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The Spirits of Crossbones Graveyard
Time, Ritual, and Sexual Commerce in London
By Sondra L. Hausner Indiana University Press
Copyright © 2016 Sondra L. Hausner
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-253-02147-2
CHAPTER 1
The Myth of the Winchester Goose
Take away prostitutes, and what evils would ensue. St. Augustine, On Order (386 CE)
Mythic reality is a strange and ethereal one, one of those few places in the human social universe unconstrained by the limits of time. Whether we embrace the functionalism of the Polish British fieldworker Bronislaw Malinowski or the structuralism of the great French theorist Claude Lévi-Strauss, myth is eternal, as it is designed to be. Its source and its power are both attributable to that particular, enduring capacity of myth to transcend time: mythic narrative creates, sustains, and maneuvers the very origin of our existence. We use the stories of our beginnings to recount — to ourselves and our kin — how it is we see the passage of time, not least the way we understand what is happening to us now, at the time of our telling.
Anthropologists adore myths, for they constitute a body of readymade stories that give us an easy, inviting route into the way a group narrates itself. For Malinowski (1948 [1925]), myth was famously analogous to a tribe's "charter," or rulebook, or even constitution, of how a culture lived its morality. In this functionalist interpretation of myth, if one wants to know how people think they should behave, one need only consult a culture's myths: they inscribe a set of moral ideals by which a culture's inhabitants know they should live. For Lévi-Strauss (1963), myth bespoke the very structure of the human mind, constituting the formless but somehow architectural web upon which consciousness builds itself. For Mircea Eliade (1954), myth was an axis mundi, the pole around which a nation tells its tales, anchoring its fleet to cosmic truth.
For the tellers themselves, myths recount — or even create — the story of being, otherwise a perennial mystery. As such, they have an unchanging or constant quality, even as they speak to all the variations and exigencies of contemporary life. It is in this paradox — the eternality of myth alongside its changeability and seemingly endless variation — that mythical narratives have come to be seen as the cornerstone of religious cultures across the world and throughout history.
Even our tiny, unnamed tribe, gathering rain or shine by the gates of Crossbones Graveyard, repeats and reveres its origin myth: the tale of its brief history is an integral part of its ritual actions. Every time we participate in this ritual, we hear how a Goose appeared in the life of a contemporary London artist named John Constable (not the Romantic English painter of the same name), also known as John Crow, one night early in the twenty-first century. This particular Goose, in her interaction with our Crow, was an inspirational totem: she led John to the site, he recounts to us, that would subsequently be identified as a historic graveyard, where the bones of 148 skeletons would be excavated in the process of preparing the land for an extension of one of London's underground lines (the Jubilee Line, to be precise). The story of the Winchester Goose — the totemic spirit who came to visit the storytelling shaman — came streaming out of the present-day poet: overnight he wrote a play that would in due course be performed at the Southwark Cathedral, the locus of worship in his neighborhood, and an important site in the Church of England's diocese of the same name.
This artistic act was not an insignificant achievement (nor exactly an anti-establishment one) on the part of an iconoclastic rebel poet in South London. But the good graces of the Cathedral are not to be relied upon in an everyday sense: the whole point of the ritual is to remind us how powerful institutions (even if — or perhaps especially if — they are subordinate to still more commanding interests) have a way of asserting their dominance when it suits them. An index of the inevitably hierarchical structure of social orders, this ritual is most comfortable in the open air, in front of its self-created memorial altar, not inside the Cathedral itself.
And so, as we know, every month since it happened, John holds a ritual in honor of the shamanic vision that brought him to the Cross-bones Graveyard on Redcross Way. John's ritual points out — explicitly — how the Church of England distinguished between different kinds of dead: some people, those who had enough money or were connected to family members who could pay, were buried in the church graveyard; others were buried outside, down the road, in unmarked graves. This story, orated by Constable's shamanic alter ego, John Crow, is the origin myth of this particular social group, and we gather to hear it on each twenty-third.
It is not particularly effervescent — we are a small gaggle of fairly tame counterculturalists on a side street in central London — but it is our ritual. Often wearing a blue robe that could equally be a terry cloth bathrobe (or, in British parlance, a dressing gown) or a wizard's cloak, with a large amber rosary around his neck, John Crow performs on a ritual stage as he tells us of his vision — the dreamlike, shamanic awakening that brought him, and now us, to this location in the first place — and also of the activist vision into which he would translate that clarion call from the spirits of Southwark. His hope is that, through the telling of this story over time, we may gradually reveal the social hierarchies within our societies and thereby act to undo them: through their exposure in ritual, those structures that determine who's in and who's out — in every society, in every period, and even within ourselves — are weakened. This is a ritual about the past, but it is performed for the benefit of the future, and for the sake of the site, namely the memorial garden that he hopes we can create for the community of Bankside, as well as for "all humanity."
As we have seen, the ritual opens by invoking the spirits of the dead (and equating them with us, the "spirits of the living"), and closes with a release, or an incantation to the totem ("Goose! May your spirit fly free!"), and a literal circle of gin, poured around us, a group huddled by a graveyard, and down our gullets too. Human societies need solace, John Crow explains, and gin was an alcohol that was cheap enough to be the balm of many: "It was mother's comfort, and mother's ruin." This ritual, and the telling of this particular myth, is also a source of solace; it offers a gathering of like-minded people who care about memorialization, and who need a place to come every now and again for some open-hearted human contact.
The Early Canonical Position on Harlotry
Like gin, sexual congress has the capacity to be a comfort, or a ruin. Thus have theologians, lawyers, policy makers, intellectuals, and emancipators wrestled with the nuts and bolts of the practices of sexuality — that which our species needs in order to survive, and one of the greatest sources of pleasure in the human repertory — over the centuries. A deep and powerful urge, sexual desire has also gotten human beings into a great deal of trouble, and most if not all religious systems in the world have set about trying to harness, deflate, direct, or subdue its sometimes overwhelming charge. For all the conundrums it causes, sexuality cannot be simply outlawed; it must be managed.
Historically variable as the meanings of money and sexuality will always be, what is it about the concatenation of these two spheres that brings about such seemingly universal cultural debate and reprobation — involving theological institutions, criminal courts, moral codes, and legal manifestos, not to mention welfare, rehabilitation, and reintegration systems? Is there something about this heightened realm of sensual, bodily experience that so definitely places it into an arena of human cognition and action that is separate from a society's standard rules governing labor transactions or exchange? Certainly, human bodily sense is increasingly understood as the very ground of our perception and consciousness of the world (Csordas 1994; Stoller 1989; Schaefer 2015). That bodies can know (and that such knowledge is a form of power) is undisputed: it is whether this form of knowledge — experience — may be trusted, denigrated, or put to use that is so culturally and historically debated.
Every culture in the world has had to wrestle with the sticky issue of the profitable use value of the body's sensory experience that is at stake in the exchange of sexual congress for financial gain. Arguably embedded in the bramble thicket of prostitution are not only the questions of what to do about sex outside of marriage, or for reasons other than procreation, but also the very kernel at the heart of the matter (cf. Zizek 1989), namely what to do about human desire. From here matters get only more complicated, in the establishment of the nitty-gritty juridical requirements that both shape and govern collective institutions and societies: where should those who might offer sex for money live? How should they be integrated into society if they give up their trade — or if they don't? What is a society meant to do with children that are conceived of morally anathema unions? What should happen if a prostitute falls in love with someone who is not her client — or, thornier still, if a client should fall in love with her? Who is responsible for making these decisions, and how should they be regulated: how should moral rigor be balanced with social care, of both society at large and the necessarily marginal worlds whose bodily labor — sexual and otherwise — may support its steady functioning?
Our ritual's invocation of a double standard on the part of the medieval bishopric in Southwark speaks to a long history of explicit debate in the Christian church around the ethical troubles with sexual conduct. Much detailed consideration regarding permission and permissiveness around sexuality, the nature of lust (and, to a certain degree, the nature of money offered for it), the appropriate handling of agents involved in facilitating sexual transactions, and the moral status withheld from sex workers, among others, characterizes the discussions of the early and late medieval canonists. The constellation of dense moral complexity around the exchange of sensual experience outside of monogamous couplehood — an institution designed to contain human lust in the first place — is made trickier still by the element of monetary exchange, which throws into relief the question of who is paying for what, and who is to be held accountable (quite literally) for the seepage of human sexual activity outside morally recognizable (or at least tolerable) norms. Both elements — the unmanageability of promiscuity and the financial exchange around sexual acts — were deeply problematic for medieval thinkers, for whom they were inextricably linked.
In the fourth century, St. Jerome wrote: "A whore [meretrix] is one who is available for the lust of many men" (cited in Brundage 1989 [1976] :8i). This phraseology is not kind nor full of praise, exactly — meretrix is not a neutral appellation in the Latin, but rather carries a derogatory note — and yet St. Jerome's definition does not carry the suggestion of depraved criminality that prostitution begins to garner after the Reformation. What is clear here, in the first instance, is that promiscuity is one root of the sin: sexuality is too unruly a set of actions — and the emotions it can trigger too delicate to dabble in — for people to express outside of a singular marital union. At the same time, even the church knows that monogamy is not an assured state of affairs among humans, for a whole host of emotional and physical reasons. The core of the trouble is that humans are lustful, and sometimes couples do not work, or a particular coupling is not sufficient, or lust or emotion needs to be taken elsewhere, for more reasons than we can count under the sun.
St. Jerome is not alone in his attempt to offer a somewhat balanced assessment of the practice of providing extra or surplus sexuality, as it were; perhaps the most frequently quoted theologian on the subject of prostitution is St. Augustine, also writing in the fourth century, who proclaims, "If you remove harlots from society, you will disrupt everything because of lust" (cited in Brundage 1987:106; an alternative translation in Karras [1989:100] reads: "Remove prostitutes from human affairs and you will destroy everything with lust"). In short, there is no doubt that prostitution is sinful, but society, in its fallen nature, needs it; in the early church, as Brundage explains, "prostitution was an evil, but an evil that was necessary for the preservation of the social structure and the orderly conduct of civic life" (1987:106). This canonical position is the ground of much of what is to follow in Christian thought: it is "the classical Christian rationale for a policy of practical toleration toward prostitution" (1987:106). The Bishop of Winchester did not have to look far for theological justification in order to accept tithes from brothel owners on the estate.
Indeed, many subsequent theologians used Augustine's logic. In the thirteenth century, Aquinas goes further with the metaphor, suggesting in Opuscula Philosophica that sex work is "like a sewer in a palace. Take away the sewer, and you will fill the palace with pollution. ... Take away prostitutes from the world and you will fill it with sodomy" (cited in Wunderli 1981:96). Here, too, there is a moral, and even a theological, way to permit prostitutes to work in a socially upright order, insofar as prostitution is acknowledged as a necessary sin. Human lust, problematic though it is, is a "natural lust" (Aquinas cited in Wunderli 1981:83) in this interpretation of human nature, and prostitution — at least in some forms — allows for its containment. (It should be noted, however, that this position does not condone pleasure, even within a marital union: Aquinas argued that "a man who had intercourse with his wife solely for enjoyment was treating her as if she were a whore" [Brundage 1987:448], that is, presumably, as a woman who facilitates the base urges of a man.) Read through these early Christian theological dictums, permitting prostitution is the most morally appropriate direction the church can take, for it allows a singular outlet for sexual sin. The alternative would be far worse.
This seeming canonical consensus about the dubious but ultimately convincing worth of an institution based on sinful acts does not cut short the contestations around sex work, which goes well beyond the crimes of adultery and fornication (both of which are sex outside of marital unions, but neither involves financial transaction). Through the centuries, canonical lawyers and theologians continue to wrestle with the definitions of prostitution by trying to find the precise location of the immorality inherent in sex work. Anticipating Aquinas, who was worried about the effects on families and children when parents were not monogamous, Gratian's twelfth-century Decretum asserts that the defining quality of prostitution was promiscuity (Brundage 1989 [i976]:8i). Apart from the obvious questions about legitimate inheritance that are embedded in the morass of having multiple sexual partners — one of the material repercussions of promiscuity — were emotional complications. In the thirteenth century Cardinal Hostiensis suggests that with the public availability of whoredom or harlotry came notoriety, already a negative trait, and by the fourteenth century, Joannes Andrea argues that with a notoriously multiple sexual stance comes deception — an emotional corollary of promiscuity — and the possibility or indeed likelihood that men would be duped by a sex worker's feigned emotional availability, itself a crime in the lawmaking of Cardinal Cajetan. (These canonists' emphases on multiple partners and public display draw from Roman law, which — in contrast to the rules in the manor of Winchester — assumed that prostitutes would live in brothels.)
Here, with the worry on deception, we see the role of clients — and indeed the role of men (for male prostitutes do not seem to appear in these canonists' discussions, which are much more focused on subduing the natural lust of women) — enter the picture. The notion that a prostitute's true crime lies in the way her clients feel about her and their intimate interactions suggests that prostitution, in these canonical descriptions, may be as problematic for the way men are implicated in the problem of women's lustful nature as for the acting on lust itself. If women are seen as lustful creatures to begin with, which seems to be the case in medieval canonry (and arguably throughout history), prostitution is really no surprise to the canonists. (Brundage cites the frequent gloss on sex work as "an evil use of a bad thing" [1989 [i976]:85] — although it could as easily be seen, through the grudging acceptance Augustine and Aquinas endorse, as the good, or reasonable, use of an evil thing: prostitutes were already expendable.)
(Continues...)
Excerpted from The Spirits of Crossbones Graveyard by Sondra L. Hausner. Copyright © 2016 Sondra L. Hausner. Excerpted by permission of Indiana University Press.
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