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.