SATAN IN THE GROIN

exhibitionist carvings
on mediæval churches

part II

If wealth was always represented by a moneybag, often weighing the carrier down, sins of the flesh were variously represented by grotesque figures, usually naked and displaying or indicating their long hair or beards, symbolic of rampant sexuality.

Many of these are exhibitionists, both male (displaying and sometimes licking oversized apparatus of masculinity) and female (often showing huge vulvas). Some exhibitionists have since had their important messages hacked by uncomprehending prudes.

San Pedro de Tejada (Burgos), Spain

Damnation was vividly represented, most frequently by monsters grabbing or swallowing human figures (often naked) - representing Satan's Realm claiming and swallowing up the souls of sinners.

Maillezais (Vendée), France

Puypéroux (Charente), France

The sin of Luxuria (the depravity of the rich) was typically punished by Hellish snakes or toads attacking the breasts of long-tressed naked women, while Concupiscentia (lust) in men was punished by serpents biting their balls or beards or moustaches. Mauling by huge demonic beasts was also a common symbol of the fate of sinners. The blowing of horns into the ears of the damned suggests the Last Judgement.

Passirac (Charente), France

For hundreds of years neither sex nor marriage were endorsed by the Western Church. St Augustine had said that the only sex that was not a passage to Hell was the carnal union of two Saved Souls for the sole purpose of creating another soul to be saved. Thus most marriages were considered to be at least potentially sinful (unlike sacred marriages between holy men), and it was not until the the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215 that the Church declared marriage to be a sacrament - with a prescribed ritual - and ensured its eventual demise by espousing the 'family values' so despised by the first Christians.

Saint-Front-sur-Nizonne (Dordogne), France

Female exhibitionists have been illustrated in various books, notably in Images of Lust * by Anthony Weir and James Jerman,

Solignac (Haute-Vienne), France

but few people are aware that there are at least as many male exhibitionist carvings on churches across the length and breadth of Europe - from Bohemia to Galicia, and Denmark to Sicily - an enticing selection of which are illustrated here.
They appear also on castles and even stranger places in Britain and Ireland.

Post-mediæval gate-pillar, Ballycloghduff (Westmeath), Ireland

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* Images of Lust, by Anthony Weir and James Jerman, was published by Batsford (London) in 1986, and re-issued as a paperback in 1994. It was re-published in paperback by Routledge (London) in 1999, and is due to come out in the United States shortly.

part 3 >

This web-page is dedicated to the late Martha Weir,
who was amazed but unfazed by these carvings,
and without whom "Images of Lust" and " The Silent Orgy "
would never have been researched or written.

BACK TO PART ONE

Click here for a related essay:

POTENCY AND SIN : IRELAND AND THE
PHALLIC CONTINUUM

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Irish Genius

exhibitionist carvings on mediæval churches

part II

exhibitionist carvings
on mediæval churches