#history of christian

[afatlotofchance]

7 deadly sins: All about gluttony (2)

WARNING: I get quite darker with this post. Mentions of murder, rape, incest, and eating disorders await! Those who have a slob kink or a corruption kink will certainly be pleased

III) Some context and consequences, to better explain gluttony

We talked about what gluttony was in essence, we talked about the most commonly shared classification of gluttony and its implications, but there is still a lot to add to fully understand and comprehend gluttony as it was conceived and perceived for centuries and centuries. So here is a little selection of various points:

1) The sin of gluttony was a criticism of Roman society. If you do not know, before the Roman Empire became the first Christian Empire and helped spread the religion throughout Europe and Northern Africa, the Romans were the biggest persecutors of Christians, and they were perceived by the early Church as their number 1 enemy. Heck, it is thanks to the Romans that Jesus got crucified! And so, the early list of the seven deadly sins (which were eight before) was designed to actually criticize and condemn the Roman lifestyle and morals. Gluttony is the most obvious of these attacks, because the Christians were actually demonizing the Romans’ habit of lavish feast and banquets, regularly held in upper classes and as a typical social entertainment – the famous “orgies” we know today. The Romans had cultivated a true aesthetic of the excess, and this was what the original Roman orgy was about – to have the best party of all times, you need to eat a lot, and drink a lot, and have sex a lot. The Christians were especially shocked by one habit of the Romans, something that heavily influenced the “overeating” part of gluttony: the vomitorium. To keep having their orgies, the Romans invented this small room or area in mansions, where the guests of feasts and banquets, feelings too stuffed or too full, went to make themselves vomit, all so they could return to the table and keep eating with an empty stomach!

Small historical edit: I checked back and the “vomitorium” is actually a legend propagated by Christians themselves. Don’t get me wrong – Romans did purge themselves and forced themselves to vomit during their orgies and banquets so they could eat and drink more, this is historically attested. But the “vomitorium” wasn’t a room in the house dedicated to vomiting, unlike what the Christian historians said – in truth it was just an entryway of the house, metaphorically “vomiting” the guests in the main room.

2) Speaking of orgies, Christianity strongly believed that Gluttony and Lust were two deadly sins that went together hand in hand. For Christian thinkers, gluttony always led to lust – again the influence of the Roman orgies, that started as sickening banquets and often turned into sex parties, is felt. Christians classified both gluttony and lust into the “material” sins like greed, as opposed to spiritual ones like anger, pride or envy. But they sub-classified these two as the “sins of the flesh” since both were tied to the body. Even more, theologians and moralist had clearly noticed how these sins “seated” in parts next to each other: gluttony’s stomach and belly area being located right above the genitalia, the “underbelly”, the realm of lust. So it was thought that gluttony always led to lust – and remember when I said the Church had a thing against sauces and spices? Well they truly believed sauces and spices were one of the reasons gluttony turned into lust, since they were convinced (based on the aphrodisiac property of some spices) that sauces and spices were by nature designed to excite and inflame the sexual senses and desires.

3) Tying back into the previous topics: gluttony being related to the Roman orgies, gluttony being thought to lead to lustful and lecherous behavior, gluttony making a man into a beast walking on all fours and rolling under the table… This was being gluttony wasn’t just about food – it was also about alcohol! Drunkards were a type of gluttony sinners, and the excess of alcohol was just as condemned as the excess of food. In fact, it is quite interesting to see how gluttony “evolved” depending on which social class you wanted to mock or criticize: when you did a caricature of the glutton as a rich lord, wealthy merchant or fancy bourgeois, it was all about food (especially since the rich were accused of taking away the food of the poor and the needy below them), but when the peasant, the villager, the low-class man was accused of gluttony, it was him being a drunk – since they were too poor to have lavish feasts, and everybody knows the age-old stereotype of the lower class alcoholic.

4) Gluttony was thought to make you stupid. I talked before of the various “endings” of the “gluttony game”, ranging from bestial behavior to lustfulness. But one recurring belief was that gluttony actually destroyed or remove a person’s intelligence, and made them idiots. Saint Thomas of Aquinas (him again) listed the “five flaws” born out of gluttony as: witless joy, buffoonery, impurity, jabbering, and stupidity of mind.  Beyond impurity, all these flaws were basically different ways to say: being a glutton will make you idiotic. Sure, eating and drinking will make you joyful and merry – but it will be the superficial joyful stupor of being full and drunk, not the true, deep, philosophical happiness of living and existing that Christianity keeps searching for. By spending your time eating and drinking, you remove time from more intellectual activities such as reading or studying. Only concerned with satisfying yourself through your body functions and through culinary pleasures, not developing any social existence or craft whatsoever, living in a superficial, temporary and instant happiness that is not true or lasting (since it stops by the next hunger pang), you slowly lose your wit, your caution, your prudence, you stop concerning yourself with higher subjects or topics, you get accustom to acting silly or stupidly due to the weight of all this food on your body and mind, or due to the drunkenness becoming your by-default state of being, and basically for the Christian theologian you become a brainless, smiling blob. A “cow-like stupor” to take back the words of a fellow kink writer. Eating too much and drinking too much makes your thoughts rusty, your movements clumsy, removes reasonable boundaries and cautions (think of the drunk who starts talking about things he shouldn’t talk or spill secrets he shouldn’t spill), and encourages a form of pure disorder – the “buffoonery”, where nobody waits for anything, nobody cares for anything, and everybody just act like drunk clowns and fools in a big sloppy feast.

A sloppy and dirty feast – because as I said, “impurity” is also there. And impurity is here to understand in the sense of “dirtying” and “soiling”. Thomas of Aquinas raises up the topic of making oneself vomit – either unconsciously, just as the result of eating or drinking too much, either purposefully, to have more room to eat afterward. For him this is the ultimate symbol of gluttony, as the glutton literally soils himself to be able to eat even more, abandoning his health and dignity in the process (as you can see, the early Church was actually an anti-bulimia militant). But more generally, it was all related to the “bestiality” of gluttony and gluttony as a “sin of the flesh” – theologians and moralists disliked gluttony because it reduced the human to a mere body, to a mere set of organ, to a digestive track. The glutton, by spending his time drinking and eating, turned himself into a poop-and-piss machine, because all this food had to come out one way or another. It reduced the man to the bodily functions of ingesting and expelling, and it multiplied all the dirty substances a body can produce: urine, feces, saliva… I hear all those who have a “slob” kink screaming in joy in the background, but yes, this was the horrible picture of gluttony for these moralists. I think the video game “Dante’s Inferno” translated this Christian vision of gluttony perfectly well, taking back the idea that this sin turned a human being into a walking digestive system to decorate the level of Hell of gluttony: their idea of the third circle of Hell was a gigantic stomach filled with gastric acid, hungry maws gnawing, tapeworms vomiting everywhere, puddles of feces and even anuses constantly expelling nauseous gazes and fiery farts…

5) While gluttony is a strong criticism of the Roman culture, its roots are to be found in the philosophies and morals of Ancient Greece, more specifically in the system of vices and virtues codified by Greek philosophers such as Plato, Socrates and Aristotle.  Aristotle had a system of virtues and vices in three parts: for each domain of the human existence (honor, social conduct, shame, fear) Aristotle considered that there were two vices corresponding to the two extremes of this domain (too much or too little), and one virtue that was the just middle. He considered what Christians called lust and gluttony to be part of the same field of action: the one of “pleasure”, where the first of the two vice was an excess of pleasure – licentiousness, and pure, undiluted self-interest. A selfish debauchery where you are only concerned with your earthly pleasures, such as eating, drinking, having sex… Its twin vice being a lack of pleasure, what is often translated as “indifference” or “insensibility”, a complete rejection and ignorance of the things that physically make life enjoyable and nice. The virtue, right in the middle of the twin vices, was temperance. [And it is very interesting because, as we will see in the next part, the Church itself while fighting licentiousness was often guilty of the vice of insensibility, at least by Ancient Greek ethics). Plato also had some things to say about gluttony: more precisely he explained that eating and drinking in itself was fine. Plato held in his belief that when a man ate a good meal, and drank some wine, it made him more sociable and more thoughtful – as in, it encouraged conversation, it encouraged sharing, discussing and debating, it allowed the thought to be sharper as you lost some of your shyness or inhibitions that wouldn’t have allowed you to say the truth or interesting things… But Plato also pointed out that when a man ate too much, and drank too much, this was where everything was spoiled – when a man made himself heavy, nauseous and drunk, his speech became disorganized and incoherent, his thoughts blurry and foggy, and all he did was fall under the table and roll there like a mindless beast. A bit of food and wine sharpens the wit ; too much food and wine blunts the mind.

6) Gluttony might be the worst of all the sins! At least according to some theologians. You see, there is an Original Sin in the Christian religion, the sin that introduced evil into the world and that doomed humanity: Adam and Eve eating the forbidden fruit in the Garden of Eden. And there is a VERY big debate in the Christian religion as to what exactly is the nature of this original sin. For some it is the sin of pride (which is classified as the king and roots of all other sins), for others the original sin was rather disobedience – but there is a firm position and a large group of theologians that rather claimed the Original Sin was the sin of gluttony, since it was about eating a fruit… This interpretation did not really stick, but it exists, and so if you ever want to include gluttony as a theme in whatever fiction you want to write, you can imagine it as the original sin that doomed humanity if you wish it so, or at the first and oldest of the seven deadly sins!

In fact, there is an English legend that does depict gluttony (in its drunkenness form) as one of the worst sins of all: it is an obscure medieval legend surrounding the figure of saint John of Beverley. According to this tale, before John was a saint, when he was still a regular man, he met the devil and the devil forced him to choose between three sins he offered him: drunkenness, rape and murder. John thought he could trick the devil and so instead of becoming a rapist or a murderer, he chose to be a drunkard, thinking it would be the lesser of the sins. But he didn’t know that gluttony always led to lust and rage… He ended up in such a drunk stupor and such a drunk state that one day, when returning to his bedroom, he entered the wrong room, and found in what he thought to be his bed a woman asleep… Overtaken by lust, John forced himself upon the woman, and when another man entered the room to stop him, John killed him in a drunken rage. Only once the fumes of alcohol had dissipated did he realize he had raped his mother and killed his father… There is a less Oedipian variation of this legend, where the victim of both John’s rape and murder is actually his own sister – but the message is the same. Gluttony might look like a lesser sin, but it always leads to darker and more dire consequences.

 IV) Gluttony, through religion and society

As I said above, gluttony is a very social sin – and so to fully understand it, we must understand how it impacted or was influenced by the way Christianity lived and existed, and the way medieval society organized itself. Because back in those days, religion and society made one.

1) Medieval Christian society was suffering from a massive eating disorder. This tongue-in-cheek affirmation actually reflects something very true: the way the medieval European society had organized itself, based on the religious principles of Christianity (Catholicism to be precise), created a cycle of under-eating and over-eating which, in light of the theologians’ view of gluttony, allows one to understand the particular relationship these people had towards food.

The Christian year had two big forty-days period during it, that were fasting periods, where all the Christians had to abandon meat, eggs and other rich products, limit their food intake, reduce their meals, and live a very dry and hungry life. The most famous of those two periods, because it is still practiced today, is of course Lent, which is still known as the “grim and sad part of the Christian year”, and the other is, quite surprisingly, the Advent. Today we think of the Advent calendar with its chocolates, but in older times, the Advent was just a wintery Lent. Officially, these forty-days of fasting existed to commemorate the sacrifice and suffering of Christ and affiliated characters, and to prepare the Christians for the big religious holidays that came afterward (Christmas for the Advent, the Holy Week/Easter for Lent) – but historians and sociologist know today that unofficially, these two-fasting corresponded to the most infertile and hungrier part of the year, where food was very scarce and famines were most likely to explode. So it was actually kind of a religious excuse for the lack of food due to the poor climate and bad harvests.

But in return, each of these fasting periods was cornered by celebrations of overeating, where everybody stuffed their face as much as they could – people stuffed their gut before undergoing the fasting because they knew it was their last time eating good things, and then people busted their bellies once the restrictions were over to celebrate the return to “normal”. The Church of course heavily criticized and complained about these explosions of gluttony, but they realized it was kind of needed for people to swallow the pills of Lent and Advent. As a result, we had the apparition of Mardi Gras, “Fat Tuesday”, the last day of eating meat and fat before Lent, where people guzzled down as much meat and butter and fried stuff as they could, while Easter at the end of Lent was all about a large meal with multiple course, beautiful roasts, and lots of eggs and chocolate. Similarly, the fasting of the Advent was part of why Christmas became a jolly and merry feast where people stuffed themselves as much as the animals they ate, and got severely drunk. As for the last of the “four corners”, it would be Saint Martin’s Day, a Christian feast day that fell in the days preceding the beginning of the Advent and which was known as “The Day of the Pig”, since each farm and household had a pig they had fattened up throughout the year, and on Martin’s Day it was time to kill the pig and turn him into all sorts of meats and delicatessen – a killing that was celebrated by enormous banquets and large meals of ribs, sausages, and other forms of pig meat. So, to summarize it all, the Christian medieval society kept oscillating between belly-bursting festivals and monthly strict diets, switching very brutally between gluttony and hunger.

2) Beyond these big events of the calendar, the regular Christian medieval life was very… problematic when it came to food, and encouraged some strange behaviors.

Many people think that of the three Religions of the Book, Christianity is the easiest when it comes to food, due to lacking the strict alimentary restrictions of Judaism and Islam. But it wasn’t always like that, and Christianity used to be very big on limiting and forbidding food. As you might or might not know, since Christianity demonized gluttony and made of temperance a virtue, for it the practice of fasting was a good and holy thing. Before great religious rituals or important holidays, people underwent some fasting to purify themselves. You were forbidden to eat or drink before mass, so that the ritual wouldn’t be “soiled”. Priests and monks and men of the Church limited their food intake, regularized their meals and did frequent fasting to keep their mind clear and their thoughts sharp. Fasting was also a common penance after confessing a sin – it was a way to clean one’s soul for whatever petty or venial evil you committed. This was tied to specific religious bans on certain foods – you might have heard of how up until a very recent day, Christians did not eat meat on Fridays, rather going for fish due to religious reasons. The ban of meat on Fridays was a very big thing in medieval societies, so much that there were big religious debates about what kind of animal you could and could not eat in Fridays (for example, powerful lords managed to tweak the religious rule by convincing churchmen to claim that swans were not actually true birds, and rather counted as fishes due to living in the water – so that Christians could still eat some meat on Friday). During the Renaissance, as cooking became an art and chefs were recognized as artists, a new trick developed itself: the disguising and sculpting of food. For example, some chefs cooked and reshaped fishes into the shape of a ham or a roast, so that nobles and aristocrats could still have the illusion of eating meat on Fridays.

I know, I know – all these peculiar food obsessions and picky eating are literally the kind of gluttony I described at the very beginning of my last post, the people who are obsessed with limiting their quantities and measuring their portions… It was! But in the Middle Ages it was thought to be a good and virtuous behavior, and we had to wait for our modern times for people to realize that maybe it was just as obsessive and unhealthy as the overeating gluttony. And this unhealthiness notably showed up in the Church itself…

3) You see, originally monks and priests, in the early Church, were really, REALLY hating gluttony’s guts. Being a man of the Church was basically starving yourself constantly.

The first monk who created the list of the seven deadly sins, Evagrius Ponticus, was part of a community that lived in the desert, far away from fields, farms or cities, isolating themselves in a dry and arid land purposefully to find God. This reduced them to a very poor and lacking life – and Evagrius based his original list of vices based on the flaws he noticed among his fellow desert-monks. Gluttony was then a big problem because these communities purposefully secluded themselves in a life with limited rations of food, and so whenever one monk hogged it all to himself, he condemned the others to starve.

For a very long time, the Church was so intensely decided to fight off gluttony they want to the extreme of declaring that merely enjoying food was bad! Yep, they were convinced that (just like with sex) if you felt the slightest pleasure or joy when eating, you were a sinner doomed to hell. Eating (again, just like sex) was supposed to be a body function like breathing, and thus not supposed to be enjoyed. Eating was supposed to be merely to survive, it wasn’t supposed to be a game, an entertainment or a passion. For these fanatics, the pleasure of eating was in itself a sin of gluttony, and food had to be swallowed, not tasted, eaten but not enjoyed. Saint Augustin for example (yet another big authority on the deadly sins) held this belief, that finding pleasure in food was an insult or offense to God since (in his very warped view), one should only find pleasure in God and nothing else.

This resulted in extremely strict table etiquette in monasteries – for example in some places you were ordered to chew your food a given amount of time before swallowing it to avoid yourself becoming too “fancy” when eating. In many orders you only had two meals a day, in the morning and evening, with a ban on all meat (or just the meat of four-legged animals), and an interdiction to speak during the mealtime. In order to avoid those harsh restrictions, monks found a ruse, especially those of the Saint Benedict order, that created in their monasteries a special room called the “misericord”, a room inside the religious building that was thought to represent and embody, the outside, secular, non-religious world. As a result, since the food restrictions were only supposed to be applied INSIDE the monastery, the monks could go in this room to stuff their face and eat the forbidden food, since this room was technically “outside” of the building.

Of course this rejection of food did cause a problem to all those church men and friars when they were invited to a feast or a banquet by a lord, king or nobleman, since they were forced to eat, it was the rule of hospitality – if you rejected your host’s food, you insulted him… Saint Francis of Assisi, who founded the mendicant order (begging friars) of the Franciscan, was especially concerned with this, since his entire religious model was based on depending on the charity and generosity of others, and when the others wanted to thank you with large, fatty, heavy meals, it was the road to gluttony… So he invented the solution of carrying with him a bag of ash everywhere, so that when he (or his brothers) were given a meal too rich for them, they would sprinkle the ashes on top. Like that they could eat everything… But without enjoying it! Because again, the Church has a massive obsession with just not enjoying food. This was the early times of the Church and the Middle Ages, when monks and priest were basically walking colorless skeletons… The perfect image of Lent. In fact, this was something very specific to monks: “the perpetual Lent”. Monks were forced into an eternal state of Lent, which meant they could never in their life eat things such as meat or butter.

Things changed when we reached the late Middle Ages! Things changed a LOT. On one side, the Church became more lenient towards food stuff. The eternal Lent vow was removed, so that monks and priests could eat meat and fatty products. The Pope Innocent XI asserted that no, enjoying food was NOT a sin, that it was natural to enjoy food, and that it was impossible to eat without some sort of pleasure – and that saints like Augustin might have been a bit too fanatical. Plus, if food was placed on Earth by God, and if God created our bodies so we had to eat, and if God organized things so that we would enjoy food, it doesn’t make sense – and is almost heretical – to believe enjoying food as God planned would be insulting God… Innocent clarified that it was normal to feel pleasure and joy when eating good and tasty food, and that the real sin derived from when people enjoyed food that was not good, pleasant or morally acceptable – and that similarly, meals were to be enjoyed, and only became a sin if you partake with enthusiasm in a “wrong” meal (organized for the wrong reasons, at indecent times, etc…).

Finally, the Church became filthy rich, as they became vast land-owners, turned into merchants (since monasteries were farms and craftsmen shop), seated with lords and noblemen in their castle, and imposed taxes left and right. So, less food restrictions, their boss telling them it as okay to enjoy eating, and a new wave of riches… The “fat monk” comes in. This very famous and widespread cliché of the monk as a fat drunkard was a stereotype spread by the very literature and arts of the late Middle Ages, but it was because indeed monasteries started to become embodiments of gluttony, as the monks started to feast and party on all the good food they had, and since all they did all long was sit around, pray and read, all this excess of wine and food quickly went to their waistline. It was actually part of a wider phenomenon where the Church through corruption became its own antithesis, since monasteries also started to have monks inviting women or prostitutes in, and the higher-ups of the Church being bought with money. In fact, it was this burst of gluttony, lust and greed that was part of the Reformation and the Protestants splitting from the decadent Catholic church: Luther criticized the theologians that had turned into “theologastrists”, worshippers of their own belly who wouldn’t recognize Lent even if it hit them in the face, and who celebrated masses in their kitchen.

4) Another example of how the early extremes of “sacred starvation” were VERY unhealthy, and it is a good thing they changed, is the case of a few saints, female saints, known today as the “Holy Anorexics”. Back then, these women were heralded as saints for taking asceticism to its most extreme, but today we can look back and identify all the symptoms of anorexia, that religion wrongfully glorified. You can find it under the term “Anorexia mirabilis”: it was this firm belief by young girls and women that by starving themselves they could share and honor the suffering of the Christ, and the practice of creating hunger-induced hallucinations to have visions of the “glory of God”. The most famous of those “anorexic saints” was Catherine of Siena, who rejected all forms of food to stay pure, only ate what was given to her at the Eucharist, refused to obey her superior’s orders to eat (since they saw she was getting ill and told her she was going too far), and even induced vomiting with a twig. This was the extremes the fear of gluttony could bring one to.

And this allows me to fall back on a fascinating parallel: the destruction of one’s body. This is one of the argument that the Church raised against the sin of gluttony, that one of its nasty effects was the sickening, soiling and destruction of the body, which is supposed to be a gift of God and a thing one should take care of. Nausea, digestive problems, diarrhea, gout, obesity, indigestions, heartburns, heart and liver diseases, were all condemned as the “evils” and “diseases” of gluttony by religious men and doctors alike. This was one of the warnings against gluttony: do not keep on this path, or you’ll end up in a bloated, sick and painful body. But in a paradoxical way, the destruction of the body was also the argument that served to destroy and oppose the opposite extreme the Church went to. Continuing with the topic of the “holy anorexics”, they were very divisive cases because very often they became very obviously sick, and by their stern refusal of eating they doomed themselves to die. While some glorified them as “saints”, another part of the Church rather condemned them as doing the exact same thing gluttons did with their body, ruining it and self-harming it due to an obsession with food. In fact, in the Renaissance, there was a group of theologians that created a specific sub-type of gluttony focused on phenomena such as this “holy anorexia”.

It is a lesser, not-well-known type of gluttony known as “spiritual gluttony”. It might seem very abstract for non-religious people, because its official definition is “seeking in exaggerated and obsessive ways the pleasure of God and the comforts of God, the same way gluttons seek obsessively and exaggeratedly the pleasures of food and the comforts of meals”. What does it mean? In practice it means for example – accumulating fasts and keep fasting despite your religious superior or religious authority’s orders of stopping, because it is clearly bad for your body. It can also mean, keep accumulating penances, even when you don’t need it anymore, just for the perceived pleasure of “purifying” yourself through them. It can also be translated as, for example, continuously praying and praying so much you start ignoring your actual job or your other duties; or, reading so much religious texts and studying so much religious topics you neglect your family, your friends or the human/social aspect of your life. Or growing an addiction to things such as confession, never getting enough and constantly getting confessed. This is very interesting because it shows that the Church itself, through time, ended up recognizing that gluttony could exist outside of food and drinks, under the shape of forceful and obsessive accumulations and addictions to pleasurable and comforting things. Because it is the very essence of gluttony: self-pleasure, self-comfort, but taken to such a point, such an extreme, that the pleasure becomes nauseating and the comfort harmful or wasteful.

5) More of a trivia than anything else, despite the early Church’s hatred of food and eating, the New Testament (aka the purely Christian part of the Bible) is notorious for being filled with banquets scenes and descriptions. Some people go as far as call the Gospels “the books where people eat all the time”, and Jesus himself is noted to take part in a lot of those feasts. There’s the Wedding at Cana where the Christ turns the water into wine, there’s the feast at Zaccheus’ house to which the Christ participates, and there’s of course the miracle of the multiplication of breads and fishes to feed the crowd… But, as theologians observed, in the last example, despite Jesus summoning enough food to leave an entire crowd satisfied, there are still leftovers once everyone’s hunger is satisfied, and people do not force themselves to continue eating. The crowd eats its fill, enough to not be hungry anymore, but doesn’t just devour everything gluttonously. Heck, the first temptation Satan uses against the Christ when he spends forty days in the desert (the forty days commemorated by Lent), is the temptation of food, as Satan suggests Jesus could just turn stones into bread to satisfy his hunger – showing that Jesus was a guy who could be won over by food.

Theologians did use stories and tales from the Bible to illustrate the sin of gluttony – but they usually did so by taking elements of the Ancient Testament, not the New one. The most famous “gluttony stories” of the Bible are Esau selling his birthright for a dish of lentils, Holofernes’s love for drinking being used against him by Judith, and the drunkenness of Noah which led to him humiliating himself and then cursing his own children. Given we are on a kink topic, I will also mention a fascinating secondary character of the Ancient Testament, which also embodies gluttony: king Eglon, who was a notorious glutton only living for eating, shitting, and then eating some more, and renowned as massively obese. When he was killed by a murderer who plunged his sword inside his belly, the sword was literally sucked up in the fat of the king, his murderer unable to retrieve it – but this also made the weapon of the crime disappear. And the death of the king wasn’t even noticed for some times, as his servants mistook the position and behavior of his dead body, hunched over his chair, for their king relieving himself as he so often did…

[prokopetz]

I understand why a lot of fantasy settings with Ambiguously Catholic organised religions go the old "the Church officially forbids magic while practising it in secret in order to monopolise its power" route, but it's almost a shame because the reality of the situation was much funnier.

Like, yes, a lot of Catholic clergy during the Middle Ages did practice magic in secret, but they weren't keeping it secret as some sort of sinister top-down conspiracy to deny magic to the Common People: they were mostly keeping it secret from their own superiors. It wasn't one of those "well, it's okay when we do it" deals: the Church very much did not want its local priests doing wizard shit. We have official records of local priests being disciplined for getting caught doing wizard shit. And the preponderance of evidence is that most of them would take their lumps, promise to stop doing wizard shit, then go right back to doing wizard shit.

It turns out that if you give a bunch of dudes education, literacy, and a lot of time on their hands, some non-zero percentage of them are going to decide to be wizards, no matter how hard you try to stop them from being wizards.

[psalmlover]

tiddles the church cat

[whereserpentswalk]

The nazis that you see in movies are as much a historical fantasy as vikings with horned helmets and samurai cutting people in half.

The nazis were not some vague evil that wanted to hurt people for the sake of hurting them. They had specific goals which furthered a far right agenda, and they wanted to do harm to very specific groups, (largely slavs, jews, Romani, queer people, communists/leftists, and disabled people.)

The nazis didn't use soldiers in creepy gas masks as their main imagery that they sold to the german people, they used blond haired blue eyed families. Nor did they stand up on podiums saying that would wage an endless and brutal war, they gave speeches about protecting white Christian society from degenerates just like how conservatives do today.

Nazis weren't atheists or pagans. They were deeply Christian and Christianity was part of their ideology just like it is for modern conservatives. They spoke at lengths about defending their Christian nation from godless leftism. The ones who hated the catholic church hated it for protestant reasons. Nazi occultism was fringe within the party and never expected to become mainstream, and those occultists were still Christian, none of them ever claimed to be Satanists or Asatru.

Nazis were also not queer or disabled. They killed those groups, before they had a chance to kill almost anyone else actually. Despite the amount of disabled nazis or queer/queer coded nazis you'll see in movies and on TV, in reality they were very cishet and very able bodied. There was one high ranking nazi early on who was gay and the other nazis killed him for that. Saying the nazis were gay or disabled makes about as much sense as saying they were Jewish.

The nazis weren't mentally ill. As previously mentioned they hated disabled people, and this unquestionably included anyone neurodivergent. When the surviving nazi war criminals were given psychological tests after the war, they were shown to be some of the most neurotypical people out there.

The nazis weren't socialists. Full stop. They hated socialists. They got elected on hating socialists. They killed socialists. Hating all forms of lefitsm was a big part of their ideology, and especially a big part of how they sold themselves.

The nazis were not the supervillians you see on screen, not because they didn't do horrible things in real life, they most certainly did, but because they weren't that vague apolitical evil that exists for white American action heros to fight. They did horrible things because they had a right wing authoritarian political ideology, an ideology that is fundamentally the same as what most of the modern right wing believes.

[cookinguptales]

So I’ve been enjoying the Disney vs. DeSantis memes as much as anyone, but like. I do feel like a lot of people who had normal childhoods are missing some context to all this.

I was raised in the Bible Belt in a fairly fundie environment. My parents were reasonably cool about some things, compared to the rest of my family, but they certainly had their issues. But they did let me watch Disney movies, which turned out to be a point of major contention between them and my other relatives.

See, I think some people think this weird fight between Disney and fundies is new. It is very not new. I know that Disney’s attempts at inclusion in their media have been the source of a lot of mockery, but what a lot of people don’t understand is that as far as actual company policy goes, Disney has actually been an industry leader for queer rights. They’ve had policies assuring equal healthcare and partner benefits for queer employees since the early 90s.

I’m not sure how many people reading this right now remember the early 90s, but that was very much not industry standard. It was a big deal when Disney announced that non-married queer partners would be getting the same benefits as the married heterosexual ones.

Like — it went further than just saying that any unmarried partners would be eligible for spousal benefits. It straight-up said that non-same-sex partners would still need to be married to receive spousal benefits, but because same-sex partners couldn’t do that, proof that they lived together as an established couple would be enough.

In other words, it put long-term same-sex partners on a higher level than opposite-sex partners who just weren’t married yet. It put them on the exact same level as heterosexual married partners.

They weren’t the first company ever to do this, but they were super early. And they were certainly the first mainstream “family-friendly” company to do it.

Conservatives lost their damn minds.

Protests, boycotts, sermons, the whole nine yards. I can’t tell you how many books about the evils of Disney my grandmother tried to get my parents to read when I was a kid.

When we later moved to Florida, I realized just how many queer people work at Disney — because historically speaking, it’s been a company that has guaranteed them safety, non-discrimination, and equal rights. That’s when I became aware of their unofficial “Gay Days” and how Christians would show up from all over the country to protest them every year. Apparently my grandmother had been upset about these days for years, but my parents had just kind of ignored her.

Out of curiosity, I ended up reading one of the books my grandmother kept leaving at our house. And friends — it’s amazing how similar that (terrible, poorly written) rhetoric was to what people are saying these days. Disney hires gay pedophiles who want to abuse your children. Disney is trying to normalize Satanism in our beautiful, Christian America. 

Just tons of conspiracy theories in there that ranged from “a few bad things happened that weren’t actually Disney’s fault, but they did happen” to “Pocahontas is an evil movie, not because it distorts history and misrepresents indigenous life, but because it might teach children respect for nature. Which, as we all know, would cause them all to become Wiccans who believe in climate change.”

Like — please, take it from someone who knows. This weird fight between fundies and Disney is not new. This is not Disney’s first (gay) rodeo. These people have always believed that Disney is full of evil gays who are trying to groom and sexually abuse children.

The main difference now is that these beliefs are becoming mainstream. It’s not just conservative pastors who are talking about this. It’s not just church groups showing up to boycott Gay Day. Disney is starting to (reluctantly) say the quiet part out loud, and so are the Republicans. Disney is publicly supporting queer rights and announcing company-supported queer events and the Republican Party is publicly calling them pedophiles and enacting politically driven revenge.

This is important, because while this fight has always been important in the history of queer rights, it is now being magnified. The precedent that a fight like this could set is staggering. For better or for worse, we live in a corporation-driven country. I don’t like it any more than you do, and I’m not about to defend most of Disney’s business practices. But we do live in a nation where rights are largely tied to corporate approval, and the fact that we might be entering an age where even the most powerful corporations in the country are being banned from speaking out in favor of rights for marginalized people… that’s genuinely scary.

Like… I’ll just ask you this. Where do you think we’d be now, in 2023, if Disney had been prevented from promising its employees equal benefits in 1994? That was almost thirty years ago, and look how far things have come. When I looked up news articles for this post from that era, even then journalists, activists, and fundie church leaders were all talking about how a company of Disney’s prominence throwing their weight behind this movement could lead to the normalization of equal protections in this country.

The idea of it scared and thrilled people in equal parts even then. It still scares and thrills them now.

I keep seeing people say “I need them both to lose!” and I get it, I do. Disney has for sure done a lot of shit over the years. But I am begging you as a queer exvangelical to understand that no. You need Disney to win. You need Disney to wipe the fucking floor with these people.

Right now, this isn’t just a fight between a giant corporation and Ron DeSantis. This is a fight about the right of corporations to support marginalized groups. It’s a fight that ensures that companies like Disney still can offer benefits that a discriminatory government does not provide. It ensures that businesses much smaller than Disney can support activism.

Hell, it ensures that you can support activism.

The fight between weird Christian conspiracy theorists and Disney is not new, because the fight to prevent any tiny victory for marginalized groups is not new. The fight against the normalization of othered groups is not new.

That’s what they’re most afraid of. That each incremental victory will start to make marginalized groups feel safer, that each incremental victory will start to turn the tide of public opinion, that each incremental victory will eventually lead to sweeping law reform.

They’re afraid that they won’t be able to legally discriminate against us anymore.

So guys! Please. This fight, while hilarious, is also so fucking important. I am begging you to understand how old this fight is. These people always play the long game. They did it with Roe and they’re doing it with Disney.

We have! To keep! Pushing back!

[charlesoberonn]

[godslaughters]

Dead Christ (details) by Philippe de Champaigne

[bebs-art-gallery]

The Lamb of God (1432)

— by Hubert and Jan van Eyck

[oleandro-drag]

saint sebastian tended by saint irene but they're both drag artists

felt like this might be something this site would enjoy

on stage: oleandro & delfi oraakel, photographer: peroksiid (on ig as oleandro_drag, delfi_oraakel and peroksiid)

[illustratus]

Full moon behind the Temple Expiatori del Sagrat Cor, on the summit of Mount Tibidabo in Barcelona, Catalonia, Spain.

[guardcanine]

[prokopetz]

About twenty years back, there was this weird transitional period after companies had figured out that harvesting their users' demographic information was a potential gold mine but before we lived in a hellish panopticon where any website operator could look up your IP address and know what you had for breakfast where some sites would try to get you to fill out, like, detailed demographic surveys before they'd let you access their stuff. Not just age, gender and geographic location, either – some of them would fish for employment status, marital status, brand preferences, even religious affiliation. A lot of folks I knew would just pick the first option in every dropdown, but my move was always to fill in the demographic information of the current Pope, at least as far as I was able to determine it (brand preference was always a tricky one). I like to think that, thanks to my efforts, their data sets are haunted to this day by a phantom pontiff.

[die-rosastrasse]

Dante Gabriel Rossetti

British, 1828-1882

Joan of Arc Kissing the Sword of Deliverance (1863) & Joan of Arc (1882)

[lionofchaeronea]

The Angel, Standing in the Sun, J.M.W. Turner, 1846

[sirartwork]