Even where people do it has a spiritual consequence. Recently a man and woman were arrested in an Italian cathedral after parishioners heard groaning coming from the confessional box. When the authorities pulled back the curtain, they found a woman down on her knees, but not in repentance. She was performing a sex act on the man whose groaning was due to carnal pleasure rather than moral angst. The couple argued that, as atheists, having sex in a church was no different to any other place. However, the church thought that the act was so sacrilegious that a special ceremony would be necessary to purify the box.33 The box had been contaminated by the act. This sounds remarkably similar to the ‘Macbeth effect’ we encountered in chapter 2 and the use of exorcism rituals to cleanse places polluted by evil.
If you hold essentialist views, it is easy to understand how you might regard sex as potentially contaminating, with either positive or negative essential qualities, depending on how you view the other person. This is why rape is not only a physical abuse but also a psychological violation that leaves the victim feeling ‘dirty’. For many, sex outside of a partnership of two people, whether forced or complicit, is unacceptable because the essential integrity of our partner has been defiled. Consider how the various sex acts rank in order of their essential overtones. I don’t need to spell them out, but the more physical the contact, the penetration, and the exchange of bodily fluids, the more essentialist our attitudes to the acts are. Climax achieved through nonphysical contact with another may be perverted (dirty phone calls and even virtual sex when it arrives), but it is not as essentially disturbing as actual physical penetration.
Also, why do we find sex among the elderly generally disgusting and yet older people themselves are often still sexually active? Our overall preference to have sex with younger partners may be an evolutionary drive to mate with healthier, longer-living potential partners, but the disgust we feel when thinking about old people having sex is derived from essentialism. Such ageist beliefs are not trivial. The urge to have sex with younger partners leads to exploitation. The older, stronger, and more dominant seek out the more vulnerable for sex. This is because in many cultures sex with children is deemed to be a way to regain youth and vitality.
And look at what we actually do down there in the genital region. How can anyone enjoy the pleasures of a recreation area that has a sewage outlet running through it? We can only do it if we find the other person sexy. Otherwise, with a stranger we do not find sexy, it becomes totally disgusting. Why does sex with one partner invoke lust and the other disgust? My suspicion is that such attitudes stem from a psychological perspective rooted in the essentialist notion of a need to make a profound connection with another by spreading essential seed.
This kind of sexual supernatural reasoning is potentially dangerous. According to official statistics, nearly sixty children under the age of fifteen were raped every day in South Africa throughout 2001.34 The actual figure is thought to be much higher, since only one in thirty-five cases are reported to police. Various bodies monitoring the situation believe that the victims are increasingly younger. One explanation for this trend is the so-called ‘virgin cure’ myth, which extends to raping babies.35 In 2000 South Africa’s Medical Research Council reported that ‘belief that having sex with a virgin can cleanse a man of HIV has wide currency in sub-Saharan Africa’. A survey of over five hundred automobile workers revealed that one in five thought the virgin cure was true. The origin of the myth is sympathetic magic, and it can be traced back as far as medieval Europe. However, I fear that the pandemic of HIV/AIDS is only going to lead to an increase in the occurrence of such attacks as desperate sufferers try by any means to cure themselves. This is because education can have little impact on traditional belief systems. Despite having one of the most intensive programs of health education in the world on the causes and prevention of HIV/AIDS, studies reveal that South Africans still endorse both biological and supernatural explanations for the cause of the illness. These two belief systems – natural and supernatural – are not viewed by participants as inconsistent with one another but rather as complementary causal explanations. For example, people know that a biological virus causes HIV, but they argue that witchcraft is responsible for one person contracting the virus and not another.36
THE WEAPON SALVE
Essentialism, vitalism, and sympathetic magic have a long history in medicine, For example, the medieval ‘weapon salve’ was a popular treatment for wounds of conflict.37 This was the idea that acting on the weapon that had inflicted an injury could heal wounds. Here is a recipe for weapon salve from the renowned fifteenth-century Swiss alchemist Paracelsus:
Take of moss growing on the head of a thief who has been hanged and left in the air; of real mummy; of human blood, still warm – of each one ounce; of human suet, two ounces; of linseed oil, turpentine, and Armenian bole – of each two drachms. Mix all well in a mortar, and keep the salve in an oblong, narrow urn.
Once this ointment was prepared, it was important to recover the original weapon and dip it in the ointment. In the meantime, the wound was to be cleaned regularly with fresh water and bandages each day after the removal of ‘laudable pus’.
The logic of the weapon salve reveals a number of supernatural misconceptions. The weapon had a sympathetic connection with the wound by virtue of the fact that it had inflicted it. The various ingredients for the salve were chosen because they had sympathetic affinity with the healing process. Some ingredients may have been chosen because they were believed to counteract the negative aspects of infection by exerting antipathetic forces to cancel them out. The gruesome ingredients of the potion demonstrate essentialist thinking. The use of human tissue reflected the belief that it possesses essential forces that can affect the healing process. Particularly prized was the tissue from those who had died healthy and young; no one wanted rejuvenating fat and blood from either the ill or old. Hence, most recipes called for the use of those who had been executed, the younger and more virile the better, as the young had more life force in them than the sick and dying.
The weapon salve treatment did actually work, but not through any supernatural mechanism. Rather, simply cleaning the wound and replacing the bandages each day enabled the body to fight infection, which was the most common cause of death. However, those who practised the treatment believed that it worked for all the wrong reasons. A similar story would emerge in another extraordinary episode from the history of Western medicine.
THE GONAD DOCTORS
Apparently the idea came from his time working as an unqualified young doctor in a Kansas slaughterhouse, where he noted the sexual prowess of male goats. Dr John R. Brinkley, or ‘the goat gonad doctor’, reasoned that if one could transplant the gonads of billy goats into men whose libido was flagging, those parts that old age had rendered ineffective could be reinvigorated.38 Brinkley’s reasoning was pure essentialism and vitalism coupled with a naive understanding that gonads are related to sexual function. The animal transplantation studies were originally conceived as an early application of sympathetic essentialist reasoning – like begets like. If male goats are horny, and your libido is dropping, then put a bit of billy in your works.