Virgin: The Untouched History (23 page)

When the Virgin Mary is the subject, the lines between heaven and earth blur. As much as the Church shaped Mary into a model for women, who have been admonished to follow her example of virginity, submission, and humility ever since the fourth-century Council of Nicaea, rank-and-file believers have also shaped Mary. By writing her stories, painting her picture, and in the process of everyday invocation and prayer, Mary's devotees have created an entity whose personality and virginity are developing to this day. Of the myriad examples of this process—literally hundreds have been documented by historians like Jaroslav Pelikan and Marina Warner—many have, unsurprisingly, revolved around Mary's virginity.

Medieval Christians felt that the majesty of Mary's virginity would be enhanced if, according to the priorities of the feudal age, it were given an illustrious lineage. Medieval stories explained how God prepared the virginity of Mary by singling out not only Mary's parents but even her grandparents with signs and miracles. In one fifteenth-century tale, Anna's mother Esmeria—Mary's maternal grandmother—was said to have joined the Carmelite order only to leave it because the other monastics recognized that she was supposed to be progenitor of the Messiah and was thus intended to marry. She not only married, she did it five times. But each time she married, Satan struck down her new husband in an effort to prevent the Messiah's grandmother from being born. Finally, Esmeria managed to find a man named Stollanus who was made of sturdier stuff than her first four husbands. From this union, Anna was born.

Attempts to give a lineage to Mary's virginity also happened on the institutional level. The doctrine of the immaculate conception—the notion that Mary was without the taint of original sin and thus empty of sinfulness from the moment of her conception—was not officially enshrined as dogma until 1854 when Pope Pius IX proclaimed the bull
Ineffabilis Deus,
but it had its roots in the work of scholastic theologians like twelfth-century Peter Lombard. The history of this particular doctrine is a labyrinthine journey through the niceties of Catholic theology, but the influence of Mary's existence as the only fully human being who could ever claim sinlessness was far reaching.

The Virgin Mary is both a major medieval legacy and a complicated, messy mixed bag. She is a gleaming example, the highest and most revered woman of all, a queen whose queendom, based as it is equally on both virginity and motherhood, lends its regal honor to all women. Countless Christians have drawn strength and comfort from belief in her imperturbable sanctity. The example of her humility, compassion, and submission has been a motivating force in countless acts of grace, charity, and aid. She has inspired great art, music, architecture, and literature. At the same time, the very perfection of her sinlessness and submission can only make everyone else seem that much more sinful and willful by comparison. Because virginity was the outward symbol of Mary's spiritual perfection, the same standard has been applied to all women, with predictable results. Only one woman can possibly maintain Mary's standard perfectly. The rest are forever condemned to judgment.

Finishing School

As vital as the Church was to the Middle Ages and as vital as virginity was to the Church, virginity mattered to medieval culture in secular ways as well. Medically, magically, and of course socially, virginity was at issue in everyday medieval life. The power of virginity reflected in Mary's miracles or saintly legends was an indication of what people believed about virgins. Impervious to sin and all things demonic or satanic, virginity's supernatural properties came from its holiness. Virgin magic was the work not of the devil but of God. A whole realm of more or less magical practices involving virginity, ranging from the innocuous to the evil, existed in medieval Europe.

The use of herbs, both medicinally and magically, was an everyday part of medieval life. Major European herbals deal frequently in virginity and virginity references. In them, for example, one often finds mention of an herb called "virgin's comfort," otherwise known as cicely
(Myrrhis odorata),
a hardy plant native to northwestern Europe and Scandinavia whose leaves and seeds taste of anise. Commonly recommended as a tonic for adolescent girls, it was supposed to ease menstrual discomforts and other "female problems." A different kind of female problem entirely could be alleviated by St. John's wort
(Hypericum
perforatum).
On August 20, St. John's day, virgin girls were supposed to hang sprigs of St. John's wort over their doors and tuck them under their pillows when they went to bed so that St. John would show them visions of their husbands-to-be in their dreams. The herb would additionally protect them from any demons that might attempt to take their virginities in the night. Some herbals also counseled that a virgin who worried about finding a mate should eat a bowlful of St. John's wort as a salad, dressed in oil, to ease her anxiety. Given what is now known about St. John's wort's effectiveness as an antidepressant, this seems like good advice.

Alchemists likewise invoked the mystical properties of virginity to various ends. Sometimes virgins were involved as the source of an ingredient, as in the many alchemical recipes that call for the ashes of a virgin's burnt hair or which incorporate the urine of a virgin boy as a critical ingredient in a chemical reaction (urine was a common source for salts and ammonia in early chemical industries generally speaking). Other times the word "virgin" was applied to a compound that actually had nothing to do with virgins at all, appropriating the mystical power of virginity through naming the compound for it. One example is the frequently utilized "virgin's milk," in reality a solution of benzoin and water. Added to malt and gold powder, it made an ointment used in treating gout. If properly mixed with semen it would also supposedly generate homunculi, and was considered critical to the understanding of the Philosopher's Stone.

The mystical virginal principle also holds an iconic place in the lore of the mythical unicorn, a staple of the medieval imaginary bestiary. A white horselike quadruped with a single pointed spiral horn, the unicorn was a fearsome beast capable of running would-be hunters through with a single toss of its terrible head. England's royal coat of arms featured a lion and a unicorn well before the accession of the Virgin Queen; two unicorns hold the crown in Scotland's. Evasive and fleet of foot, the unicorn was believed to be an unattainable quarry unless one had a virgin handy. Only a virgin's mystical purity could tame the creature's ferocious tendencies, and it would approach her and lay its head in her lap or upon her bosom with perfect gentleness. Legend has it that virgins were used as bait for unicorn traps. Seated in the middle of a circular fenced enclosure, the untouched feminine principle acted as bait for the untouchable masculine principle, the wild and deadly creature whose phallic sword emerges from his head. Trying to use a false virgin would end in either a fruitless hunt or in horror, for the unicorn was supposed to be able to tell, and would drive his horn through the heart of a woman who was only feigning virginity. Somehow, no unicorn was ever captured, though narwhal tusks brought home by sailors sometimes furnished "proof " that some had been in the past. The inability to catch them now could only have to do with a lack of properly virtuous virgins in such a corrupted age, and not, of course, with myth.

Not all magical contexts for virginity were as symbolic or figurative as a vial of virgin's milk or stories of the unicorn hunt. The quality of invulnerability associated with virgins, including their supposed immunity (often repeated in saints' legends) to attacks by the devil and other dark forces, was "borrowed" by using the body parts of virgins in various applications. In accounts of thieves' magic dating from the fourteenth to the nineteenth century, outlaws from Germany east to Russia were said to make magical candles that incorporated the rendered fat of dead virgins. By burning the fat of virgins—whether the virginal bodies in question were to be obtained by violence or merely grave robbery is not mentioned—the thieves would generate a variety of magical effects. Some reports say that these were "soporitic" candles, guaranteed to put everyone who was in the household being robbed to sleep so that the thieves could work undisturbed. Other writers claim that thieves used these candles to render themselves invisible, especially when robbing churches. A related bit of thieves' magic involved using the severed hand of a virgin as a candleholder to produce similar effects, although, not everyone insisted upon a virginal hand as their "hand of glory," since the hands of hanged men were also used in the same way.

Because virginity was indissolubly linked with the body, the bodies of virgins were believed to be indissolubly permeated with the power of their virginity in much the same way as the bodies of saints were believed to be repositories of sanctity. This was even true of virgins' blood, and it is in a wash of virgins' blood that we find the story of what is probably the grisliest verifiable medieval virgin magic: the all-too-literal bloodbaths of the mad Hungarian countess Erzsebet Báthory. Báthory was born in 1560, well over the chronological border into the Renaissance, but her obsession with virgin magic was sufficiently savage, feudal, and arcane as to make a fitting capstone to a list of medieval virgin magics.

The daughter of a powerful aristocrat, Báthory was reputedly a casually cruel person even as a young woman, and particularly vain. At fifteen she was married off to a wellborn professional warrior and installed as the mistress of the castle at Csejthe, an isolated keep in the rural Carpathian mountains in what is now Romanian territory. A bored teenager with a husband who spent the better part of the year off fighting wars, she had a penchant for the occult and the sadistic, and a reasonable sum of money to burn. As the years went on she developed a reputation for entertaining guests who were learned in arcane disciplines like alchemy and, some sources say, sorcery as well. Reports that she had developed a taste for torturing peasants imprisoned for debt surfaced even before her husband died in 1604, but it was only after that date that Báthory's sadism reached its virginal nadir.

In a vain attempt to restore her lost youth and beauty, she latched on to the idea that bathing her skin with the blood of virgins would make her young again. The first victim, or so the legend has it, was Báthory's own chambermaid. Many more followed, hung upside-down from rafters by their ankles just as butchers hang animals for bleeding, before their throats were slit. Báthory bathed in and sometimes drank the blood of her victims, continually desperate for the renewed youth that somehow never arrived. Stories
of
dubious veracity and thoroughly rococo detail—a golden goblet from which Báthory was supposed to have drunk blood, the silver talons she used as a torture device, her opulent bathtubs for blood bathing, and quite a bit more besides—have accompanied her legend. Supposedly they also fill the pages of her notoriously inaccessible diaries, which are the property of the Hungarian government and are reputed to be stored in state archives in Budapest.

The countess, with a small handful of accomplices, supposedly killed six hundred virgins by the time they were caught and brought to justice in 1611. Before that, however, they operated without interference. Initially preying on the region's female peasants, they later set themselves up as a (fatally literal) finishing school for the daughters of the aristocracy as a means of luring in new victims. The finishing school approach brought them under investigation, and soon the matter was taken to regional authorities.

Following two Royal tribunals, two of Báthory's female accomplices were burned at the stake and her male accomplice was beheaded. Báthory herself, by reason of her aristocracy (and perhaps due to the fact that her cousin Stefan had become king of Poland), was instead sentenced to house arrest. She died in custody aged fifty-four, looking every minute of it.

The Lord's First Night

Báthory's example was both ghastly and unique, but it was by no means unheard of for a noble to have an interest in the virginity of those he or she ruled. This was never a matter of the nobility attempting to impose a code of morality upon the peasantry. There was an entire Church for that. Aristocratic concern for the virginity of peasants was economic. The people who lived on and worked a noble's land were an economic resource whose productivity was of vital concern. Part of that productivity involved their own reproduction: sex, marriages, and the resultant babies who would form the next generation of workers all came into the purview of the noble who managed a given territory.

For this reason, the nobility in many regions developed systems of imposing fines or taxes on sexual activity that put the economic interests of the lord at risk. Canon (church) law and the institution of confession and penance existed to punish lapses in morality. Secular punishments, such as the type of fine known in middle Welsh as
amobr
and in middle English as
leyrwite,
on the other hand, were leveled against serfs who had disobeyed sexual rules concerning things like premarital and extramarital liaisons. In addition to fines imposed on sexual miscreants, taxes were also levied on marriages, especially those that involved a marriage between serfs of two different landowners. Like other feudal laws, these were rarely implemented uniformly, and while some nobles were more than fair about them, others used them abusively.

It is here, at the intersection of marriage, sexuality, and the economic exploitation of peasants by the nobility, that we find the roots of one of the most enduring virgin-related myths of Western history, the myth of the
jus primae
noctis,
or "right of the first night," also referred to as the
droit du seigneur
(right of the lord) and sometimes as the
droit du cuissage
(right of the leg) or
the jus
cunni
(the right of the cunt). The myth of the
jus primae noctis
holds that it was the automatic right and privilege of a feudal lord to take the virginity of any woman living in his domain, and specifically to deflower virgin brides. As described, it is the ultimate in symbolic theft, and a violation not only of secular law but church law as well. One would be hard-pressed to come up with a single act that could more effectively give an impression of a corrupt, exploitive, cruel, and callously selfish nobility. Perhaps that's why people had to invent the
jus primae noctis.