The Apotropaic Priapos and Male Sexuality

     Priapos is a deity who rarely appeared in literature. A latecomer to the Greek pantheon, with his exaggerated phallus, his place in Hellenistic times is surely a concession to the archaic practices honoring the earth goddess and other forces of fertility and generation displaced by the Olympians. Imperfectly fitting into the new order, Priapos assumed a role on the sidelines, providing a rustic air and did comic turns, becoming an odd sort of scarecrow while continuing to offer himself as an intercessor generally friendly to human interests. Many later depictions of the god cast a stark light on the use of male sexuality in aggression, assault, and violence.
     Strabo notes that Hesiod did not mention Priapos. Doubtless an Eastern importation, like Dionysos, sometimes named as his father, the worship of Priapos was considered by the ancients to have arisen around Lampsakos in the area of the Hellespont where, according to Pausanias, he was “more revered than any other god.” [1] His significance in this era is clearly marked though broad. As Diodorus Siculus puts it, “the generative member, since it is the cause of the reproduction of human beings and of their continued existence through all time, became the object of immortal honour.” [2] People’s “continued existence” is dependent, of course, not only on human reproduction, but also the productive fertility of the soil and the flourishing of wild and domestic animals. Priapos’ figure is represented in a second century stature with an overflowing basket of produce at his crotch. [3]
     In the most remote rural areas Priapos maintained this function most fully. With an aristocrat’s romanticism reminiscent of Yeats’ longing for Innisfree Catullus sketches a “turf cottage” roofed with “osier-twigs” in which Priapus receives honors and in return brings prosperity to his poor devotees. [4] Priapos’ general beneficent associations take the form of patronage of fishermen for those living by the sea [5] to whom he ensured a good catch as well as protection from sudden death. For centuries sailors carried small phallic charms as amulets against shipwreck.
     With sexual power comes sexual anxiety. His originary myth itself is radically ambivalent. His prodigious penis is no gift but rather inconvenient and impotent, due to Hera’s jealous curse. [6] in spite of his imposing outsize member, Priapos had a poor reputation as a lover. He is generally described as ill-favored in appearance and many Priapic legends such as those in Ovid narrate tales of unsuccessful sexual assault. [7] In a number of the poems of the Priapeia the god complains of impotence. Tibullus has Priapos deliver an instructive lecture on the seduction of youths only to end by declaring that his own erotic desire has brought him nothing but suffering and failure, exposing him to ridicule as an absurd instructor in love. [8]
     Priapos’ sexuality, then, could be represented as a generative dynamo, an expression of the vitality of nature itself, but he also could self-reflectively doubt his virility. Yet this does not exhaust the modes of male sexuality he embodies. Classical eros, not to speak of modern, allowed another, and darker, form of desire. The Classical lover may be the stricken victim of passion one finds in in a good deal of Ovid, or he may be the pleasure-loving sybarite of many lyrics in the Anthology. In a third alternative, less commonly recognized, he is an aggressive delighter in sexual assault against those of lower status: slaves, prisoners, common prostitutes.
     We are by now familiar with the assertion that rape is a crime of power and domination rather than ordinary sexual pleasure, yet the role of a similar dynamic in many other relationships is often underestimated. In contemporary language such aggression is explicit in the common use of terms as “fuck you,” “up yours,” “you suck” and the like. They are the modern forms of the notorious opening line of Catullus Pēdīcābō ego vōs et irrumābō ("I will sodomize you and face-fuck you") [10]
     A phallus to assure fertility seems natural enough, but in what way does a man with an erection serve as an effective guardian? The poems of the Priapeia (and other similar poems) leave no doubt. Priapos’ prodigious member is frightening because he threatens to sexually attack the trespasser, male or female indifferently. Priapos’ role as guardian of gardens may have gained popularity because the deity seemed a quaint and semi-comic rustic to sophisticated urbanites, but it rests on the male member’s potential as a weapon capable of inflicting suffering. Indeed, many Priapic poems suggest that the statue’s huge member might be used as a club with which to beat intruders.
     While Priapos does epitomize male sexual desire with its impetuous mandates and at times identifies this drive with the fundamental motive power of nature visible in both wilderness and cultivated land, he also represents male vulnerability. With few exceptions, of which Priapos is the most prominent, the ancient Greeks and Romans preferred to minimize male genitals in statues and drawings of naked men. Though ithyphallic figures of Shiva and of the Egyptian god Min and other divinities are not unusual, to the Greeks and Romans there was something vulnerable, absurd, and comic about going around with an erection. Finally, the male member was also commonly used as an emblem of power. There could be no clearer sign of patriarchy than the penis associated not with love but with physical punishment.



1. Pausanias 9.31.2 The earliest systematic study of Priapos, Richard Payne Knight’s fascinating Discourse on the Worship of Priapus A discourse on the worship of Priapus, and its connection with the mystic theology of the ancients, focuses on this aspect of the god. As an eighteenth century rationalist to Payne the phallus was “a very natural symbol of a very natural and philosophical system of religion.” He wrote that the ancient “mystics” using such imagery promulgated a religion free from “vulgar superstition,” an accusation he is too restrained to make explicitly against his Established Church. In spite of this discretion he suppressed the book and it was not publicly published for decades.

2. Diodorus Siculus 4.6.1-4 “laughter and sport”

3. In the Cortile de Belvedere, Museo Pio Clementino, Vatican Museums.

4. Carmina 19.

5. The Greek Anthology contains four dedications to Priapos of gardens and six for Priapos of the beach.

6. The curse is said to be in revenge for Paris’ preference of Aphrodite. I have found no earlier authority for this that the scholiast on Apollonius of Rhodes 1.932, and Kerenyi sniffs at the story as "a cheap theme, and certainly not an ancient one" in The Mythology of the Greeks, vol. 1 Gods of the Greeks.

7. For instance in 75 his penis is “exanimis” and “inutile.”

6. Fasti 1.6 and 1.9. Some of the finest English poems on impotence are from more or less libertine writers such as Rochester and Carew.

9. Elegies 1.4.

10. Carmina 16. The poet directs his invective at his friends Furius and Aurelius who had apparently called his lyrics -- with likely particular reference to Carmina 5 -- molliculi (“soft” or perhaps “effeminate”). In turn he accuses them of passive “feminine” sexual roles. His threat to sexually penetrate them is to him evidence not of homosexuality but of masculine power.

Vignettes of the Sixties

1. a raid

     In the late sixties they lived in an old building in Chicago close enough to Lake Michigan that the sound of the water lapping on the shore was audible at night. Except for the front apartment on each floor, the building was made up of studios with little kitchenettes and Murphy beds in the closets. The elderly widows who occupied most of the units sometimes would call on him for aid with such chores as replacing lightbulbs. He and his wife were there largely because it was cheap and the management allowed their cat.
     A few other tenants of their own generation lived there with whom they soon became acquainted. The first-floor front apartment, right by the building’s entrance, was occupied by two young women of spirits so buoyant and innocent that they drove a Volkswagen Beetle covered with hearts and daisies and slogans such as “make love not war” and “smoke pot.” No one could have been more amiable, and the two were masseuses as well, though the car in the street did seem rather uncool. After all, in those days really substantial penalties were exacted for simple possession, though in this particular city, cash could resolve most cases.
     They also met Gino, a flamboyant hair stylist who also lived on the first floor. Something of an interior decorator as well as a coiffeur, he had covered all his walls with metal foil. Serious about his profession, he designed original looks and hairdressing magazines were scattered about his place along with gay pornography. They had some pleasant sociable evenings with these three.
     But, one night came a knock that somehow sounded troubled even before they had opened the door. It was Gino who breathlessly informed them that the police were raiding the women’s place at that very moment. He had managed to slip down to the end of the hall where there was a small closet with a garbage chute near which he had concealed his stash before coming like Paul Revere to alert them on the fourth floor.
     As it happened at that moment they had a miscellany of minor contraband: half an ounce of decent pot, a bit of a better variety, a chunk of hash, a few psychedelics and amphetamines for a rainy day, nothing big, but enough to be very expensive in the corrupt city in which they lived. He wasn’t sure what to do. He knew he did not want to lose his little collection. Or get busted. The garbage room seemed risky, especially if the cops had managed to turn up Gino’s stuff. With the foolish bravado of youth, he strode to his back stairway and descended decisively into the alley’s welcoming darkness.
     Of course, had it been a serious police operation the back door would have been the most obvious place to keep an eye on, but as it happened he walked on unimpeded to the home of nearby friends where he left his stash for safekeeping.
     Upon his return he found that the poor women had been arrested. The officers had visited Gino as well, but his place was clean by then and the putatively straight cops had such a rollicking time examining his gay oriented magazines that they had no wish to hassle him further.
     He was not surprised, upon recovering his stuff from its guardians, to find that the pot had palpably diminished.


2. a demonstration

     My friend’s parents in some ways typified their generation. His father, whose own parents were urban and working class, flew in World War II and came home from a German POW camp to the possibilities suggested by the GI Bill. He acquired some college, then a white collar job with a major corporation and, after a bit, a substantial brick home in a prestigious suburb.
     He must have felt that America was working out pretty well for him. He was a purchaser, a position which by his own account consisted largely of three-martini lunches with salesmen who had long been suppliers and then renewing or signing a deal. His work consisted largely of socializing, of which he was naturally fond, and of which he became fonder.
     He and his wife were easy-going people, unfailingly pleasant and hospitable, but, as the sixties wore on, it seemed that something was not right. The war in Vietnam was expanding in an alarming way, dominating the news, and threatening the comfortable security of their son. Somehow it seemed very different from the war of their youth. And people’s reactions seemed different, sometimes difficult to understand, especially the attitudes of the youth.
     I and my friends had gathered at their house from our various colleges on Friday night, March 24, 1967. We had come to our parental homes in the suburbs for this weekend because the following day an antiwar march was planned for Chicago. As it turned out, it attracted about 5000 people which was a good crowd in those days, doubtless boosted in this case by Martin Luther King’s leading the parade and then speaking at the Coliseum. He had spent the previous summer in Chicago working for open housing.
     That is, however, only background for Ben’s story. Maybe a dozen of us were lounging about our friend’s TV room when his parents returned home in high spirits after a night out. They courteously came in to chat with us before retiring. After we had exchanged a few pleasantries, though, a frown crossed the woman’s face.
     “What is going on, that’s what I’d like to know. You’re all a bunch of good kids, but you want to go ‘round looking like bums. I don’t get it.”
     She paused, ruefully looking across the room. Her eyes lit on Ben, the only one of the group who wore short hair and a preppy sport coat. “Look at Ben,” she said. “Why can’t you all take care of yourself like Ben does. Anyone can tell he’s a good boy.”
     This kind of talk, while common in those days, had a certain irony to my ear. We all knew, while she did not, that Ben was so well-groomed because he was a member of the Communist Party, USA which has never much cared for bohemians, though some bohemians have cared a good deal for the Party. His appearance was meant to facilitate his organizing efforts. The Maoists in Progressive Labor were similarly distinguishable in youth movement circles due to their effort to be indistinguishable from the mainstream.


3. a work of art

     After I finished my B.A. in 1967 I skipped the graduation ceremonies and drove nonstop in a driveaway car (does anyone do that today? do the youth even know what that is?) with four friends to the Haight-Ashbury where, sure enough, at the moment of our breathless arrival, the Diggers were serving food in the park and we found we had arrived just in time to dine.
     Dine we did. We were crashing with a onetime classmate who had left before finishing his degree. He was very proud of his cat. He had been listening to KMPX (at the time so very freeform that it seemed one could wander in off the street and take the microphone). The station had received word that Grace Slick’s cat had had kittens and they were being offered to good homes. He ran the few blocks over, knocked on her door, and, sure enough, was given a cat.
     We petted the cat and ate short-grain brown rice and vegetables. Our host’s girlfriend made jewelry which she sold to a store on Haight Street. Most of the people about had even less visible form of support. They had, however, in compensation, many ideas. We heard that we should look in on a guy named Raphael whose art was said to be mind-blowing. Though we did not know anyone in the building, we went to call on him. Without hesitation we were conducted to his home and gallery, though in fact it was little like either a home or a gallery. Raphael slept in a storage closet on the landing of a Victorian home’s stairway, an oddly shaped space in which the roof met the floor and one could not stand upright. It was an imaginative person’s idea of a sublet. Though three in his space made a tiught squeeze, Raphael received us graciously.
     His art was all about. His sole oeuvre. He had hung hundreds of small objects – pieces of mechanical watches, transistors, indescribable bits of tiny and delicate debris – from his low ceiling with fine filaments. They were arranged in careful patterns to state a theme, repeat it, vary it. It was as though one found oneself inside a concrete representation of a Brandenburg Concerto. Raphael gently blew and it seemed the whole environment was jiving. We were now in an Ub Iwerks cartoon, though Bach’s soundtrack continued. The entire Haight-Ashbury neighborhood surely pulsed in harmonic sympathy. The new America and a new art were, it seemed at that moment, unquestionably emerging. New possibilities were daily blooming. Raphael and his art have never been mentioned until now.

Sir Isumbras and the Functions of the Fabulous

     As soon as language appeared, it became possible to describe things contrary to reality, facilitating lying and allowing the emergence of religion and literature. The appetite of the pious for marvels knows no boundaries in space or time; supernatural events provide marvelous entertainment and add the simplest seal of authenticity for every sadhu, faith healer, priest and shaman. Miracles continue to occur regularly if one believes the tales of the faithful.
     There is, however, no controversy over the unreality of all imaginative literature. Every story is made up, in this sense a “lie;” it makes no claim to have actually happened and thus be “true.” Every poem is also a little work of fiction, with a persona saying things the author imagined might be said. As Aristotle knew, literature provides quite a different sort of truth. In fact, both verisimilitude and fabulation are rhetorical figures, the former suggesting a complex of attitudes arising from an apparently plausible plot and the latter making use of a story’s improbability .
     Those utterly unsophisticated in visual art sometimes tend to think that the best painting is the most real-looking. (Naïve as it is, this notion has a continuous history reaching back to antiquity.) By a similar standard of judgment, verisimilitude would be the mark of the best writing. One might using this criterion criticize a novel’s conclusion as implausible, the description of a city as quite unlike the original, or dialogue as stilted. Such points are indeed salient, but only if the narrative had already established an expectation of realism making the offending passage dissonant.
     In fact a great deal of literature employs unrealistic turns of plot altogether appropriate, indeed necessary, for the effects and themes of a given work. The myths by which humans structure and understand their world include none of the restraints of lived experience. Heroes and villains die and are reborn, they possess the power of invisibility, heal the sick and raise the dead. Their reality is symbolic and not literal. Similarly, the conventions of romance involve the most incredible coincidences and pairings, the most improbable reappearances and denouements. Folk tales, too, are often utterly supernatural from the start, though many rely on spirits and goblins rather than deities.
     Verisimilitude and its opposite both make an impression on the reader. The many critics who have pondered whether Sir Isumbras is a courtly romance or a religious quasi-hagiography neglect to observe what the two genres have in common: both saints’ lives and chivalric narrative allow themselves conventions that stray far from realism.
     The sort of entertainment Sir Isumbras offers may seem in little demand today. in the narration of a medieval Job [1], whose travails mount until he accepts his guilt and, having performed extravagant penance, finds his material as well as spiritual well-being restored as a result. As a tail-rhyme romance, the account is clearly meant for popular amusement rather than for catechism; the poem certainly arose and circulated apart from any ecclesiastical imprimatur, yet is was an age when the canonical saints themselves had careers recorded as rather more lively with miraculous manifestations than the readers’ lived experience.
     The boldly dramatic turns in Sir Isumbras’ life are told with little concern for verisimilitude. After the talking bird sent by Christ sets the plot in motion, a reader or listener not swept along by the story might wonder at the lion, leopard, and unicorn that carry off his sons with such regularity, or at their miraculous reappearance in his hour of need without any explanation of what had happened in the meantime. His wife’s failure to recognize him after his long service as an ironworker is likewise implausible (as his her treatment by her captor and her immediate ascendance to rule in his absence). Sir Isumbras’ restoration to prosperity with which the tale ends is as flat and simple as the end of the book of Job. A griffin’s steals his gold, but then it fortuitously reappears. Anything can happen, it seems, that the narrator wishes to propose.
     All these extraordinary events are far from random. They serve the ends of the romance just as similar improbabilities fill other romances from Daphnis and Chloe to The Winter’s Tale. In the first place, use of the fabulous is a sign of the aesthetic text. Though marvels and the supernatural appear as well in texts centered on history, travel, or even science, as well as religion, such showy violations of natural law are characteristic of imaginative literature. The reader accepts with relish the fact that fictions have no limits as surely as did those who were listening to the Wife of Bath when she began “In th' olde dayes of the kyng arthour . . .”
     The fabulous plot elements also provide a measure of structural symmetry, marking off the central portion of the tale with its action from the backstory, the long central portion of penitential labor in the ironworks, and the denouement. Rather like the working out of a well-designed farce, every element – in this case, the wife, the three sons, and the throne – returns with a satisfying inevitability once the pattern is set into motion.
     The chief appeal of the fantastic is surely, though, the timeless pleasure of recreationally contemplating the amazing and the impossible. Indeed, England no less than India, enjoyed stories featuring marvels of all sorts [2] and a good many religious narratives as well as heroic battle narratives catered to a taste akin to that of lovers of science fiction and fantasy. Miracles in art and in language were the equivalent of the special effects so prominent in films today, relished for their very improbability. The world of superheroes in comics and films is part of a lineage that includes such varied texts as Jataka Buddha stories and Sir John Mandeville.
     Virtually all the romances include religious formulae and Sir Isumbras is not unique among them in its foregrounding of the theme of salvation. [3] The presence of miraculous events is a universal sign of divine activity, so the episodes related of the penitential knight might be considered to bolster the Gospel stories of Christ walking on water and raising the dead. The small bird that posed Sir Isumbras the question of whether he preferred happiness at the beginning or the end of his life was the direct agent of Jesus Christ. The whole story is a dramatic enactment of Providence modeling original sin, repentance and penitence, and the felicity that accompanies acceptance of God’s grace. Though the narrated events are sensational, they reflect thereby only the more strongly the culture’s hegemonic ideology about the course of every Christian life.
     Yet there lurks a contradiction in that Christian confidence. Sir Isumbras is not susceptible to the sort of programmatic allegorical reading applicable to, say, The Faery Queen or Pilgrim’s Progress. The story cannot be read purely as an ingenious thematic statement, and for that reason its realism cannot be wholly dismissed as an issue. The gap between the reader and the hero is yawning wide. Though one might call Sir Isumbras an everyman in his sin, repentance, and salvation, he is unlike anyone’s lived experience in his having lived so high, sunk so low, and endured such extraordinary suffering before his marvelous deliverance. The inexorable retributive justice which first condemns the hero to prolonged suffering and humiliation and later restores him to prosperity seems to belong to a world apart from that of lived experience just as Christ’s miracles and the supernatural events of the Hebrew scriptures are remote in time and place. After appreciating the justice meted out to Sir Isumbras, after all, the reader or listener returns to a far less visibly just world. The church would maintain that all accounts are balanced in the afterlife, but this assurance has not always determined the behavior of those who identify as believers. In a way Sir Isumbras is a poignant wish, reflecting more how the world lacks justice than solid confidence that all will be right in the end.
     The rhetoric of fancy in which anything can happen is exhilarating. The poet, like a magician, can attract a considerable audience by making rabbits appear out of hats or sawing attractive assistants in two. This entertainment value may indeed be its formal cause in the Aristotelean sense, but the role of the fabulous is significant in what a medieval churchman would have considered the poem’s central purpose to be its teaching of Christian precepts. Even dealing with dogma, however, art is subtle enough to introduce contradictions, tensions, and uncertainties into the narrative by use of the very same “unrealistic” incidents which at the same time hammer home central points of doctrine.



1. Sir Isumbras elides the central issue of Job by the knight’s clear sin of pride before his fall.

2. See, for instance my “Sacred Space as Sideshow” (http://williamseaton.blogspot.com/2010/02/sacred-space-as-sideshow.html).

3. Dieter Mehl’s The Middle English Romances of the Thirteenth and Fourteenth Centuries proposes a subgenre of “homiletic romances” which includes Sir Isumbras as well as The King of Tars, Robert of Sicily, Sir Gowther, Emaré, Le Bone Florence of Rome, Athelston, The Sege of Melayne, and Cheuelere Assigne.