learned a new movement to which the other hand responded with a new twist of the yarn. A new motion in one hand necessitates a new response in the other. Knowing that the tools in such cultures fit the hands of only one gender, what is called “cultural change” always occurs first in one domain; a corresponding response then takes place in the other. As in a dance, so in cultural evolution: One always leads and the other follows, sometimes with a nod, sometimes with a change.

Millennia ago, on the southern slope of the Sierra Madre, a new corn began to be grown, the first kernels of which must have arrived from far away. The new corn was blue, and it produced much more than the old variety. It had to be buried deeper in the ground, and the planting stick changed hands, from women to men. But the new grain, protected by a new god, also demanded a new mecate, a larger volcanic stone on which the women could grind it. Cultural anthropology, on the basis of data already gathered, could tell us much more about technical and cultural evolution if gender accommodation were taken into account.

Gender and Transgression#

Over long time periods, the line dividing the two genders can change its course, and under certain conditions may or even must be transgressed. This fact clearly distinguishes gender infringement from animals’ deviations from their sex-determined behavior. But at this point in my argument there is a distinction more important than that between animal sex and social gender: the difference between gender encroachment and the fading of the gender line itself. This disappearance of gender, the characteristic anthropological feature of industrial cultures, must be carefully differentiated from the trangression or infraction of gender.

Violation of the gender divide becomes clearly visible as tools change hands over various time intervals. But we can only speculate on many of the factors provoking such changes in the contours of gender. Certainly they are often the result of technological discovery: A tool or trait that had earlier been foreign but not tabooed became “gendered.” For example, the donkey was an animal unknown to ancient Mexican cultures until it arrived in the company of the Spaniards. Its care could not have been restricted to either men or women; nor was it taboo – no rule forbade either to touch it. Quite rapidly, then, in the mountains of Guerrero, the activities associated with the care and use of donkeys became the responsibility of men, and thus the animal acquired a social male gender among the Indians, and was culturally discovered. Cultural discovery, often called technological change, outside industrial society has always been a process of gender-related gentling. Inevitably, the donkey was more than a change of equipment for men. Its use expanded the territorial province of one gender, introduced a new asymmetry between men’s and women’s domains, and, arguably, lightened women’s work while diminishing their public status.

For these early Mexicans, the donkey was something very surprising but not taboo. I would reserve the term “taboo” for a prohibition that affects both genders, however differently, and by its absolute “no!” keeps the two genders within their gens. “Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat. But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shah not eat of it, for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shalt surely die.” (Genesis 2:16–17). The violation of a taboo entails frightful consequences for the entire community; extraordinary sacrifice and redemption are called for. Ideally, overstepping the gender divide is not a taboo. To distinguish this from taboo, I would call it a pané. Gender informs Guayaki men, “Thou shalt not touch a basket; that is women’s domain.” What for her is appropriately gendered is pané for him.

Both taboo and pané designate a prohibition, but what they respectively forbid lies in different arenas. Taboo threatens the gendered duo from the outside; it makes the men and women of a gens speak together in the first person plural, “we.” Pané bespeaks the other side of the moon, the other half of the world, that other, muted part of our reality I can know about only through its reflection in the opposite gender’s words, looks, and actions.

In all times and places we find evidence that, without change in its contour or its magnitude, the barrier between genders has been trespassed. Public misfortune is often a cause for such a breach. During the Middle Ages, the heavy-wheeled plow drawn by a shod and harnessed horse was almost the symbol of male gender. Women would not dare to approach either the tool or the animal. But we find several late fourteenth-century miniatures from northern France depicting women handling the plow. The plague had decimated the population, and war had carried off most of the surviving men. Women had to work the fields until their boys became adults.105

Not only public calamity but private misfortune too can induce an individual to neglect proprieties and take up work normally done by the other gender. Until recently, the cowshed was inaccessible to men in northern Sweden. It was a warm place where unmarried women lived and slept with the cattle, and women were certain to be among themselves during the long winter season. Daughterless widowers were, however, sometimes observed slipping into the shed to milk the cow, something they would never have done, while in public view. Occasional emergencies can also result in infringements. When haying is threatened by an approaching storm in a Tyrolean mountain meadow, the farmer and his sons may lend a hand to the women gathering the hay. But they could never demand this of a hired man. It seems that high status within a community brought with it more freedom to step beyond proprieties. But exceptions only confirm the general rule; they have been chronicled because they were considered noteworthy, and now they make up a privileged source for the study of gender.

Paradoxically, transvestism also functions to confirm the gender divide and to inform the historian. Spontaneous group violations of gender-related strictures are rare and have always been experienced as something frightening. During peasant wars, nothing would terrorize the nobility more than a wild crowd of women who had taken up arms. In some instances, men dressed up in skirts for battle and routed the enemy army without even having to resort to arms.106

Almost everywhere transvestism is ritualized into a seasonal participatory event. Carnivals from Sicily to Scandinavia have throughout the ages demanded that women play men, men play women, and men play women who play men. It has been argued that such “travesties” were occasionally used to inflame political passion. Especially during the eighteenth century, in fact, these traditional reversals became the occasion for ridiculing the “process of civilization” resented by the crowd; they became a tactic for resisting the teacher and the cleric. Satire and comedy freely utilized such gender violations. Recent studies on the cultural features of laughter, fairs, mummery, and riots rightly highlight the political uses to which travesty has been put in protecting the moral economy,107 the gendered existence of the crowds. These gender turnarounds also served to lampoon, thus keeping in check the relative domination of one gender: Putting women occasionally, publicly, and festively on top was a way of ridiculing men without seriously undermining their dominance. Inversely, in a Mexican village that is still today riddled by the fear of witches, the dance of men in drag as hags pursuing pre-adolescent boys dressed up as coyotes triggers an annual day-long celebration of laughter, putting simmering anguish in its proper place.108

But travesty has an even deeper function. In almost every culture we find that certain priests must dress as women, certain magical acts are connected with sodomitical rites, the pilloried are attired as the opposite sex, the culture hero must risk pané. The function of this pattern is to keep the gender divide crystal clear by reversing the public perspective on its outline. Magically, it may serve to surprise the guardian demons, keeping them satisfied and at bay. Ultimately, it reflects the rootedness of gender in the deepest mystical experiences.

The Rise of the Heterosexual#

Modern sexology clouds the historian’s perspective on traditional travesty. Its categories are primarily sex-, not gender-, oriented.109 This appears most clearly in the language used for sodomy. Only a limited number of societies have terms to classify their members on the basis of the gender to which they are erotically attracted. Among these, the particular style in which modern European societies stress this classification is unique. The fact that lovemaking among men or among women was more or less frequent in some places and times does not permit the historians to draw the conclusion that all societies have recognized “the homosexual” as a special kind of being. Before the European Renaissance, a person could not think of himself as a homosexual any more than as an author; he preferred boys to women, or he was skilled at writing verse. A man could be addicted to buggery much as he could have a violent temper. His contemporaries might refer to him as a bugger or a killer, but neither designation had the diagnostic power of the modern term. A man’s making love to men did not make him intrinsically “other.” Homosexual acts were recognized and each culture had its own way to appraise them – as child’s play, as ritual inversion, as punishment for the Guayaki who had touched a woman’s basket, as a vice to be ridiculed or to be violently repressed. As a special identity, the homosexual could not be imagined under the rule of gender. The Modern European deviant is as singular as the heterosexual conjugal partner.

Recently, two major studies have examined the history of homosexuality as a socially perceived propensity, as distinguished from the history of homosexual behavior. D.S. Baily shows that homosexuality as a sexual disorientation characteristic of some people but not of others went unremarked in pre-scholastic Christian tradition. Legislators, theologians, and moralists were concerned with venereal practices between people of the same sex and, following Paul the Apostle, execrated groups in which these practices were flaunted. John Boswell has critically sifted through and collected ample material for us to follow the establishment of homosexuals110 as a group endowed with a deviant nature. It seems obvious that the new kind of constitutional deviance required the simultaneous emergence of the heterosexual norm on which human consecration to conjugal production is based. But so far no parallel history of “the heterosexual” has been written. “The homosexual” must serve, therefore, as the mirror to trace the conquest of the West by the heterosexual regime.

I can only suggest, here in these pages, the complex connection between the Church and the conversion of gender into sex. The encounter between Arnaud, the subdeacon, and the inquisitor of Montaillou can serve as our point of departure. Their discussion of the sodomy of which Arnaud stands accused brings out two sharply etched divergent positions. Arnaud perceives the action in the perspective of gender; the inquisitor, from the nascent outlook of unnatural sex.111 The ecclesiastic’s attempt to treat the sodomite as a heretic leaves the cleric baffled. He expresses his bewilderment in evident good faith: “I thought … in the simplicity of my heart that sodomy and ordinary fornication were indeed mortal sins, but much less serious than the deflowering of virgins, adultery, or incest.” This Arnaud was of noble and urbane origin. He was sophisticated and literate in a worldly sense. At a time when it was extremely rare to own a book, he loaned books to others. Among the volumes he handled, one finds not only Bibles and calendars but also classics, among them a work by Ovid, an author transmitting detailed classical knowledge in the theory and practice of dalliance in lovemaking, which for a millennium the Church inveighed against. And, although Arnaud had never been ordained to the priesthood, he carried out his clerical duties with evident devotion. His confused responses still reflect a gendered point of view. Sodomy – interpreted as deviance by the inquisitor, the future Pope Benedict XII – remained beyond his grasp. For him, buggery was and remained just one of several ways of curing lust.

The history of the English word “bugger” illustrates the conflict. Originally, bugger was an ecclesiological term, a reference to Bulgarians who became Christians in the ninth century. They joined the Church of Constantinople, at that time separated from the Pope. Later, the term was transferred from these “separated” Christians to the Bogumils, a Gnostic sect that spread from Thrace through Bulgaria and into the Balkans, leaving its traces in the form of huge but simple sarcophagi. Coined for administratively separated Christians, the word now designated a foreign non-Christian group. Three hundred years later, it was then shifted to the Bogumils’ cousins, the Gnostic converts around Albi in southern France. These people, native to the heartland of Christendom, were settled on the northern slope of the Pyrenees, Europe’s bulwark against Islam. Among them, one household after another was attracted by the spirit of Gnosticism; the faith, rituals, and customs of these households were now called, indifferently, “heresy” or “buggery.”

At this precise time, the Church had good reason to fear the spread of a spiritual adversary. Only during the centuries immediately preceding had the Church equipped itself with the doctrine, the personnel, the organization, and methods necessary for the pastoral care of households made up of individual souls. The permutation of churches from places of public worship and instruction into agencies for individualized care had begun under Charlemagne and was now perfected. One key element of this pastoral care was the cultivation and regulation of gendered, conjugal households. We forget that it was only during the High Middle Ages that matrimony slowly came to be considered a sacrament and thus a matter of ecclesiastical regulation. And this produced innumerable conflicts between the old vernacular and the new Catholic models of gender. The Church’s pastoral care weakened the hold of local, self-limiting gender, while creating a mood of resistance against the clerical normalization of a catholic gender. The time was propitious for the spread of a “heresy” that could offer the villager a “Catholic” belief without a managerial imposition of gender-specific controls from Rome.112

The object of the fourteenth-century crusade against heretics in Languedoc was the network of households around Albi, which embraced attractive, locally ruled heterodox beliefs. “Cathar” households were perceived as forming infectious cancers within the body of the Church. The inquisition pried into the household to find out if the poison had spread throughout the channels of kinship from a related domus. Up until this time, members of vernacular-gendered households had come to the Church; now the Church moved in the opposite direction, overstepping the house’s threshold. The deviant individual became the object of inquisitorial diagnosis and care. Within the heretical household, the theologian sniffed out the bugger, the person smelling of heresy. In this context, the term “bugger” was used in a doubly new way: It imputed a warped nature rather than mere criminal behavior, a monstrosity rather than nature’s sinful enjoyment outside the bounds set by God.

The medieval shift from orthodox faith to Catholic behavior, the conversion of priests from men deputed to liturgical service into pastors and confessors of a flock standardized the two sexes, supported the new identification of sexual buggery with theological heresy. For the pastor, now represented by the image of the celibate cock on the steeple, watching over a flock that included two sexes, the bugger was the unredeemable enemy who had eventually to be burned.

The plebanus looking down from the steeple upon his people, the sheep entrusted to his care, is the prototype of the service professional. He is in charge of souls and equipped with the language to read their consciences. All the souls under his responsibility, he is taught, are of equal dignity and possess consciences to be examined and formed.

The inquisitorial bishop from Avignon speaks for the Church, for a new and rising Church that, later secularized and split, would take form in the contemporary professional establishment. He belongs to the Church that made over the ritual of penance into the yearly act of confession, a Church that only recently – as of the Lateran Council of 1215 – had imposed on all her faithful the duty of telling their sins once a year to their own parish priest. This new law had been introduced with an original formula reflecting a novel perspective, the homogenizing perspective of sex: Omnes utriusque sexus fideles – all the faithful, men as well as women, are henceforth held to speak every year to their appointed pastor and reveal their sins. To enable the pastor to listen to these confessions, a new literature had come into being during the preceding century, a literature that had not yet fully washed Arnaud. Manuals advised the confessor on the sorts of questions to ask the faithful. Increasingly, the new manuals defined what this transgression meant for humans in general, independent of and sometimes contradictory to the local gender line. By restricting power, privilege, and ordination to men, Church law was not sexist; it simply reflected its sources. Church law did pioneer sexism by ruling on the consciences of equally immortal souls capable of committing the same sin with different bodies. By equating, in terms of sin, the transgressions of the same law by both men and women, it laid the foundation for sexist codes.

The compulsory confession of sins in the intimacy of the confessional was something radically new, the first and by far the most effective step toward the acceptance of written law and universal education. It was almost the inverse of the public penance imposed as an irksome, prolonged ritual, frequently carried out in front of the church, that the Irish and Scotch were taught to practice at the time of their conversion during the early Middle Ages. The old penitential order was men’s affair. It expressed the public and voluntary submission of recent converts to the new laws of the missionary. Ranulf had killed the murderer of his stepfather. He had done what it behooves a son to do; not to have taken vengeance would have been unforgiveable under the old rules of the clan. But under the new rule of Christ, he ought to have forgiven. Ranulf stood for seventeen years outside the church door, in the heat of summer and the ice of winter. The new confessional order relocated penance from the outer into inner space; it compelled each “soul” to create this new space within itself, and to create it according to architectural rules laid down in Church law. Unlike public penance, done once over a period of years for a life’s outstanding crime, confession meant a yearly accounting of secret transgressions against laws formulated by a catholic, that is, universal institution, Mother Church.113 Confession creates an “internal forum.” Once a year, the sinner opens the intimate chamber of his soul to a public, Church-appointed judge who, in absolute secrecy, listens to the culprit’s self-diagnosis. The consecrated male, the priestly judge, listens each year to a genderless soul, measuring its transgressions of a written law that defines gendered behavior.

The example of adultery illustrates what occurred. In every kinship system, fornication means something different; for the woman it is always a different kind of crime than for the man. Now, the idea of transgression of Church law turned it into the same sin. Men and women become equals in sin although, as members of their respective genders, they committed different crimes. Sexuality, as a genderless concept, took its first definition as the set of Church-defined sins against the Sixth Commandment: Thou shalt not commit adultery. Observing this process, it would be a mistake to confuse the new ability of the soul to apply Church decrees to this intimate forum with the sense of propriety and probity (honnêteté) that kept the gender divide intact. Conscience was refined by the interiorization of a positive law for the human, while probity was the result of growth into gender. Conscience is the result of education; gender, the result of education’s inverse. Starting in the thirteenth century, the speculum confessoris developed: By this tool the confessor could probe the penitent’s soul, ask the right questions. Through the correct annual responses, the reign of vernacular probity was progressively overshadowed by the dictates of conscience. And while for a millennium women had been muted in a Church ruled by men, they now became equal penitents speaking in a muffled voice to the curate of a sexist regime. Unisex law made cohabitation sexist: It ruled first that adultery makes man and woman equal as sinners, but that even in sin his natural place is on top. The documents that attempt to regulate, by Church rule, frequency, circumstances, and positions of intercourse114 are in stark contrast with the tradition of Ovid’s ars amatoria that, according to court records, Arnaud had lent to a colleague a few days before his trial. As the pastoral Church empowered its missionary clergy to penetrate into the house, the bed, and the soul, it repressed gender by the cultivation of a heterosexual marriage bond, and probity by the education of conscience.

The period between the twelfth and the late eighteenth century in central Europe could well be considered an epoch of probity under the growing shadow of conscience. As would be expected, with conscience penetrating societies formerly regulated by probity alone, the images of “man” and “woman” changed. One way of getting a glimpse of what happened is to study cultural types. Certainly, the lady to whom the troubadour offered his song was a new kind of being: his mistress. She was beyond marriage and kinship for the minstrel; she has been frequently studied, and at best she represents a kind of woman that only a minority could imagine. That this minority was not tiny is evidenced by the ability of some of the simple people of Montaillou to distinguish between women they had loved and those whom they had cherished (adamari). But the best proof for an entirely new devotion to the woman, which stands above gender and appeals to the most sublime forms of sex, is the spread of a new image of Mary.

The Iconography of Sex#

Marina Warner has dipped into the enormous reservoir of images of just one other woman. By studying the pictures and attributes of Mary the Virgin she has tried to see how “woman” was viewed. Clearly, the Virgin during the later Middle Ages was no longer the “blessed among women”; she was now the “only one of her sex.”

In the changing styles and tempers of her pictorial representations, I find, not only in the Middle Ages but throughout two thousand years, a guide to follow the route from the Theotokos in the Greek apsis to the kitsch in a Catholic couple’s bedroom. Never has Mary been represented without a strong emphasis on the flesh. From the earliest beginnings of her depiction in the catacombs of Priscilla to the thousands of Romanesque pictures that have been preserved, one thing makes her different from all other women who have been painted or sculpted: the artist’s desire to represent an historical woman blessed with a destiny without par. She is the one woman chosen to be the virgin mother, to bear God. Since the fruit of her womb was the source of a new beginning among men, she was the new Eve. But this idea was no longer the most prominent in Gothic, much less later, portraits. Step by step, she became detached from gender and shed both the aura of myth that had been borrowed from the goddess and the series of strong theological epithets with which the Church fathers had adorned her. She turned into a model for “woman,” into a type to challenge man, the conscience of genderless man.115 The idea is clearly formulated by Dante in Canto 33 of the Paradiso, when he addresses the Virgin as “umile ed alta piu che creatura

Stories can tell what history cannot describe; how the mother of God became Our Lady is such a tale. When she became the prototype of the “image of woman” – never a goddess, no longer an icon, not yet the sentimental pinup of baroque art – the other figures peopling the Romanesque cathedrals also began to go their own way. Many of these saints and monsters had come into the Church together with their own “nation” when it had been baptized, with their “gens.” The furry guardians of local gender, upon arriving in the presbytery, were occasionally dressed up in the togas of martyrs or decorated with the insignia of clerical saints.116 Others found their niche in the carved stone foliage, with their horns and scales intact. The young woman who was thrown to the dragon in the legend was now garbed as St. Margaret and placed above the altar, keeping the dragon on a leash. The river gods and satyrs, the kobolds and personified storms, all found their place, one in a capital, another in the bestiary frieze, and many as cornerstones or supports for doorways and chairs. Shaggy northern monsters shared the same column with Sassanian lions, chimeric peacocks recently lifted from a text in the library, and biblical figures in abundance. The Church felt confident of embracing heaven, hell, and earth, together with all that could fly or crawl. For five hundred years, its rule of thumb remained: “Ecclesia omnia benedicat” – let the Church bless everything people do, see, or make. In the eleventh century, even the devil had become more of a joke than a threat. Local myths and customs enriched the ritual and made the cathedral a hothouse of old lore. The presence of this host of baptized symbols bore witness to the power of the Church’s message, and to the possibility of an infinite variety of vernacular existence under the shield, the aegis, of faith.117

This fraternization of barely gentled local spirits, “baptized” imported gods, gorgon heads with new meanings, and “legitimate” prophets and apostles in the Romanesque Church must be clearly seen in order to understand what the exodus of the “recent” arrivals meant when it inevitably occurred. First, Bernard of Clairvaux, the austere and unbending reformer of monasticism, began to inveigh against monks tolerating in their cloister effigies that might be necessary to lead more simple souls toward the pure light of faith but could only distract the contemplative from the purity of his love. Then, a century later, as the Church turned inquisitorial and became more concerned with conscience than with creed, its new pastoral efforts destroyed the milieu for these established guests. The old guardians of probity would no longer fit into the austere arches of Gothic morality. The hunt for all kinds of dissidents dislodged the old gods from the buttresses and niches where for generations they had served to guard parochial propriety under the shelter of the Catholic faith.

The dragons and kobolds, the basilisks and wild men, were squeezed out of the interior as architecture changed from Romanesque to Gothic. There was no room for them on the tightly bundled, narrow and pointed pillars. Like bats, for a century or more they continued to cling to the outside of the church. As gargoyles, they stuck out into the air as if they were about to take flight, meanwhile disgorging water from their mouths or groins. The theologians, wrapped up in conscience, could no longer bless them. As the Renaissance approached, learned men interpreted the memory of this harlequin rabble as emblems, symbols, and cabalistic types. And, as a matter of fact, the gargoyles did take off, roaming around the countryside for the next three centuries as creatures never before seen: defrocked saints, martyrs with club feet, dragons with clipped wings. They behaved like packs of domesticated animals gone wild again, like alley cats in a war-ravaged town. These strange spirits called forth a new kind of priest, generally called a “witch.”

Part of the history of gender would be the stories one or the other of these spirits-turned-ghosts-or-devils could tell about their exodus.118 Squatters, for example, are known around the globe; iconographers call them obscene squatters. Some are male, but more are female figures. They forcefully thrust the open vulva out and up in a position that strongly suggests power. “Beset” was the name of this icon in Egypt. She was a goddess from the Sudan who came down the Nile to become dominant among her like on all the shores of the Mediterranean during later dynasties. Pliny, in his Natural History, testifies that hail will infallibly be averted from a ripening field if a woman in her menses lies in it on her back and uncovers her pubes. Sometimes, the amulet alone will work. He further reports that a woman will serve to frighten and dispel a tempest on the high seas on any day of the month. Beset has come down to us in hundreds of examples. In the late Romanesque churches, she mingles with a sister, also from the Mediterranean: the double-tailed mermaid. And from the northern isles another squatter descends toward France. This one is dressed in the garb of Eve, our common mother. She is Shela-na-gig, a Scot who must have been blessed quite early, when some Irish or Scottish clan came into the Church. She too is by origin a guardian spirit of gender, a powerful antidote to evil. Upon coming into the Christian cosmos, the squatter became the symbol for all that lives on the earth, and thus came to be Eve, the mother of all life. As Eve, she was carved into the pivot of the central pillar of a church’s main western portal. She is enthroned above the zodiac that frames The Last Judgment at the cathedral at Autun. She points her nakedness toward the sunset, the night, the direction from which all harmful spirits and powers threaten the people of God. She alone is powerful enough to protect the crowd of faithful and zoomorphs within the Church. Sometimes, though, two squatters, one of them ithyphallic, guard the west portal, in which case the first human parents always appear in the tympanum above. As Eve, Shela-na-gig can be interpreted as the epitome of traditional hierophany baptized by the Church. All squatters are hierophants, revelations of sacred power and protection. As Eve, the squatter is elevated into the gendered protector of a catholic crowd.

If Shela-na-gig’s taking Eve’s veil represents the high point of the squatter’s power, banning her from the Church despoils her of her sacred nimbus. The squatters that humanistic scholars turn into learned emblems are symbols, not hierophants; no demon would be frightened by the two-tailed sirens teeming in Raphael’s loggias. The theologians turn the mermaid into the allegory of carnal lust, which they represent as an attractive vice. As one of the seven deadly sins, she now teases conscience and is painfully removed from the sacredness of the divide she formerly guarded. But much more importantly, removed from Eve’s apple, from conversation with the serpent and Adam, having lost the diaphanous transparency by which she had revealed sacred power, the squatter nevertheless survives in spite of being dislodged from the Church. With her gender broken but not yet destroyed, she becomes one of the postures of the witch. As such, she survives in kitchen and coven.119

During the half millennium in which they had obediently supported columns and portals and chairs, the squatter, the billy goat, the dragon, the giant, and the dwarf had lost the edge of their sacred gender. The Church’s indiscriminate blessings had worn it down. Now the new theologians learned to distinguish carefully between the sacraments – neither more nor less than seven, universal, necessary for salvation – and the old blessings, which came to form the layer of sacramentals, clearly second class. For the new divines, the old spirits of local decency were at best no more than symbols, generally intruders if not vermin. And as they slipped away, taking off from the steeples on being driven from the thicket of the cloister garden, roaming on their own, the ancient goblins were metamorphosed. No longer pagan gods but Christian devils, no longer unredeemed guardians but apostate spirits, no longer ambiguous hierophanies but ghosts smelling of sulphur, they began to wander. They had lost the power to exorcise vernacular fears, but they could still haunt the countryside. Expelled by the Avignon-based Church, the domesticated shades of the past returned to the village square, to the rivers and mountaintops, as pale and crippled demons with Christian names, congealing into a new threat for a clergy now at the service of a novel order.

Delumeau has delineated the new fear characteristic of this peculiar situation as the Middle Ages declined. The confusion, anguish, and horror of people who had simultaneously lost both the tranquility of their Christian faith and the vernacular symbols of propriety they could trust gave rise to a religious situation without precedent. The line of priests and soothsayers who had formerly given ritual sanction to gendered existence had been broken, and the Roman priests who replaced them had turned into pastors charged with the administration and normalization of gendered life. A void was created, one that called for a new rite. Its celebrant was the witch, the priestess of the epoch of broken gender. Perhaps she was indeed as unique as the gendered conjugality characteristic of the period, as new as the homosexual, as strange as her prosecutors claimed.120 In any case, the struggle against her united the secular and the religious arms of the new state.