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As well as innumerable public secular events having a strong theme of male and female nakedness, there are many accounts of the phallus and nudity playing a prominent part in Christian festivals and ceremonies up until relatively recent times; that such events encouraged licentious behaviour is only to be expected in a sexually repressed society.
Numerous processions took place during 1315 when there was widespread fear that the harvest would fail: one was made from Paris to Saint-Denis and included a vast number of men and women. This was followed by many private parades in which all participants, except the women, went entirely naked. On other occasions everyone – men, women and children – went stark naked in public procession, a situation considered to be a praiseworthy and holy custom.
The festival at Isernia has already been mentioned but another phallic festival was also recorded in the Kingdom of Naples where, in the city of Trani, an ancient wooden statue of Priapus – called by the people il santo Membro – was carried in procession: a statue whose enormous phallus reached to his chin; the festival was abolished by the archbishop of the city in the early 18th century.
Perhaps the most notorious and ubiquitous festival was the Fête des Fous (Feast of Fools) – noted for its “indecency and nudity” – that began as a vague continuance of the Roman Saturnalia during the 5th century when it was allowed by the English and French churches. The Feast was adopted by the barbarian conquerors of the Western Empire and spread amongst Christian Goths in Spain, the Franks in Gaul, the Alemanni in Germany, and the Anglo-Saxons in Britain. During the sacred Saturnalia, a kind of joyous harvest festival celebrating completion of agricultural labours for the year before commencement of new crop sowing after the winter solstice rebirth of the sun, slaves and serving-maids were given equality with their masters in a brief social revolution of role reversal. It was customary in each household for slaves to elect a king from amongst their number who distributed lead ‘money’ to his subjects; these objects depicted the figure or emblem of their owner, of the deity he most honoured, or of some farcical subject matter – perhaps in the form of a pun.
Although the Council of Toledo (635) soon condemned its excesses the Feast was later sanctioned by the medieval Church and remained popular throughout Europe for many centuries. At some uncertain period the Feast was given the character of a specific religious festival by the clergy who already had particular days set aside for their own celebrations: the feast of St.Stephen (December 27th) for the deacons, St.John’s Day (December 27th) for the priests, Holy Innocents Day (28th December) for the boys, and the Circumcision (1st January), Epiphany (6th January) or 11th of January for the sub-deacons. The Feast of the Holy Innocents, commemorating the killing by Herod of babies after the birth of Christ, became a regular festival of children when a boy, elected by his choir school companions, served as a bishop or archbishop with the older choirboys acting as his clergy and the real senior clergy taking on a humble status. By the 11th century initial solemnity of the occasion must have already given way to ‘indecorous behaviour’ since it was fulminated against by Burchard, Bishop of Worms, and, in 1238, the Feast was banned by Grosseteste the Bishop of Lincoln.
It appears that these individual celebrations eventually merged into one long festival dominated by the lower clergy who later united with brotherhoods of ‘fools’. The day before Epiphany guilds of workers appointed their own ‘king’, in person or only symbolically; for example the king of barbers, king of vulgarity, etc. Celebration became marked by buffoonery and licentiousness but was also a brief respite from taxes and the anxieties of everyday life. The chief location for the Feast was the church itself where the lower clergy took over duties normally carried out by their superiors; it was most prevalent throughout France but rather less so in England, the Low Countries, Germany and Bohemia. Nevertheless, the Feast of Fools was very popular in England during the reign of Elizabeth I although it was finally abolished during her sovereignty – probably through puritan pressure – and replaced by a secular festival, the election of an ‘abbot of unreason’ or ‘lord of misrule’ (however one reference states that the English court ceased to appoint a Lord of Misrule after the death of Edward VI in 1553). Even this new festival was frowned upon: in his Anatomie of Abuses written in 1583, Stubbes described how badges were sold by members of the court of the Lord of Misrule to anyone who will “maintaine them in this their Heathenrie, Devilrie, Whoredome, Dronkenness, pride, and whatnot!” Evidently secular festivities were little different in content to their quasi-religious forerunners.
Closely allied with the Feast of Fools, and later indistinguishable from it, was the Feast of Asses in which all clergy, from the highest dignitaries to the humblest cleric, participated. The feast was celebrated in mid-January – the feast of the Flight into Egypt – when the most beautiful girl in the city, sitting on a richly draped ass (probably a wooden figure) with a child in her arms, was conducted to the church and placed by the altar before Mass was sung. This Festum Asinorum gradually lost its identity and was incorporated into the Feast of Fools – probably the dates were too near each other. The ass now lost much of its association with the Nativity Crib and ‘Flight’ as it had always been a relic of old magical cults representing a symbol of fertility and strength as well as the embodiment of stupidity.
Dulaure described how priests elected a ‘bishop’ or ‘pope’ for the duration of the Feast of Fools who entered the church with great pomp and ceremony and sat himself down in the real bishop’s chair; Mass was then said with all the clergy and other participants appearing with their faces daubed black or hidden by a hideous or ridiculous mask. During the service numerous people, dressed as mummers or as women, danced and sang obscene comical songs; others came to eat sausages and black pudding on the altar or to play cards; the censer was used to pay homage to the celebrant priest and old shoes were burnt so that he had to inhale the smoke. After Mass there were new acts of “extravagance and impiety”; priests mingled with men and women of the congregation while working themselves into a frenzy by running and dancing through the church, their unbridled imagination leading to all manner of licentious behaviour – they had no shame or modesty. Nothing inhibited their madness and passion. In the middle of this mayhem, still accompanied by blasphemous and obscene songs, celebrants could be seen stripping off all their clothes and giving themselves up to “shameful debauchery”. This scenario continued outside the church but, although less sacrilegious, it was no less coarse; participants riding on rubbish carts full of dung amused themselves by throwing it at the surrounding crowd. The most immoral laymen, disguised as monks or nuns, mixed with the clergy and performed uninhibited lewd movements under the monks’ clothing – filthy and impious songs always accompanied these scenes. Dulaure considered it quite amazing that such ceremonies, mixed with religion, had continued in almost all churches throughout France for twelve or fifteen centuries and was only abolished with the utmost difficulty: in the 12th century a bishop imposed regulations to check abuses committed during the Feast of Fools held on New Year’s Day at Notre-Dame in Paris, but the Feast was not finally forbidden until the Council of Basle in 1435. The Feast acted as a church-approved celebration at a time when there was no such concept as a secular public holiday – it was a time when everyone could let off steam and pent-up passions – and it survived in France until 1644 when the Church finally forbade it.
Yet despite this prohibition it appears that elements of the old Feast continued up to relatively modern times: a self-indulgent procession, despite government attempts to suppress it, was witnessed in the early 1880’s in Palermo, Sicily. On the feast of Saint Rosalie held on the 4th September: “an antique image of the saint is carried round the town practically all night, and phallic dances and practices are freely indulged in till the image is re-housed. It seems to be simply the old Bacchanalia, Saturnalia, Liberalia, or Lupercalia, still continued from ancient times”. The author quoted from a report by the Rome correspondent of The Express newspaper of 4th September 1905: “at two o’clock in the morning the image was still on the road, surrounded by fanatical and intoxicated crowds, who ever and anon executed weird and disgusting dances around the effigy to musical accompaniment”.