Goddesses and Witches in The Golden Ass

 

Citations in brackets refer to endnotes.

 

     The Metamorphoses of Lucius Apuleius, called the Golden Ass (Asinus aureus) since Augustine’s time, is an extraordinary book simply as the only ancient Roman prose fiction to survive entire [1].  In it are what seem to be the clearest hints we moderns are likely ever to have of the ancient mystery cults, and the central theme of the book as a whole is the story of its hero’s path to enlightenment,  though he visits as well a few scatological and erotic sidepaths on his route.  Perhaps the closest analogue in the later European tradition is Langland’s Piers Plowman which similarly uses allegorical figures in realistic, often humorous, settings to detail the soul’s ascent to salvation.  In this spiritual goal and in the book’s comedy the Golden Ass is also reminiscent of Wu Cheng'en’s marvelous Journey to the West, but, while even the indulgent Buddhism of the Monkey King’s story must frown upon attachments, including sexual desire, the Latin author, like Li Yu, the putative author of the Rouputuan, or Prayer Mat of Flesh [2], regards sexuality as an avenue to the divine.

     Rather like Odysseus who remains loyal to his wife through a series of encounters with females, both mortal and immortal, and finds repose only after rejoining her, the hero of the Golden Ass must pursue his picaresque path until he finds a liberation more profound than his return to human form in his initiation into the mysteries of Isis.  The most beautiful and profound of the earlier forms of what a Jungian might call his anima is Psyche, but others appear all along the way, most of which are either malevolent witches or simply selfish women.

     Of the many stories woven into this composite, episodic work, the centerpiece is clearly Cupid and Psyche.  Far longer than any of the other stories, it is also raised to a higher register of significance by its  focus on the doings of deities.  The love of Cupid and Psyche encounters a number of obstacles: her father’s attempt to kill her through exposure,  the meddling sisters plot to kill the lover, and the tasks imposed by Venus.  After succeeding in these trials, Psyche becomes herself immortal, and she gives birth to the couple’s child, Pleasure. 

     Hermeneutic critics have assigned specific meaning to each incident.  For Martianus Capella in On the Marriage of Philology and Mercury (De nuptiis Philologiae et Mercurii) in the fifth century Psyche is a soul held captive by sensual indulgence; his Mercury makes a match instead with learning, detailing the seven liberal arts in a work that set the school curriculum for a millennium.   Boccaccio, in his fourteenth century On the Genealogy of the Gods of the Gentiles (Genealogia deorum gentilium) refers to both Apuleius and Martianus and sets forth a neo-Platonic Christian interpretation [3], while C. S. Lewis feels he must revise the myth to make it Christian in Till We Have Faces.  The story is a favorite of Jungians for whom it is about individuation and coming to terms with the anima [4]. 

     The difficulties encountered by Cupid and Psyche are familiar from folk tales: "Beauty and the Beast," "Blackbeard," "Vasilisa the Beautiful," and Pandora are among those which include similar motifs.  The specifics of these challenges are, not mechanically decodable; they are merely difficulties in the way of happiness told in an entertaining manner and paralleled in many narrations on other themes.  In the context of the Golden Ass the story is the mythic form of a transformative love ending in initiation in mysteries, salvation, and apotheosis, a spiritual process to which the love story of Cupid and Psyche offers an analogue.  The unfaithful wives, witches, and other indifferent or malevolent females in, in the many attached tales are dead ends, delusions, false loves that bring frustration, suffering, and disaster.  Toward the end Philebus, the priest of Sabadius, appears as a false deity, leading to a perversion of love rather than to its fulfillment. 

     The interplay between mythic and realistic realms is pervasive in the narration occurring on every page.  Thus divine and human actions are synchronized.  The characters are compared to goddesses (Venus most commonly) and their lovers or rivals, immortal or mortal.   To cite only a few examples, chosen at random, the witches in Aristomenes’ story select Socrates just as Diana chose Endymion; Byrrhaena’s house includes a sculpture of Diana with hounds; Photis resembles Venus rising from the sea while Lucius “a slave of the Queen Proserpina” and their sex is “bacchic”;  Thelyphron resembles Orpheus while Lucius compares himself to Hercules or Cupid, and this pattern continues throughout the Golden Ass.  The correspondence of mythic and human is recurrent and consistent; each illuminates the other.

     In mystical literature in general the ineffable is expressed perforce by figures of speech.  As erotic love is the most powerful form of human desire, sex is often used to represent the soul’s identification with Ultimate Reality.  Among the most prominent examples of this universal trend are the poems of the Song of Songs, Mechthild of Magdeburg, Rumi, St. John of the Cross, Mirabai, and the Bauls of Bengal.  Lucius Apuleius in his captivating story with time-tested narrative turns, humor, and considerable realism, rare in antiquity, brings his protagonist to an enlightenment no less sublime for the seasoning of impropriety he admits prior to the lofty conclusion.

     The divine in the Golden Ass is Isis whose initiations were indeed conducted in Rome.  Like Thessaly, the site of the novel’s action, Egypt was thought by the Romans to be a place where magic flourished.  Earlier mystery religions, notably the Eleusinian cult but including those centered on Orpheus, Cybele, Dionysos, and Jesus Christ, had attracted Romans whose religious sensibilities were unsatisfied by the conventional observances honoring Jupiter and the Olympians [5].  Mysteries offered individuals a participatory and emotional experience as well as the opportunity to be initiated and thus to guarantee a felicitous afterlife. 

     For a male writer, enlightenment is signified by his union with the female, his other half according to Aristophanes’ fable in the Symposium.  The physical joining of the sexes, called maithuna in Hinduism and Buddhism, refers to the abolition of duality, but need not be symbolic only.  For Lucius Apuleius as for Plato and the poets of courtly love, physical desire and corporeal lovemaking constitute a spiritual discipline that has the potential to lead the soul toward the sublime.  In the Golden Ass the supernal jouissance of sexuality points toward the rituals of a mystery cult, the latest outgrowth of the myriad fertility and earth goddesses who had dominated neolithic religious practice for millennia before the coming of metalworking.  His story is no less uplifting than it is amusing, a precious combination of qualities offering the reader enlightenment and amusement at once.

 

 

A note on translations

There can be no doubt that Lucius Apuleius presents unusual problems to translators.  The combination of Second Sophistic rhetorical display with colloquialisms and out-of-the-way usages makes a considerable challenge.  Some readers will prefer the William Adlington version (1566), the book that Shakespeare knew, which is not as faithful as the modern translations, but possesses a captivating style of its own.  Robert Graves’ (1951) edition is extremely readable and remains the choice of many common readers today.  Sarah Ruden’s version (2011) is probably most accurate with close attention to sound and wordplay.  Though not all her solutions work equally well, hers is the most ambitious rendering.  Other translators include Thomas Taylor (1822), Jack Lindsay (1960) P. G. Walsh (1996), and E. J. Kenny (1998)

 

  

1.  The Satyricon is extant only in fragments.  The History of Apollonius King of Tyre is thought to be a translation from Greek.

2.  Also known as Huiquanbao and Juehouchan, and in translation as The Carnal Prayer Mat or The Before Midnight Scholar, is a 17th-century Chinese erotic novel published under a pseudonym but usually attributed to Li Yu.

3.  V, 22.

4.  The classic treatment is Erich Neumann’s Amor and Psyche.  For a more recent Jungian reading, see  Marie-Louise von Franz, The Golden Ass of Apuleius: The Liberation of the Feminine in Man (2001).

5.   A parallel is suggested by the current popularity of emotional Pentecostal churches among long-time Roman Catholics in Latin America.

Morning Glories on the Make

 

     Why are flowers universally considered beautiful?  Though a functional part of nature, enabling sexual reproduction, flowers are favorite images in poetry and visual art in all parts of the world.  As compared with leaves or stems, they are, of course, showy things, with extravagant forms, colors, and even fragrances all of which are considered attractive.  Surely, for one who suspects that aesthetics derives from functional use, flowers may be significant to people’s survival, though they are rarely eaten, because they are the promise of fruit to come.   As the flowering parts are sexual organs, the plants, it seems, are flaunting their reproductive capacity in the most flamboyant display possible.  Flowers bring the pleasure of a reinforced confidence that nature is percolating with vigor throughout, and that, on the most basic level, dinners need never cease.  Their showy sexuality is the dynamo propelling fertility.  Unsurprisingly, flowers have become part of the imagery and the social practice of romantic love, from “I am the Rose of Sharon” to contemporary St. Valentine’s Day marketing.  In nature the flowers’ reproductive organs communicate with other flowers as well as with birds, insects, and humans.  The faith of the flower in a generation to come is expressed in overdetermination to the point of glory.  

     The birds attracted to this floral display have their own costumes and rituals to celebrate their own affairs.  Such behavior is familiar to everyone who watches nature films.  The inconvenience of the peacock’s magnificent tail is undeniable at all times when the bird is not engaged in courting.  The bowerbirds not only build elaborate structures; they decorate them with shiny or brightly colored objects and perform dance movements to attract females.  Male jumping spiders twist their bodies to display colored or iridescent hairs (the most spectacular is called the peacock spider) while hopping about seductively and singing in distinctive tones.  Some have areas of ultraviolet reflectance which they also flaunt just as some flowers attract bird visitors through similar ultraviolet flashes).  Even the ordinary house fly cavorts before his love object with the hope of soliciting the female’s cooperation.  Egg-laying is the functional goal of the blue-footed boobies’ dance, or the solemn movements of pirouetting sandhill cranes, or Costa’s hummingbirds swooping and diving and then suddenly flashing a startling display of radially symmetrical purple face feathers, yet what the animal does is only secondarily, one might say symbolically, related to reproduction, rather like human fetishes. 

     Nature employs symbols to perpetuate itself, and it infuses those symbols with ostentatious passion by using the brightest colors, the most inventive forms, the most conspicuous cues.  The birds are surely expressing enthusiasm; I suspect the flowers may be as well.     

     Reproduction is the Aristotelean final cause of all this folderol, but the practical seems all but lost in magnificent symbolic clothing.  If the drive to pass on their DNA is what leads animals and plants to express themselves so creatively, one might suspect a similar goal lies at the root of human art.  While it may be undeniable that many artists have successfully pursued sexual variety, it remains unclear whether they developed their skills in order to provide variety in the bedroom. 

     I once witnessed a festival in Ogwa in Edo State, Nigeria in which, accompanied only by percussion of a drum ensemble, individual young men took turns doing acrobatic dances not unlike breakdancing that surely were meant here not only to satisfy the local deities but also to impress the young women of their acquaintance.  Though such an outright connection is rare, to Freud not only art but energy in general originates in the libido.  In a classic essay in 1910 he argued that the work of Leonardo da Vinci was entirely the result of sublimation after he had recoiled in horror from his own sexuality. 

     But can it be called sublimation when so often eros is explicitly invoked in art?  Vast amounts of love poetry have been produced (though in volume it may yet be outweighed by religious poetry).  I once worked in a prison library where a book in high demand, kept safely behind the counter, was called Pearls of Love.  It was a collection of romantic poetry from which the inmates copied warm passages to include in letters to their lovers.  Were the countless sculptures of naked women from the Venus of Willendorf to Jeff Koons’ Woman in Tub created from purely aesthetic motives?  Would Venus look equally beautiful to an alien who reproduces through budding? 

     Most would agree that a hungry person is unduly influenced by circumstance, who quite sincerely, while salivating, thinks that a photograph of a beefsteak the most beautiful thing in the world.  One suspects that the judgement would not survive a good meal.  Yet eros can hardly fail to be present when one person regards a figure of another. 

    Some artists are emphatic.  Van Gogh said, “There is nothing more truly artistic than to love people.” To Klimt “all art is erotic” and those who most appreciate his work might be likely to agree, while Picasso is said to have oracularly declared “sex and art are the same.”  Matisse said in an interview that “Poetry and painting are done in the same way you make love.”  A link between artistic practice and appeal as a lover is encoded in popular art as well including Burgess Meredith’s character in That Uncertain Feeling, Lute the “troubadour” in the comic strip Hägar the Horrible, and the macho posturing of heavy metal guitarists.

    Even if the theme of a poem, painting, dance, or tune has nothing whatever to do with love or sexuality, surely in art where the maker like a god shapes a small universe with a free hand such a fundamental human element of nature must be present.   Just as dreams often take a sexual turn, the fantasies that we have learned to project for each other’ amusement, our art, is inevitably lit with some level of erotic glow.  Every text has a sexual meaning, just as every text might be read psychologically, or metaphysically, or socially, or self-reflectively, yet, for most humans, the sexual interpretation may have a certain primacy, an inside track.  Perhaps among us hominids who like to think of ourselves as “higher,” just as among the birds and the bees and the flowering plants, art is a secondary sexual characteristic.

Holy Nudity

 

I exclude from consideration the lengthy and fascinating history of the use of nudity to intensify protests such as by the Doukhobors and Extinction Rebellion or artworks such as Spencer Tunick’s photographs or Yayoi Kusama’s “Grand Orgy to Awaken the Dead” (performed in the MoMA sculpture garden).  In a more difficult judgement, I also exclude religious manifestations that strike me as cult-like and exploitative, though these almost always involve nudity and sexuality and may be difficult to distinguish from other unconventional spiritual practices.

 

Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy! Holy!

The world is holy! The soul is holy! The skin is holy! The nose is holy! The tongue and cock and hand and asshole holy!

                                            Allen Ginsberg, footnote to Howl

 

 

 

     Who could fail to be charmed by the story of Thomas Butts’ coming to call on William Blake only to discover the poet and his wife naked, reading Paradise Lost aloud?  When the visitor hesitated, the poet called out, “Come in!  It’s only Adam and Eve, you know.” [1]  What makes the anecdote amusing, of course, and what excited “the scandal of wondering neighbors” of the little garden at 13 Hercules Buildings is the conventional assumption that nudity is incongruous with holiness.  

     In an earlier age Blake and his wife might have been accused of heresy as well as indecency since they were identifying with the primal couple before the fall and thus denying original sin.  Once born into self-consciousness Adam and Eve’s very first reaction once they have eaten the fruit is to feel ashamed of their bodies.  “And the eyes of them both were opened, and they knew that they were naked; and they sewed fig leaves together, and made themselves aprons.”  Later God is thoughtful enough to make them garments of skins, presumably more practical for longtime wear.  [2]

     The author of this portion of Genesis was inverting the values of the symbols employed by their ancient Near Eastern neighbors.  The snake and the fruit, which had been regularly associated in Sumerian, Babylonian, Akkadian, Hittite, and Canaanite myth with fertility and the good things of this earth became evil in the story of Adam and Eve, allowing a religious view that, in contrast to religious practices descending from the Neolithic, is fundamentally hostile to the body.  The affirmation implied by Hesiod’s advice to farmers “to sow naked, plow naked, and reap naked” [3] and in this way encourage the fertility of the earth appears only in vestiges in the Hebrew Bible such as, for instance, the snake-topped pole associated with healing and in lyrical love passages, particularly in the Song of Songs.  [4]

       Clearly the primary significance of the story of the Fall is to teach that the body is inherently disgraceful and must be well-covered.  Yet the contrary notion lurks still in the background even here: in paradise one wears no clothes.  The bodily form is in the image of God and must therefore be glorious.  The tension of this contradiction stretches to the present day in such phenomena as the wigs that conceal the hair of ultra-Orthodox Jewish wives and sexual abuse by the Catholic clergy . 

       In general the Abrahamic religions have adopted the negative view represented in the Eden myth in which nudity or dress which reveals the body is considered to be shameful.   Equated with disgrace by prophets and sages, nakedness is associated with oppression and want, the humiliation of military defeat, and ritual uncleanness [5], but surely the primarily motive for body taboos was the concern for sexual purity of women.  The concern for tzniut (basheydnkeyt in Yiddish), for haya or satr in Islam, and modesty in Christianity [6] has resulted in a wide variety of specific dressing codes, all of which traditions place the greatest stress on the sexual purity or faithfulness of women and the discouragement of lust with its inevitable social dangers.

     The condemnation of immodest clothes and promiscuous behavior is complicated in the Hebrew scripture by the fact that the prophets were sometimes condemning acts that were not simply immoral but blasphemous as well since they sometimes referred to the Near Eastern fertility cults which included practices like temple prostitution.   Most prominently in the Canaanite cult of Qetesh which was then adopted in the Egyptian New Kingdom worshippers had sexual contact in the temple with a woman who might be either a dedicated servitor of the deity or a pious layperson fulfilling a once-in-a-lifetime obligation. [7]

     In the early Christian church candidates for baptism presented themselves naked.  The symbolism is clear in St. Cyril’s instructions.  “As soon, then, as ye entered, ye put off your tunic; and this was an image of putting off the old man with his deeds.  Having stripped yourselves, ye were naked; in this also imitating Christ, who was stripped naked on the Cross, and by His nakedness put off from Himself the principalities and powers, and openly triumphed over them on the tree.” [8]

     Blake was far from the first to attempt to recover a prelapsarian innocence through nudity.  In Christianity’s childhood, when orthodoxy was first debated and distinguished from heresy, among the cults most particularly condemned were those associated with the Carpocratian gnostics. [9]  In Augustine and other Christian polemicists one reads of otherwise unknown groups with the most extraordinary beliefs and practices.  A variety of Gnostic groups directly upended Jewish and Christian symbolic values and revered the serpent of Eden as the one who brought knowledge to humanity.  Among them were antinomians like the Nicolaitans who appeared early enough to be attacked in Revelations [10] and, according to Clement of Alexandria, “abandoned themselves to pleasures like goats in a life of shameless self-indulgence.”  If one is to believe Epiphanius, Borborite scripture described Christ’s having sex and used semen and menstrual blood in their eucharist.  Followers of Carpocrates in the second century formed communal groups in which private property was abolished and goods, including women, were held in common.  

    Augustine says of the Adamites as those who practiced nudity were termed, “Naked they gather together, men and women alike; naked they listen to readings; naked they pray; naked they celebrate the sacraments; and that is why they reckon their own church as paradise.”  [11]  A millennium later Europe experienced an efflorescence of neo-Adamite groups which began in the Middle Ages and then briefly flourished on the left wing of the Reformation.   During the fifteenth century a group of Adamites split from the Taborite movement in Bohemia and established a communist nudist colony on an island in the Nežárka.  In 1535 a group of Anabaptists in Amsterdam went naked through the streets prophesying.  They were all executed. 

     In 1641 a pamphlet [12] described an Adamite meeting in the supposed words of a participant who offers to explain their worship to a stranger.  “I will tell you what the brother-hood is, & give you good reason for it.”  Together they proceed to Marylebone Park “where were gathered at least one hundred men and women…[who] instantly stripped themselves to the bare skin, both men and women’ to listen to the Adamite’s sermon.”  The text is Genesis 2:25 “And they were both naked,” and the preacher concludes with the words, “We therefore, my dearely affected, that are voyd of these superstitious coverings, not onely Cloathes, but also Churches, for we prophesie in the open fields as our Father Adam did in the garden of Eden, must needs be in the state of innocence, as he was, for we have not so much as fig-leaves upon us: let us therefore reioyce exceedingly, and expresse our ioy in the lively act of Generation, and propagation of the godly, that may bee borne naked as we are at this present.”

     The same year another anonymous pamphlet noted, among the distressing variety of dissenters “there is sprung up a new sect of Adamists, who take their denomination from our first father Adam, and these with men and women promiscuously mingled have their private meetings, where they will not hear the word preached nor have sacrament administered to them but naked, not so much as fig-leaf breeches upon them, thinking thereby to imitate our first parents in their innocency.” [13]

     A number of seventeenth century Quakers in particular embraced nakedness, including Elizabeth and James Milner who are reported (by their enemies) to have called themselves Adam and Eve.  We know from both Defoe and Pepys of Solomon Eccles’ going about during the 1665 plague without clothing and with a brazier of burning coals on his head.  Poor Eccles was whipped and imprisoned for his brand of piety.  A disapproving contemporary relates how “A Maid-servant at Putney at her Masters house, when he and many friends were at Dinner with him, came into his Parlour amongst them stark-naked, and another day stark-naked from her Masters house through Wandsor and to Lambeth, or neer it, where some Water-men, by force, stop'd her, and carried her back. It was said, she intended to have entred London, over the Bridge, and so to have gone through London streets unto Westminster.”  The author goes on to describe other similar observations, including “a Man-quaker [who] went stark naked through all the Market, and on a Lords day in the same posture entred into the greatest Assembly in that Town, walking unto the further end of the lower cross through many people and then returned.”  [14]   In  America  female Quakers Lydia Wardel and Deborah Wilson followed their British cousins – both were whipped for their action.   Perhaps the last Quaker Adamite was Alexander Jaffray whose diary records his nude stroll through the streets of Aberdeen in 1677.  [15]

     Appearing in recent times, the epigone of this long tradition are the leaders of the modern “naturist” movement in the United States: Ilsley Boone, Henry S. Huntington, and Elton Raymond Shaw, all active Protestants, two of them clergymen.  They were influenced by the health food and exercise regimens of the late nineteenth century and advocated a lifestyle including vegetarianism, sunshine, calisthenics, and abstention from alcohol, tobacco, and coffee, similar to the Germanic nudism that persists strongly to this day under the formidable name of Freikörperkultur. [16]

     Surely all the religious enthusiasts of previous centuries would, like these “naturists,” utterly deny any erotic component to their sight of naked bodies, yet might it not be that the prodigious dynamo of human sexual energy simply kicked their psyches to a higher level from which they were better able to engage the cosmos or the divine?  After all, even prior to the Song of Songs sexual desire has served as the likeliest metaphor for spiritual ecstasy.  This tradition has flourished, recorded in countless texts including the parable of the ten virgins, the poetry of Mechthild and St. John of the Cross, as well as in non-Christian religious poetry including Krishnaite love poetry such as Meera Bai and much Sufi song, Rumi, Hafiz, and many others.

     The most recent widespread association of nudity and holiness is surely the cluster of cultural phenomena associated with the hip youth movement in the sixties.  Allen Ginsberg had begun taking off his clothes at social gatherings a decade earlier, and thousands followed his example in communes, concert venues, parks, “encounter groups,” and meditative sessions.  Even if the effect of such scenes is dimmed by the increased tolerance for revealing clothing and the prevalence of nudity in contemporary films, attempts to recover an Edenic joy through shedding clothes will surely continue, rooted as it is in the prodigious human sexual drive and the resulting customs, restrictions, and taboos.   

     Among non-Christians are a wide variety of naked worshippers even in the present day.  The Digambara or “sky-clad” Jain monks wear nothing at all and sweep the ground before them with a peacock feather broom to avoid treading on small creatures.  The Hindu Shaivite Naga sadhus wear no clothes, though they may wrap themselves at times in a single saffron cloth.  Generally meditating in mountain retreats, they use cannabis (and sometimes martial arts) in their spiritual practice.  Certain Muslim Sufi dervishes such as the Malmatis, likewise eschew clothing in their encampments.  There are also extraordinary individuals such as the eleventh century Sufi poet Baba Taher, called Oryan “the naked” and the remarkable Sarmad Kashani, a 17th century Jewish mystic, originally Jewish, who, while he lived in India, refused to conform to Judaism, Islam, or Hinduism, and was executed for heresy.  

     One might interrogate one’s feelings, standing naked in bedroom or bath or, like Blake, in a breezy garden and inquire the mixture in the mind of purity, integrity, and natural wholeness with shame, self-consciousness, and vulnerability.  If the positive sense of self predominates (as surely it should), one might perhaps begin to imagine the exhilaration of those from earlier centuries for whom the simple experience of shedding clothes reinforced the essential rightness of the body to the extent that they felt themselves absolved of original sin and return thereby to Paradise. 

 

 

 

1.  The story appears in Chapter 12 of Alexander Gilchrist’s Life of Blake.

2.  Genesis 3:7 and 3:21.

3.  Works and Days 390. 

4.  Numbers 21:6-9.  Cf. the rod of Asclepius (often in the U. S. confused with the caduceus).  This snake pole, however, was destroyed by the reformer Hezekiah (2 Kings 18:4).  For love poetry see the Song of Songs passim and, for instance, Proverbs 5:18-19 “Let your fountain be blessed, and rejoice in the wife of your youth, a lovely deer, a graceful doe. Let her breasts fill you at all times with delight; be intoxicated always in her love.”

5.  See, for example, Isaiah 47:1-3, Deuteronomy 28:47-48, and Lamentations 1:8.   For poverty, see Revelation 3:17-18.  On war, see Isaiah 20:2-4.  For the temple taboo, Exodus 20:26.

6.  Key scriptural passages include for Jews Micah 6:8, Proverbs 11:2,and Leviticus 18:6; for Muslims Quran 33:59 and 24:31, and for Christians 1 Timothy 2:9. -

7.  This practice is paralleled in modern times by such phenomena as free love in Noyes’ Oneida Colony in 19th century New York and the custom of Muslims having sex with a stranger as the culminating act of a pilgrimage to Gunung Kemukus in Java.  Many Hebrew-speaking Israelites seem to have participated in the Canaanite rites until the “Deuteronomic reforms” of King Josiah in the seventh century B. C. E.  the prohibition of temple prostitution is recorded in Deuteronomy 23:18, yet the remonstrances of Ezekiel and others they frequently reverted to the practice.  See Ezekiel 23:36-48, II Kings 23:37, 24:9, and 24:19.  In his rage Ezekiel approaches obscenity in 23:20.

8.  St Cyril, Mystagogic Catecheses.

9.  The following accounts are drawn from Augustine (De haeresibus 31), Clement of Alexandria (Stromata II, 20 and III.4), Epiphanius (Panarion, lii), Irenaeus (Ἔλεγχος καὶ ἀνατροπὴ τῆς ψευδωνύμου γνώσεως [called Against Heresies], I.25), and Theodoret (Haereticarum fabularum compendium, I, 6).

10.  2:6, 15. 

11. The Adamites sermon containing their manner of preaching, expounding, and prophesying, as it was delivered in Marie-bone Park.

12.  The Brownists Conventicle: Or an assemble of Brownists, Separatists, and Non-Conformists.

13.  For these and other accounts see Jacques Tual 1997. “Friends on the Fringe: A Further Assessment of Nude Prophesying in Early Quakerism” in Kiyoshi Tsuchiya (ed.), Dissent and Marginality: Studies in Literature and Religion.  I have also made use of Kenneth L. Carroll, “Early Quakers and Going Naked as a Sign,” Quaker History Vol. 67, No. 2.

14. Richard Blome, in his The Fanatick History (1660), p. 112.

15.  James Bowden, The History of the Society of Friends in America, 273.   

16.  One may sunbathe naked in urban German parks and clothesless hikers may enjoy naked trekking (“nacktwandern”) on parkland trails.