Betwixt The Sheets: The History of Sex, Scandal & Society - Pagan Ritual Nudity

Episode Date: September 10, 2024

Rituals are a big part of this funny human experience, aren't they?Whether that's morning rituals like making your bed... or pagan rituals that involve stripping down to your birthday suit for certain ceremonies.The importance of nakedness is a big part of it, too, that can help separate you from this world and bring you closer to nature, and other realms.What other ways have naked rituals played a part in our history? And are they still practiced today?Joining Kate is the fantastic friend of the show, Ronald Hutton, author of The Pagan Rituals of the British Isles, to help us find out.This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith. The senior producer was Charlotte Long.Enjoy unlimited access to award-winning original documentaries that are released weekly and AD-FREE podcasts. Sign here for up to 50% for 3 months using code BETWIXTYou can take part in our listener survey here.Betwixt the Sheets: History of Sex, Scandal & Society is a History Hit podcast. Hosted on Acast. See acast.com/privacy for more information.

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Sign up to join me in locations around the world and explore the past. Just visit historyhit.com forward slash subscribe. Hello, my lovely betwixters. It's me, Kate Lister. I am looking forward to another episode of betwixta sheets. But I have to tell you, this is an adult podcast spoken by adults to other adults about adulty things in an adulty way, covering a range of adult subjects, and you should be an adult too. And now that you've been given your warning, this is fair do's, this is naughty stuff coming your way. If you continue to listen and you get upset, well, frankly, tough t-h.

For the rest of you that are sticking around on with the show. We are deep in the new forest on the south coast of England in the late 1930s. Keep your voice down, though, as in a clearing just beyond these trees, Gerard Gardner, founder of the modern Wicker movement, is being initiated into a coven of witches he's just met. You can't see my face now, but I'm breaking the Fourth Wall flea bag style with a somewhat dubious look on my faith. The claims of this happening are disputed to say

the least. But soon after the alleged events, Garner would create the wicker movement, which gave power to things like the night, the moon, the feminine, wild nature and paganism. The patriarchy was thrilled. And one thing that the pagans love is a good ritual. And dating back through history, nudity has often been central to that. What importance did nudity have, I hear you ask. Well, let's get our kit off and find out. What do you look for a man? money of course. You're supposed to rise when an adult speaks to you. I make perfect coppents of whatever my boss needs by just turning a knob and pushing the funny.

Yes, social courtesy does make a difference. Goodness, for a beautiful time. Goodness has nothing to do with it, Derry. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets, the history of sex scandal in society. With me, Kate Lister. If you look back through religious history, you will soon discover that ritual is a central part of every single one of them. And it's surprising how often nudity will turn up in that. For example, in the early days of the church, baptisms were performed naked. And what other ways is nudity played a part in our

funny human rituals? Well, joining us today is the one and only and good friend of the podcast, Ronald Hutton, author of many fantastic books, including the pagan rituals of the British Isles, to help us Find out more about this fascinating history. Ceremonial robes at the ready. Let's do this. Hello and welcome back to Betwixt the Sheets. It's Ronald Hutton. How are you doing? Very glad to see you again, Kate. I think you might be one of my most favourite guests, you know.

You're so really kind. Thank you. That's true. We've had you on to talk about Christmas and witches and goddesses of love and war. And today we've got you here to talk about the history of ritual nudity, which is fascinating. It all kind of falls into a slightly disturbing pattern, doesn't it? Possibly. Possibly. But you've done other things on dragons, which is outside.

Yeah, so I think we've got a broad spectrum here. What brought you to studying ritual nudity? Because it is fascinating. And I'm curious as to, if there was a moment when you went, oh, I think I should look into this. Well, there wasn't a book on it, or rather there wasn't a book on it since one published by a German academic in 1911, which was entirely written in Latin in case the subject matter should get through to the general public and corrupt it. It was actually a very modest, very restrained and ponderously learned book. so I don't think it would have done very much damage had it been translated into the nacular. My own angle came from writing a history of modern pagan witchcraft, mostly known as wicker.

And I realized that although many wican covens celebrated their religious rights robed, quite a lot of them did so undressed. and that aroused my interest in historical context, because it seemed to be very unusual. And I then began to wonder how unusual it was. And then I realised that there wasn't a proper book on the subject. And that's why I set out to make a study of it. When you say ritual nudity, my mind immediately goes to the Wickerman and to sort of Hollywood representations of paganism. And I'm not sure why it does that.

Is there any truth to the fact that modern pagan cults, wikens, that some of them do practice in the nude, but is it a really big thing within these communities and why do they do it? It's not a really big thing in the sense that a minority of modern pagans work rituals in the nude. But it's quite an important minority. and it's confined mostly to those who identify with the figure of the witch, modern pagan witches. And to cut a rather long essay of mind short, the reason why modern pagan witches quite often work in the nude religiously, celebrate rituals and ceremonies in the nude, is that they are a magical religion. interested in working magic as well as honoring goddesses and gods. And across the world and throughout

history, there's been a really common idea that in order to work magic, it's good to get your kit off because that breaks your link with your everyday self. And it's true in literal terms that it's really easy and inexpensive and straightforward way for pagan witches to create an atmosphere of which the people involved are really certain they're not in the everyday world is if you enter a space of candlelight and incense, often quite intense mood music and often quite poetic, quite beautiful liturgy. And nobody is dressed. It's quite a shock to the visual system. Instantly, you know you're in a different space.

The every day the mundane is gone. Do you think that's why they do it? Is it just it's about creating a sort of a sense of othering and a sense of this is a magic space? Is there any other reason for doing it? That's really the reason for doing it. There is one role that ritual nudity has played in religion over the millennia.

And that's been an initiation rights. We're pretty sure from the wall paintings, for example, that the people initiated into the ancient Roman mystery religion of Mithras, which was a secret cult, reserved for those who are accepted by the community, rather like modern Freemasons, but much more intensely religious, focused on salvation

through making a friend of the particular God. And the initiates had to undress and then be redressed as part of exceptions. And there are much more famous religions in which this is the case and more endearing. One of them is Judaism, where for the Bar Mitzvah and the Bar Mitzvah, the Innisciate had to undress and take a ritual bath and then be reclothed. But also in early Christianity, where baptism consisted of undressing completely, being washed completely, and then being anointed on the body by oil at various different places,

by an officiating priest. So that's about, I suppose, that's marking the progression from one state to another, isn't it? That's like you've been born anew? Yeah, it's a pretty straightforward, powerful and understandable death and rebirth experience. That makes sense, because you're not born with clothes on, are you? That makes sense. When I'm thinking about the history of witchcraft, and maybe it's not even the real history, but the way it's been depicted in, I suppose, art and literature, they often seem to be in the nip. Like, if you look at paintings of witches and what happened at the Sabbath, and even from the witch trials themselves, they're always saying, yeah, I met the devil, we all got our clothes off and we danced around. That's not about a real. birth, is it? That's doing something else. No, it's about being transgressive. Uh-huh. Through mainstream Christian European culture, right down to the present day. If you want to signal to mainstream society that you're being naughty, you do two things. You get

your clothes off and you dance. And that's a sign that you're out of order. You are kicking over social conventions and probably having a great deal of fun. There's a special reason why witches are nude. They actually aren't very often in actual witch trials and the actual confessions forced out of people. Nudity is not very prominent. There's a practical reason in the early days why witches might be naked at a witches gathering to worship the devil.

And that is that they had to get there covering quite large distances. And so the idea arose in the mind. of the persecutors, which was then tortured out of the people arrested, that they flew through the air having rubbed themselves all over the body with a magical flying ointment. And that got them there. So they'd be undressed when they got there. But there are other ways of getting there, like riding on a demon, usually in the shape of an

animal. Obviously. So it isn't necessary to get undressed. The reason why a naked witches are so prominent in art, is actually a very simple and a pragmatic one, a practical one. And that is that, especially in Protestant Europe, northern Europe, there was something of an animosity against showing the female nude, especially showing pagan goddesses and nymphs,

who are the usual kind of ladies you can show naked and Western art. And so the way that artists got round this was to show naked, witches and to disapprove of them. And so it's the way, to a great extent, that one of the the classic forms of Western art, the nude, in this case largely the female nude and the male gays, got smuggled back into mainstream northern European art. Ah, I see. The question of nudity is always really interesting because we strongly associate nudity with sex, but they're not necessarily the same thing at all. You can be completely nude and it doesn't have any sexual contexts at all. Babies can be nude and sex can be about being dressed. When we're

looking at the history of witchcraft, how has nudity being used in this context? Is it linked to sex in these contexts? Is it they're being really naughty? Yeah. In the witch trials, it's linked to sex. in that one of the reasons why the people holding the trials aren't interested in nudity is that they want to convict the people they are pushing into confessing, the people they're trying to destroy, by getting them to confess to much more dreadful things, promiscuous sex, group sex, incest, child sacrifice and murder, literally baby eating. Wow.

Those two things together. the wild sex, cannibalism, and child murder are the big no-nows of, well, not just Western civilization, but any human society. Yeah. And so they're the great targets. So really nudity is an incidental byproduct of transgressive sex. It's all in the imagination. We have no evidence that anybody actually did this stuff.

No evidence whatsoever. Because I have heard it argued not entirely successfully, I would have said, that perhaps there was some kind of ancient wican witchcraft cults that people were being, and that's what led to the witch trials. Well, there's no evidence of an ancient cult that gets up to these things that would survive. What there is evidence of is that from ancient times onwards, when communities have really hated certain other people and wished to condemn them, they're accused of transgressive sex, child murder and cannibalism. The Romans accused the Christians of doing this stuff, and sometimes the Jews. When the Christians took over, they accused Christian heretics of doing this.

And when they invented the idea of a satanic witch conspiracy, They immediately transferred the same stereotype onto witches. Basically, transgressive sex, cannibalism and child murder, usually then eating the babies, are the things you accuse awful people of doing in order to dehumanise them. It doesn't really matter if you're in the nip at that point, does it really? It's pretty superfluous. It's pretty incidental. When did Wiccan start practicing in the nude then? The sense that I get from it is that it's an ancient order and it's an ancient religion of folk magic and worshipping nature.

But I get a sense from you that, no, that wasn't. So when did they start doing stuff in the nude? Well, what you've said about it is right up to a point in that it's a modern religion which draws heavily on a range of ancient images and a range of folklore. So there's lots of old stuff in it. There's stuff spanning thousands of years. but it appears in its present form in the 1950s. And in many ways it drives a battering ram against social convention at that time. And by making nudity something sacred and indeed making sex sacred,

it's flying in the face of a couple of thousand years of tradition, which have associated both of those things with the shameful, the evil. impure, be un-spiritual. It makes those things sacred. And Wicca really did this, meaning driving the battering ram against convention. It valued the feminine over the masculine, the moon over the sun, wild nature over cultivated farmland, the countryside over the city, and magic over formal religion. And that's in many ways observing the priority of the romantic movement, the great movement to the early 19th century.

But in all of those respects, it's going against a couple of millennia of mainstream Western tradition. So in these groups, how is nudity used? Because I'm fascinated by that it's, they can't just turn up with no clothes on. They can't just be having meetings

down the pub and nobody's got any clothes on. So how are they employing nudity? Do people go and disrobe and then come together and then there's some kind of ceremony? Germany, when is it being used in their meetings? It's something that occurs after people have met together in a private place. They will disrobe. I presume groups have different traditions and practical means of doing this.

And then they meet together in the sacred space. They make it sacred. One of the things about modern paganism is that it has very few full-time established temples and shrines. Instead, again, just as in magical tradition, there's a great emphasis on creating a space that is outside time and normality by casting a circle, which is pure magical tradition, calling in elemental powers like air and fire and water and earth, at special gateways and points on the circle like east and south and west and north. And carrying round fire, like incense and water around the circle, to clean it and make it feel magical and new.

And then you use words to dedicate that space to whichever goddesses and gods you're going to work with that night or whatever purpose you've created the space for. And taking off clothes is part and parcel the same process of establishing. a completely different space between worlds. I'll be back with Ronald after this short break. Wasn't it started by a guy who was also a naturalist? Is that true? Yeah, it was started by a retired civil servant from the colonies called Gerald Gardner, who was definitely a keen naturist,

and he believed in the healing powers of sunlight and fresh air. But there's not a lot of sunlight around in most pagan gatherings. because they're mostly hold in the evenings when people are off work or the work of the day is done. I think that Gerald was totally happy with people being naked as a naturist, a nudist. But if that was all that he wants to do, then he could do it really easily without any effort, just being part of a naturist club. True. Wicker is a really intense religion of deities, a goddess and a god who represent the natural world.

And it's quite hard work. You know, the rituals seem to be exciting, but they require a lot of input. So I think that Gerald being a naturist, you know, helps things along, but it's not actually the bedrock of this. That makes sense. I have heard it said that the shedding of clothes creates equality amongst the group, that it's about, you know, now we're all exactly the same in our fleshy vessels. What do you think about that? Does that hold for you? It would probably work for groups that believe in equality,

although I think quite a lot of, quite impressive jewellery tends to be worn by people. They're rarely entirely naked, plenty of jewellery. tattoos, sometimes cords around the waist from which people suspend things like wands or ritual daggers for making patterns in the air. These are often worn. The point is simply not to be every day, not to be normal and to throw away most clothing. The other thing that's problematic about equality is that some, by no means all, but quite a large number of modern pagan groups are quite hierarchical. People are initiated through three successive degrees in which people learn more and get allowed to do more. And there's usually somebody or a couple of people in charge.

So they're not actually founded on practical equality as much as a lot of groups are. They can be. When we're looking at nudity, is there a sense that, I remember when you were first on this podcast and you explained that the word pagan just means anyone that's not a Christian? is the idea of somebody practicing or worshipping in the nude, is that part of Christian propaganda that there is a history of just almost mocking anyone who's not Christianist, oh, well, they must just be running around in the nude, that there's something uncivilised about it that's used? There certainly is. But by the way, I define pagan not simply as anybody who's not Christian,

but as a practitioner of a religion that is based on the pre-Christian religions of Europe and the Near East. So that's the vital ancient input. There are lots of religions in the world that are not Christian. It would be quite distressed to be called pagan, like Islam and Judaism, whom I think would really freak out if I applied the P-word to them and they thought that I was applying it. Yeah, Christians have done exactly what everybody in the 2000 years odd of civilization, which Christianity is dominated, has to find as naughty. And they're always the two. You get naked and you dance. And this fixes paganism for good or bad in the Western imagination.

I once took part, well, a long time ago, I took part in a show called The Moral May. which is still going. It was a bit more heavy-handed in those days, which was 1995. And they wanted to talk about modern paganism. They couldn't get a modern pagan to come in. So they got me as the next best thing as an academic who'd studied modern paganism and seemed to understand it. And so I came on and clearly to the disappointment of the guy in the chair around the galaxy of Christian and other mainstream world religions who are represented, and the atheist, I suggested that pagans weren't actually particularly learid or anti-social or disturbing or dangerous. And the clearly rather irritated chair, a very famous chair, said at the end, oh well, in that case, I suppose

we have to tolerate these silly people dancing around naked in the rain. So immediately he'd fastened on the stereotype, even though at no point in the discussion had anybody mentioned pagans being people who were naked and danced around in the rain. He was reaching for a smear. Yeah. And that's the classic one. It is, isn't it? And I wonder where that comes from. That idea, because running, like dancing naked around a bonfire or dancing naked in the rain or anything. It's so fixed in our imagination of a kind of a quote, I don't know, like a silly religion almost. And I wonder, it's got to be earlier than the wicker man, that. Oh, it certainly is. It goes back to the Middle Ages. It goes right through the witch trials,

and it goes right through the Victorian view of paganism. Because basically, people who take their clothes off and then dance are people who are kicking restraint overboard. And it's a more harmless way, a silly way of doing things than taking off your clothes dancing and then having wild sex and committing blood sacrifices. At that point, you're kind of moving over the frontier of the silly into the shocking or the criminal. And so the dancing naked is the point at which those who simply want to mock paganism, stop. And it's quite effective. It's like a gateway. Yeah. It's like a gateway insult leading on to cannibalism and eating babies. Yeah, it goes on even to academic reviewers.

Oh, really? I published a big book on modern pagan witchcraft that came out in 1999. One of the first and most prominent reviews in The Times, two pages, was by a distinguished academic, subsequently made a dame. She was clearly irritated that I said some nice things about modern pagan witches. She loved it when I was critical of them, but if I was complimentary, then she was really offended. And she accused me of secretly wanting to dance naked with the witch's knife in my hand.

Obviously. Of course, that must be the case. Clearly the entire reason why I wrote a book instead of just doing that. Absolutely. Oh, dear. Had your research ever taken you to such an event just out of curiosity? Would you ever, have you ever been invited into a coven? Would you go if you were? I've visited lots of covens in the course of my research. That's how I was able to get access to all the historical records that are extant.

What happens in the coven, stays in the coven. We'll say no more about that. Well, what we can say is that I'm quite conventional and my morals and I'm physically quite shy. And I never had to do anything that I found disturbing. We'll back with Ronald after the short break. That is good to know. I'm going to let that cover everything from nudity to baby eating. So we'll just say that Ronald's never had to do any of those things. If we're looking at the history of Christianity and nudity,

Christianity has a very, very fraught relationship with nudity, doesn't it? It crops up in the Bible quite a lot. It's used in baptism. It seems to me that it's used as a punishment or a statement. of shame and vulnerability rather than worship? It certainly is, and it gets this from Judaism. If you know your Old Testament, nudity is shocking in that. And in the books of Moses, when there's detailed directions for worship,

there's a line about how the priest officiating, when he comes down the steps from the altar, must make sure that nobody can see up his robe, because that would be defiling. It's quite, you know, this is serious stuff. Yeah, yeah, absolutely. There's a ban on it. And a terrific culture war was set up in the Jewish homeland

when Greeks took it over after Alexander the Great swept the known world. The Greeks brought in their gymnasia, these places where adult men would go and exercise naked. and the Hebrews were absolutely appalled. The Greeks couldn't see their problem and nor with the Romans. So this is a minority view in the ancient world, but it becomes mainstream with Christianity. And Christianity packaged nudity with sex

and was very down on sex. Celibacy was regarded as being the ideal Christian condition for centuries until it became obvious that the world was not going to end as soon as had been expected. And monogamous sacramental marriage got canonised instead as the optimum form. Tell me about Conan the Bashful, because that's a fascinating story. Yes, it is. It points up the fact that early Christian baptism was totally in the nude for both sexes. and the officiating priest had to touch the body, the naked body of the person being baptized, to anoint it with oil, to consecrate it.

Now, the rule said that the priest had to do this, and if it were at all possible, if he were baptizing a woman, he should get a Christian woman already baptized to help him. So it wasn't a one-to-one, there'd be no suspicion. And there's a parable, an affecting story of an early Christian priest in Palestine called Conan, Conan the Bashful or Conan the embarrassed, who found himself to his horror actually having to baptize a beautiful young woman without a woman being present to assist and to act as a chaperone. and he was tempted to run away from the job rather than face it. And he found his way blocked by an angel that made the sign of the cross over his genitals and rendered Conan permanently impotent, after which everything was fine.

So there's a happy ending. Wow. Wow. That's extreme. That is, isn't it? Yeah. That's just we'd rather be permanently impotent than touches. nude woman without another woman being present? Yeah, without losing the fear completely, you're going to get turned on.

Wow. Christianity clearly has quite a difficult relationship with nudity, but if we're talking about ritual nudity, nudity being used in religions as a form of praise, does that exist in your research, or is it all more modern than that? Have you found examples of cultures and groups around the world that do practice? in the nude, apart from Wiccan? No. With the possible exception of voodoo,

which does, although I haven't checked the sources, does seem to have a tradition of doing this in the 19th century. And that, I think, to me, is very revealing because voodoo is another rare case of a magical religion, like Wicca, and older than Wicca is in its modern form. Otherwise, you do find nudity in initiation into religions, as I've said. But otherwise, you don't find any religions in the world in which the members regularly practice the ordinary rituals, the ceremonies, collectively in the nude. What about something like tantra?

Tantra, I know much less about Tantra. But tantra is not a religion. It is a tradition within a religion, which is Hinduism, which in some forms of tantra, and Hindus are very, very certain that I must say just some forms of tantra. People practice sacred sex, sometimes allegedly in a group in the sense that a number of couples meet together. undress, sit in a circle, and then consecrate commonly the sex that the couples are then going to have as couples afterwards. It's not like a group orgy of the classic imagined kind. Okay. Okay. It's not a religion, is it? But it's for some people, it's a spiritual practice. It's a very important spirit. It's a consecration of sex to which ritual nudity is incidental.

What about something like in ancient Egypt, because you often see the images of the nude gods, or does that not translate to how people would have worshipped them? They're not nude in Egypt. They wear see-through stuff, and it's Greece. Greece, of course. Do they worship naked? Nope. They liked their deities, particularly their male deities, to be naked, as a sign of not being human.

So it's a great guide. If you see a naked figure in art, it's not a human one. unless it's an athlete. Ah. Or somebody engaged in gymnastic exercises. Or it's a warrior, a hero and a legend. You reserve nudity for special things in Greece. In the Near East, in Syria and Palestine,

there's a tradition of goddesses being nude and facing the viewer with upraised hands and indeed jewellery necklaces. These images have been quite influential. on modern paganism. So there's a tradition of divinities being nude, but not of worshippers. What about something like the Lupercalia in Rome? Were they nude when they were doing that? And also, is that the origin of Valentine's Day, as I've read?

No, it's, Lupercalia is 15th of February, so it's next door to Valentine's Day. But Valentine's Day is a custom that appears in late medieval England. and the lupacalia are in ancient Rome. And they consist of a bunch of aristocratic young men getting together in a cave in the centre of Rome, sacrificing a goat and daubing themselves of goat's blood, and then running around the streets of Rome with leather straps, dressed in leather jock straps,

which can't have been terribly comfortable, and hitting women to make them fertile. It's supposed to be a blessing. Right. Okay. To religious people, it has a dividend. You might actually have the child for which both of you have been longing. But it's not quite nudity. So final question then.

We're bringing it right up to the modern day. And I'm really surprised to hear that there isn't evidence of people actually worshipping in the nude. I really thought that there would be. But do you think that we can ever bring it back? Not that it was there in the first place, But do you think that we could get it going? Do you think that we could bring nude worship into mainstream religion? Or is it just, we're past that by this point?

There's no point for it there. It's never been there worldwide. Mainstream religion is where people who look like everyday people get together to do something that's not every day, which is confront the divine, often assisted by professional clergy or part-time clergy, who are in special dress to consecrate them and set them off. The whole point about magical religion like wicker and probably voodoo is that it sets people off from the normal and every day.

It makes them special in order to work magic. Yeah. And if anyone's listening to this and they thought, I'd quite like to go to a coven and see what all that is about, as somebody that has attended a few of these, what would be your advice to anyone who's... who's thinking, he would like to explore more about modern wicker and being nude in covens? The answer is you probably know a witch, even if you don't know it, so ask around.

And there are plenty of links on the internet to organisations like the Pagan Federation and the Children of Artemis. And there are plenty of occult bookshops and sellers of ritual impedimenta for New Age and pagan ritual of a lot of towns, just ask around there. Ronald, thank you so much for talking to me today. You have been wonderful as always. That's very, very kind of you, and you've looked after me, Kate, as always.

Thank you for listening, and thank you so much to Ronald for joining me. And if you like what you heard, please don't forget to like with you and follow along wherever it is that you get your podcasts. If you'd like us to explore a subject, or maybe you just wanted to say hello, then you can email us at betwixt at historyhit.com. We've got episodes on everything from the history of cottaging to Viking beauty standards, all coming your way. This podcast was edited and produced by Stuart Beckwith.

The senior producer was Charlotte Long. Join me again betwixt the sheets, the history of sex scandal and society, a podcast by History Hit. This podcast contains music from Epidemic Sound.