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Subscribe to this list via RSS Blog posts tagged in phallus

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 

I've heard that warriors, charging into battle, get erections.

I wonder if it's true.

Being myself a bard rather than a warrior, I have no personal experience of the matter. Knowing my own unpredictable man's body, though, with a mind (not to mention a sense of humor) of its own, I could well believe it.

Ah, the mysteries of male physiology.

Now, erections are about lots of things—ask any guy waking up in the morning or (again, reportedly) hanged man*—and sex is only one.

But if this nugget of received wisdom is actually trustworthy, I could well understand why the Redcrest legions so feared the skyclad charges of Celtdom.

After all, it's kind of hard not to take an erection personally.

Not to mention the fact that a bobbing boner pointing in your general direction tends to be rather, er, distracting. Charging into battle against a naked, shrieking, woad-stained enemy with a sharp sword in his hand is decidedly not a good time to go losing your focus.

I don't personally know many warriors—in fact, I can't think of any—who have experienced the kind of face-to-face combat that the ancestors did, so there's no one of my acquaintance that I can ask directly. If there's a way to web-search this topic without first getting directed to every porn site on the planet—and believe me, I really don't want to go there—I have yet to find it.

(Porn sites carry lots of computer cooties, and besides, who's going to trust a porn site for information of any kind?)

Last modified on

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 

 

 

I've heard that warriors, charging into battle, get erections.

 

I wonder if it's true.

 

Being myself a bard rather than a warrior, I have no personal experience of the matter. Knowing my own unpredictable man's body, though, with a mind (not to mention a sense of humor) of its own, I could well believe it.

 

Ah, the mysteries of male physiology.

 

Now, erections are about lots of things—ask any guy waking up in the morning or (again, reportedly) hanged man*—and sex is only one.

 

But if this nugget of received wisdom is actually trustworthy, I could well understand why the Redcrest legions so feared the skyclad charges of Celtdom.

 

After all, it's kind of hard not to take an erection personally.

 

Not to mention the fact that a bobbing boner pointing in your general direction tends to be rather, er, distracting. Charging into battle against a naked, shrieking, woad-stained enemy with a sword in his hand is decidedly not a good time to go losing your focus.

 

I don't know many warriors—in fact, I can't think of any—who have experienced the kind of face-to-face combat experience that the ancestors did, so there's no one of my acquaintance that I can ask directly. If there's a way to web-search this topic without first getting directed to every porn site on the planet—and believe me, I really don't want to go there—I have yet to find it.

 

(Porn sites carry lots of computer cooties, and besides, who's going to trust a porn site for information of any kind?)

Last modified on

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 

“Which way do you dress, sir?”

Ah, the wonderful world of euphemism. I'm being fitted for a new suit. What the tailor is asking me is which way I hang.

It's not a question that strangers usually ask. It's not a topic that I generally discuss in public. But, of course, it makes a difference in how the trousers are cut.

I try not to smile.

“To the left,” I tell him solemnly.

For better or for worse, I've always hung left.

 

 

Deep Pagan

 

If you're wondering, Just what does this have to do with Pagan Culture?

 ...welcome to Deep Pagan.

Last modified on

Modeling Humility 

 

I've had some pretty strange dreams in my time, but this has got to have been one of the strangest.

I'm not sure what kind of congregation I'm in, but it must be something staid like Episcopalian; most of the guys around me are wearing suits. That makes what happens next even more bizarre.

We rise to sing a hymn. As we begin, all of the men around me unzip and pull their dicks out.

(I must be visiting the congregation, because I don't really know what's going on. Nevertheless, I follow along with the rest.)

At one point—during the chorus, I'm guessing—we all swing our dicks to the right. During the next chorus, we swing to the left. So it goes through the entire hymn, alternately. The young guy on my left is doing it; so is the man standing in the pew in front of me, and the older one to my right. We're all doing it. Me, I swing along with the rest.

The collective tone of this bizarre act of Episcopal fertility worship—is it an act of blessing?—is that of mild amusement, but there's something serious about it as well, something ritual. As the hymn concludes, we all shake off, as if at the end of a piss, and re-trouser. Presumably, the service then continues. I don't know for sure, because I always wake up at this point.

I've had this dream several times now. I draw three conclusions.

Last modified on

Posted by on in Culture Blogs

 

 

Early one Spring morning, I open the back door and burst into sudden laughter.

Overnight, my yet-to-be-planted vegetable garden has sprouted a fine crop of several dozen life-sized—and life-like—phalli.

In the early light, they thrust up through the dark, fertile soil like mushrooms after a storm.

 

Several days previously, one of my crazy pagan friends had given me a latex ice-mold in the shape of an erect penis: just the thing for the Beltane punch-bowl, we agreed. Of course, we'd made the obligatory jokes about cocksicles.

Clearly, my friend had bought a mold or two for herself as well.

Good old plaster of Paris.

 

Needless to say, my Baptist next-door neighbor was not pleased.

Last modified on

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Actually, Just a Shower

Ah, the hazards of being pagan.

My friend is decrying overgrown vegetables. As by far the best cook in our group of guys, he's earned the right to opine.

“Best rule of thumb,” he says, “is never to eat a zucchini bigger than your own dick.” This gets him a laugh.

I ask the obvious question.

“Hard or soft?"

The two of us have known one another for years. We've been to lots of skyclad rituals together.

He grins.

Last modified on

Posted by on in Culture Blogs
Jesus with a Boner

Check out Peter Paul Rubens' 1615 (?) painting Christ Risen.

Note the prominent morning boner.

The Renaissance was the time when Pagan Antiquity saved the Christian West from itself. (Even dead and buried, those old pagans still have the power to impart new life.) Inspired by the nude gods of the Ancient World, Christian art suddenly took on a fleshy quality that it had never theretofore known.

(Some critics would see a betrayal of Christian message in the implied eroticism of this artistic en-flesh-ment. Since embodiment—incarnation—lies at the very heart of the Christian story, to this sympathetic pagan at least this would seem an invalid critique; but perhaps the inherent contradiction lies in Christianity itself.)

Since the Resurrection is never narrated in the gospels, it took a long time for it to be depicted in art; before the Middle Ages, artists tended to treat the Resurrection by allusion rather than direct depiction.

As an artistic problem, it's an interesting one. How do you show a dead person coming back to life?

What Rubens has done here—logically enough, really—is to show it as a waking from sleep. Still wrapped in his grave sheet, Jesus is just sitting up in bed. As for the morning boner, well, that's just male physiology, and kudos to Rubens for having the testicular fortitude to show it.

But, of course, the waking erection is more than that. It implies a virility more appropriate, one might think, to the fertility gods of antiquity, to the Green Men of the world (in whose honor we speak of “wood”) than to the “pale Galilean” of so much Christian theology.

Rubens was not the first to depict Jesus with an erection; the motif occurs earlier in Flemish and German art—notably in the paintings of Van Heemskerck—as a daring articulation of the implications of Incarnation in, not just human, but in male human form (109).

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Recent Comments - Show all comments
  • Steven Posch
    Steven Posch says #
    Rubens was a prolific guy.
  • Anthony Gresham
    Anthony Gresham says #
    I majored in art history back in college. I don't remember this particular work by Rubens being mentioned at all.

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