Flagellant Processions

“When the whip is raised, when leather, scourge, and cane strike against covered or naked flesh, we stand before a stage — a stage on which a ritual unfolds.”

So begins In Praise of the Whip: A Cultural History of Arousal, Niklaus Largier’s scrupulous chronicle of the curious practice of flagellation. While flogging has always been a popular method of punishment and torture, and while during the Lupercalia festival of ancient Rome women were whipped to ensure fertility, and although medieval Christianity was notoriously enthusiastic about penitence and penance, it isn’t until the tenth century that the disciplina of self-flagellation first appears in the annals of Christian asceticism. Even when practiced in eremitic seclusion, flagellation is intrinsically theatrical, for the act of self-abnegation is always staged for an audience of at least one: God Himself. But flagellation isn’t only an act of penitence; it is also, and perhaps predominantly, imagined as  a staged participation in the final scourging of Jesus that culminated in his crucifixion. In effect the flagellant’s blood intermingles with Jesus’ blood in a bodily re-enactment of the atonement. It’s in this sense of participating in Christ’s redemption that the public act of self-flagellation bears bodily witness to the Scriptural testimony. Enthralled by the multisensory image of the flagellant’s performance, the observer is brought through the inflamed imagination into an enactment of the Passion, where the torn flesh of the penitent commingles with the Word and the Spirit.

Largier traces the historical role of the intensely transcendent sensuality of flagellation through Ascesis to Erotics and finally to Therapeutics, these being the three main divisions of the book. While eventually we reach some risque bits and a few naughty pictures, I’m going to stick with ascesis in this post, because I learned about something I’d never heard of before. Did you know that there were flagellant processions during the Middle Ages? These were widespread popular movements that erupted not once but twice, eighty years apart. The first uprising of the flagellant processions began in 1260-1 in Perugia during a time of epidemic and famine; the second wave, in 1349-50, kept one step ahead of the plague that swept the continent.  Largier quotes at length from Hugo Spechtshart of Reutlingen, who witnessed some of the processions that erupted nearly everywhere in central Europe during 1349-50 and just as suddenly vanished.

“Priest and count, knight and serf participated… as well as monks, burghers, farmers, and professors… In those day, the flagellants moved about the land in great throngs. They tortured their bodies with gruesome whips whose effect was increased by the presence of knots in the straps. Whoever goes with them places himself under the sign of the cross, for as Scripture teaches us, all those who bear the cross are worthy and acceptable to the Virgin. They wore crosses on the front and back of their coats, also on the front and back of their hats… They even wear hats when flagellating themselves in a circle, so that… the cross is constantly before their eyes…

“They would spend each night in a different place, They stayed overnight at various sites, often quite impoverished ones, and would move about for a total of 34 days, since Christ spent exactly that many years on earth. The last day is only half a day, then everyone returns home.

“Once at nice and twice during the day, they tormented themselves with blows of the whip before the astonished crowd, and together they sang hymns while moving about in a circle and throwing themselves to the ground in the form of a cross. They did this six times, remaining on the ground each time until they had prayed two Pater Nosters.”

Bearing flags emblazoned with a cross, the flagellants, barefoot and clad in rags, would walk from town to town.  Until the 33½ days of their pilgrimage were completed the flagellants would neither bathe nor wash their clothes nor trim their beards. They were not permitted to ask for lodging, but could accept if a place was offered for the night. They were forbidden to sleep in beds or to associate with women.

“While on the path engaged in communal flagellation, they walked in side-by-side rows, like siblings, and sang songs as if they were scholars. As soon as they entered a place, the bells would ring and the people would stream out to gape at them and their fascinating terrible wounds. But they also came to beg of Christ the crucified, to fend off terrible and sudden death, and to give grace to the dead, peace to the living, and heavenly joy to the close of their lives… Crowds of men formed, and after a while they disappeared and no one knew any longer what had become of them.”

The flagellant processions made a significant impact on the towns they visited. Residents confessed their sins publicly, longstanding disputes were reconciled, thieves returned what they’d stolen, jails were emptied, slaves and captives were freed, exiles were welcomed home. Through strange behaviors, mass migration, egalitarian communality, and independence from most political and ecclesiastical authority, the flagellant processions constituted a radical if short-lived “deterritorialization” of medieval European culture.

Oh, and did I mention that this book was translated from the German by one Graham Harman?

UPDATE: Inasmuch as Graham linked to this post calling it a review, I’ll supplement my obsession over the flagellant processions with at least some review-like material. Briefly, I enjoyed the book and found it informative and stimulating. Largier spends more time describing than analyzing, but the wealth of material he’s assembled and the way he’s organized it maps an intellectual trajectory that’s self-validating. He doesn’t interpret, and implicitly condemn, medieval flagellation in terms of sublimated sexuality. Instead, he traces the gradual historic compartmentalization of a libidinal energy that a thousand years ago permeated body and spirit and imagination in a “conspiratorial connection” which, Largier contends, “became unbearable.” Phallic sexuality has thus become the only legitimate locus and interpretive context for erotic pleasure, including an odd variant like flagellation, while “the only place imagination is now allowed to occupy is the arts.”

Not having German myself, I cannot remark on the quality of the translation.