A Brief History of Nakedness

Philip Carr-Gomm

• Publisher: Reaktion Books
• Year: 2012
• ISBN:
  9781861897299
• Topic: Histoire
• Subtopic: Histoire du monde

As one common story goes, Adam and Eve, the first man and woman, had no idea that there was any shame in their lack of clothes; they were perfectly confident in their birthday suits among the animals of the Garden of Eden. All was well until that day when they ate from the Tree of Knowledge of Good and Evil and went scrambling for fig leaves to cover their bodies. Since then, lucrative businesses have arisen to provide many stylish ways to cover our nakedness, for the naked human body now evokes powerful and often contradictory ideas—it thrills and revolts us, signifies innocence and sexual experience, and often marks the difference between nature and society. In A Brief History of Nakedness psychologist Philip Carr-Gomm traces our inescapable preoccupation with nudity.

Rather than studying the history of the nude in art or detailing the ways in which the naked body has been denigrated in the media, A Brief History of Nakedness reveals the ways in which religious teachers, politicians, protesters, and cultural icons have used nudity to enlighten or empower themselves as well as entertain us. Among his many examples, Carr-Gomm discusses how advertisers and the media employ images of bare skin—or even simply the word "naked"—to garner our attention, how mystics have used nudity to get closer to God, and how political protesters have discovered that baring all is one of the most effective ways to gain publicity for their cause. Carr-Gomm investigates how this use of something as natural as nakedness actually gets under our skin and evokes complicated and complex emotional responses.

From the naked sages of India to modern-day witches and Christian nudists, from Lady Godiva to Lady Gaga, A Brief History of Nakedness surveys the touching, sometimes tragic and often bizarre story of our relationships with our naked bodies.

1

Clothed with the Sky

Whenever ye have need of anything, once in the month,
and better it be when the moon is full,
then ye shall assemble
in some secret place
and adore the spirit of Me
who am Queen of all Witcheries . . .
And as the sign that ye are truly free,
Ye shall be naked in your rites, both men
And women and ye shall dance, sing, feast,
make music, and love, all in my praise.
—The Charge of the Goddess

On Lammas night, 1 August 1940, thirteen members of a witches’ coven gathered in a clearing near the Rufus Stone in the New Forest, where some say King William II was offered as a pagan sacrifice in the eleventh century. Although it was the summer it was cold that night. They undressed quickly and began to rub goose fat on their bodies to protect themselves from the elements. One elderly man, however, refused the fat and instead offered to be the one whose life would be given to save many lives.

As one coven member lit a small bonfire, another charged a censer with glowing charcoal and grains of frankincense. They all then gathered in a circle around the fire to begin their rite. The High Priest cast a circle with his athame, a small dagger. The High Priestess traced pentagrams in the air and summoned the spirits of the four winds. And then the entire circle of witches began to spin. Round and round the fire they danced and ran, chanting ‘Eko Eko Azarak! Eko Eko Zomelak!’

The dancing became faster and faster, the chanting became louder and louder, until suddenly two members let go of each other’s hands, and moved in opposite directions so that the circle broke and turned into a line of naked bodies that repeatedly ran at the fire as they shouted: ‘You cannot cross the sea! You cannot cross the sea! You cannot come! You cannot come!’ Over and over they ran to the flames and shouted, until one by one they fell exhausted by the fire.

As they lay panting on the ground they visualized the force of their imprecations travelling across the Channel and straight into the mind of one man: Adolf Hitler. Several weeks earlier they had learnt of the threat that he might invade with his armies. Churchill had warned that ‘all we have known and cared for’ could ‘sink into the abyss of a new dark age made more sinister . . . by the lights of a perverted science’. There and then the coven had decided that they would do everything in their power to stop even the thought of an invasion, and for three consecutive nights they performed that ceremony beneath the stars, in the forest beside the sea.

When the old man died a few weeks later in the local hospital from pneumonia, the rumour soon began to circulate that he had been sacrificed in a witchcraft ritual. Whether this was true, whether the whole story was true, we shall never know. Cecil Williamson, an MI6 officer, claimed that a ceremony did indeed take place to repel Hitler, but that he had helped to organize it as part of the ‘secret war’ being conducted against a Nazi regime known to believe in the power of the occult. Forty Canadian soldiers, wearing army blankets embroidered with magical symbols, had been instructed to perform a fake ceremony in a clearing in the Ashdown Forest in Sussex that centred on the ritual destruction of a dummy of Adolf Hitler. An account of this was then deliberately ‘leaked’ to Germany.

Williamson claimed his story had been taken and distorted by his erstwhile friend and colleague Gerald Gardner, a retired customs officer who had spent most of his life in the Far East, but had returned to Britain in 1938 and had begun popularizing a religion that he believed was practised long before Christianity reached its shores: witchcraft.

Ever since the witch trials of the fifteenth and sixteenth centuries and the popularization of images of nude witches during that era by Dürer and other, mainly German, artists, witchcraft has been associated with nudity. The majority of people, if asked about the relationship of nakedness to religion and magic, might well cite witchcraft as the only example of a practice in which worship and nudity have been combined. After all, religions are concerned with achieving moral purity, and encourage modesty and even a rejection of the pleasures of the body, or at least too much attachment to them. In the Judaic and Christian traditions nudity has always been shunned, since the Old Testament states that when Adam and Eve became aware of their nakedness they were filled with shame. It was surely only the witches, in their perverted ‘black magic’ rites, who dared shamelessly to expose their bodies while worshipping?

Contrary to these popular misconceptions, it is not only witches who worship in the nude: certain Christians, Hindus, Jains and modern pagans and druids also follow this practice. Judaism and Christianity in particular have a complex and ambivalent relationship to the naked body. The story of the relationship between nudity and religion is ancient and fascinating, and touches upon the very deepest philosophical and spiritual issues that concern what it means to be embodied and alive.

My Lord . . .
Here I be stripped of all finery
No clothes, lover or home have I
Excepting by thy Grace
Master, I have descended the Paths towards
Thy gates . . .
Leaving all but my truthful spirit behind me.
Here am I naked as the sea, as the sky,
As grave winter itself.
I pray Thee take pity on me and listen unto my prayer.
—Robert Cochrane (1931–1966), who inspired several modern
versions of Witchcraft¹

Today, witchcraft, and its most popular variety Wicca, is considered one of the fastest-growing religions in the West. In the USA it probably claims over 400,000 followers, in the UK 100,000.² While many carry out their ceremonies in robes, many worship naked, and they carry out rites which were in all likelihood created in the mid-twentieth century from a variety of sources which reach far back into the past. The master-mind behind the phenomenal success of Witchcraft as an alternative religion in the modern era was Gerald Gardner who, along with Cecil Williamson, helped to run a Witchcraft Museum on the Isle of Man in the 1950s.

The fact that one man was so successful in promoting a religion that could be practised in the nude is in itself remarkable, and some have made the mistake of thinking that it was Gardner who introduced nudism into ‘the craft’, as it is known, since he was a committed naturist. A lifelong asthmatic, when Gardner retired to England his doctor recommended naturism to strengthen his health and alleviate his symptoms. Gardner took to naturism like a duck to water, and by 1946 he had bought a half share in a nudist resort in Hertfordshire.³

Although having a naturist as a promoter of a religion that advocates worship in the nude was clearly fortunate, Gardner did not simply invent the idea. Witches had been depicted in the nude from the sixteenth century, but in doing this, the artists had almost certainly fallen under the spell of the Witch Craze which spread through Europe in those years, and which has now been found to have its origin in the depravity, not of any so-called witches, but in the minds and hearts of those inquisitors and witch-hunters who tortured and killed so many innocent women and men. As Ronald Hutton in ‘A Modest Look at Ritual Nudity’ writes: ‘The question of whether early modern witches actually worked naked is rendered a non sequitur by the total absence of evidence for any actual witch religion in the period; the satanic cult of the demonologists does seem to have been a complete fantasy.’⁴ The pictures of naked witches were undoubtedly based on that fantasy, and in addition happened to be one of the few ways in which German artists of that age were permitted to depict the female nude.⁵

Although it now seems that there was no such thing as a witch religion in Europe as an organized form of worship that had survived the onslaught of Christianity, by the nineteenth century folklorists and anthropologists had begun to uncover customs and practices that were undeniably magical in intent, many of which probably represented archaic remnants of pre-Christian religious activity.

Apart from the writing of modern authors, such as Gardner, and the testimony of women extracted under torture during the Witch Hunts,⁶ which must necessarily be discounted, the only recorded mention of witches worshipping naked comes from the work of an American folklorist, Charles Godfrey Leland. In 1899 he published Aradia, Gospel of the Witches, which recounted the alleged practices of witches who lived in the Elsa Valley of Tuscany, and who traced the origins of their faith to pagan antiquity. Aradia was the daughter of the goddess Diana and her brother Lucifer, who had been sent to earth to teach witchcraft and poisoning to those of the peasantry who had retreated to the mountains to live their lives as bandits rather than submit to their feudal masters. In stirring instructions, which now stand at the heart of modern Wiccan liturgy, witches are told to meet naked under the full moon: ‘And ye shall be free from slavery, and as a sign that ye be really free, ye shall be naked in your rites, both men and women, and ye shall dance, sing, feast, make music, and love, all in my praise.’

Despite many attempts at embellishment and improvement, including those by the infamous magician Aleister Crowley and Gerald Gardner and his High Priestess Doreen Valiente, the instruction to worship naked has been retained in the various texts known as ‘The Charge of the Goddess’, recited regularly by many thousands of witches all over the world.

No-one knows if Leland’s work represents a genuine tradition that existed in Italy. The material for the book was supplied to him by his ‘witch-informant’ Maddalena, and some believe she, or others, simply concocted it. Leland was considered an ‘unusually unreliable scholar’⁷ and until the large collection of his papers is thoroughly researched, we shall never know whether Italian witches did indeed meet naked under a full moon to dance, sing and make love in praise of their Goddess. What we do know, however, is that the association of nudity with witchcraft and folk magic can be found all over the world, which makes it certainly possible that naked worship did occur in Italy.

Although witches today almost universally consider themselves workers of benevolent magic, the term ‘witch’ and its equivalents have been used in most times and places to designate people who are believed to be practising harmful magic, usually to blight crops, animals or people. In Africa, for example, the ‘evil witches’ of the Vugusu and Logoli of western Kenya, known as omulogi, are said to travel around in the nude at night, as are the witches of the Lovedu of the northern Transvaal, and of the Amba of Uganda. In the Middle East, Arab peoples believed that witches haunted cemeteries and flew around at night, naked and riding on sticks, and in central India they rode on fierce beasts like tigers and crocodiles. In New Guinea the Trobriand islanders believed witches flew naked through the skies to bring death to their enemies. The shamans of the Chukchi people of Siberia, when they wished to practice harmful magic, shunned their usual, often heavy, ritual garb and were said to utter their curses naked under the light of the moon. In North America, the Navaho believed that those who practised evil magic sat in circles together wearing nothing but masks and ornaments.

As Ronald Hutton points out in ‘A Modest Look at Ritual Nudity’, amongst the ‘African peoples who ascribed nudity to the witch-figure, it was only part of a package of role-reversals’, which included moving about outdoors at night amongst people who traditionally feared darkness, and riding on unclean or untameable beasts. This analysis can be extended to the other cultures that portrayed evil witches in a similar way. The message conveyed by their depiction of role reversals is clear: people who work evil are not like us: they are the exact opposite of us.

Did any of these reversed figures actually exist, or were they products of superstition and fantasy, as most of the witches imagined by the European witch-hunters seemed to have been? We cannot be sure, but although we may never know whether the kinds of evil magic described were ever practised in the nude, we can be certain that other kinds of magic were, since nakedness was a feature of classical paganism, medieval kabbalistic magic and worldwide folk customs, all of which have informed the modern religion now known as Witchcraft.

Nakedness in Initiation

Those who would rise through the degrees of the holy mysteries
must cast aside their clothes and go forward naked.⁸
—Plotinus

Gerald Gardner travelled to Pompeii in 1951, and visited the famous ‘House of the Mysteries’ that contains a series of frescoes that seem to depict the initiation of a woman into a mystery school. It may even have suggested the idea to him of the ritual scourging that was introduced into the Wiccan initiatory rite, since the frescoes depict a tall bare-breasted angel raising a cane as if about to strike the buttocks of a semi-naked woman, whilst another, completely unclad, appears to celebrate the event by sounding cymbals.

A little north of Pompeii, in the Mithraeum at Capua, another set of frescoes depicts the initiation of a man into the cult of Mithras. In each scene the postulant is naked and blindfolded, guided by a clothed figure who appears to be his initiator.

The classic pattern for initiation, found the world over, involves an enactment of the process of separation from the habitual and everyday, followed by some kind of ordeal. The rite ends in a symbolic rebirth as the initiate, having survived the testing, is welcomed into the community of fellow initiates. Written accounts of Mithraic initiations suggest a host of fierce ordeals that the candidate was required to endure, including branding and immersion in water for extended periods. The frescoes, however, only suggest the brutality of this aspect of the initiation in the way the man is being handled, but no further details are provided.

As foreign as such rites may seem, their essential structure is utilized to this day in organizations that began to be popular in the early eighteenth century, and which by the end of the nineteenth century counted many millions of men in their ranks – up to a fifth of the total adult male population of the United States and a similar figure for those in Britain.⁹ In an uncanny echo of the Mithraic rite of initiation, those who enter Freemasonry, or many of the trade and fraternal associations who have borrowed the Masonic form of initiation, are obliged to symbolically undress by baring their breast, having one foot bare, or by rolling up one trouser leg, and are led blindfold into the ceremony. They are then faced with an ordeal, which in the traditional form of Masonic initiation involves being challenged at the point of a sword that touches the chest, and to then endure being led around the room by a cable-tow, a noose around the neck.

Once one learns that Gardner was initiated into Freemasonry, it comes as no surprise to discover that the Wiccan initiation rite also includes being led blindfold by a cable-tow and being challenged at the point of a sword. The difference is simply, but powerfully, that in Wicca it is not just one’s trousers and shirt that are rearranged. They are taken off and one enters the magic circle naked. Gardner may have got the details from Freemasonry, but the Pompeii and Capua frescoes suggest that the idea of initiations that included ordeals endured naked are of ancient provenance.¹⁰

Gardner the naturist seems to have taken another idea from the Freemasons too, and in a stroke of genius, laced perhaps with a sense of mischief, transformed a rather clumsy act into a ritual gesture that unites the spiritual and the erotic, the reverential and the sensual, in the most profound way. In Masonry a secret word is passed from brother to brother in an embrace known as the ‘Five Points of Fellowship’ – a kind of geometrical hug in which the heels, knees and hands of the initiator and candidate are connected in imitation of the operation of a compass point and square. In Wiccan ceremonies the initiator dispenses with any attempt to be a human compass, and instead administers the ‘Fivefold Kiss’ to the candidate on the feet, knees, just above the genitals, and on the breasts and mouth.

The Kabbalah and Folk Magic

Freemasonry and classical paganism, however, were not the only sources of inspiration for the use of nudity in modern witchcraft. Much of Wiccan ceremony is derived from a work of medieval magic entitled the Key of Solomon, which appeared in the fifteenth century and which drew upon the inspiration of the Jewish Talmud and Kabbalah. Amidst its pious instructions can be found occult procedures that involve summoning spirits of the dead and sacrificing animals to detect thieves, find treasure, procure love and curse enemies. The following excerpt reveal...