A History of Celibacy
Elizabeth Abbott
448pp, The Lutterworth Press, £15
Buy it at a discount at BOL
What do you do with an early-medieval girl called Uncumber? Her father, a pagan Portuguese ruler, found a Sicilian king to take her off his hands. But Uncumber wasn't like the other girls. Her mother was a Christian, and the daughter wanted to stay a virgin: power politics collided with the sage and serious business of chastity. But Uncumber, the Morrissey of her age, knew that the advertised absence of sex was a powerful weapon. And so she grew a beard. Confronted by a follically enhanced virgin on the eve of his marriage, the Sicilian sailed away. The princess's victory is, allegedly, memorialised in our "unencumber".
It was victory at a price: crucifixion. However, since martyrdom offers cultic charms, Uncumber had her hairy followers in death. Medieval bearded ladies - saints on the make - took over where she left off. Paula of Avila sprouted a particularly fetid growth as a weapon in her armoury. Militant Teresa of the same town would have known of Paula as a role model - the local girl kept good or, at any rate, chaste. These and others of the gang questioned what was "natural" in a counter-revolution of the mind and body executed with charismatic poise. The comfortable equation of Christianity and of Judaism with sugary family values ignores these fierce forms of dissidence and emancipation. Modern liberals - even in the age of the STD - find the virgin with a cause equally hard to take.
The point about celibacy, either imposed and cruel or chosen and free, is that it is unnatural: a withdrawal from the chain of procreation. It also rejects the idea that there is some other half waiting in the wings to make complete that which is divided and forlorn. Therein lies its appeal, its power and its offence: it can both empower the self and wither it. Un-sex can be sexy too - and not just through the promise of gratification deferred.
Italian castrati made themselves eunuchs both for art's sake and for jobs in baroque Rome. But these fundamentalist celibates were only the latest in a long line linking sexual denial with power display. The first eunuchs are seen in the courts of ancient Persia and recur in both Byzantium and the Forbidden City. Those without families proved more loyal to rulers than men who dallied with the hope of establishing dynasties for their progeny.
Is celibacy creative? The ideology of spermatic economy insists that it is, maintaining that no drop may be spilt if greatness is to be achieved. The Greeks called the penis "the necessity"- and most of us are the heirs of Hellas in this regard. But their medicine men, such as Pythagoras and Galen, thought that there was only so much of the stuff around, so it was best to look after it. When Balzac groaned post-coitally "there goes another novel", he was subscribing to an old code.
The gods of the field incline with the solitaries of the study. Peruvian soccer fans still blame their 1982 World Cup loss to Poland on those players who broke the ban on pre-match sex. Indian wrestlers, the pahalwans , are life-long celibates as well as full-time sportsmen and get in a terrible state over the tiniest nocturnal emission. For Hinduism, also the sexiest of religions, agrees with Galen that semen is the essence of life. Hence the "langot", a G-string trussing the wrestlers' genitalia up between their legs. Happily, the players' regular hashish consumption may ease this particular pain. But the changing-room authorities seem to be evolving: Glenn Hoddle listened to the spirits and allowed England players their girlfriends during the 1998 World Cup.
Celibacy can be just misery. Newton went on an 18-month depressive rebound from a 23-year-old Swiss. Deprived of dishy Fatio, who sensibly refused to move to Cambridge, Newton lost his early creativity. As Master of the Royal Mint, he displayed a rather anal concern with guarding the nation's currency and prosecuted counterfeiters with unwonted savagery. But Gandhi showed all the manipulativeness of a Middle Temple lawyer in using celibacy as a way of testing himself and of teasing the teenage girls, whom he alternately slept with and dispatched back to the village. For the Mahatma, sex meant always having to say sorry. One memory haunted him - that of seizing a brief session with his wife and thereby missing the death of his terminally ill father.
Elizabeth Abbott mixes anthropology with history in her confection of insights. We discover Athenian women going on a three-day binge every autumn, gleefully burying models of male genitalia. Here also are rich Babylonian women going one further and creating life-long communities of celibates who ran their own estates and traded in silver; Aztec aristocratic males with pierced penises preserved from contact; the Enga society in New Guinea, whose bachelors are fined a pig for mentioning sex in conversation. The pages of Abbott's lucid, exciting book throb with both life and its denial.
The emphasis is on the feminist-liberal-Christian end of things. Joan of Arc - whose sin was her cross-dressing - is a particular heroine, as is that crazed and cross 12th-century power-broker (as well as literary and musical genius), Abbess Hildegard of Bingen. What Abbott has done, in effect, is to write a history of civilisation from one particular angle, gliding through world civilisations with a compelling ease. There is plenty of anecdotage along the way to ease the journey. There is anger too - as in the account of Chinese foot-binding, where fashion statements colluded with masculine control as tiny feet were sucked, nibbled and stroked for more than 1,000 years until the official prohibition in 1906. Clerical celibacy comes in for some special anger, with Abbott's focus on the treatment of the 1970s "Third Way" movement, full of sophistry, as such movements tend to be: nuns and priests were allowed to date, neck and pet without sex. But it is a strength of her moving and dazzling achievement that Abbott is never conventional, preachy or platitudinous. Like all good history, her book is a signpost to the strangeness of a world that has such deviance in it.
