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North-west of Skye
by Islay McLeod
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There goes the wall. Photograph by Islay McLeod
Like a dark cloud hanging over my long gone childhood in far away California was one dreaded word – polio. That was years before Salk or Sabin. Our family’s revered President FDR Roosevelt had it. Children were coming down with it all the time.
My mother was terrified that I’d get it. Hence her absolute insistence that I thoroughly wash my hands after going to the toilet and before sitting down to eat. That was impressed upon me as if it were a religious ritual that must be faithfully carried out. So imprinted was I that the ritual duty and belief remains. Nowadays, however, the ritual testifies to the modern belief in the power of the classical goddess of health Hygieia, daughter of Asclepius, who has metamorphosed into hygiene.
Even today, when I venture into a public men’s room in, say, a library, museum, or office building, and I’m standing at the wash basin thoroughly rinsing and notice someone departing from a urinal or a cubicle and exiting without washing, I wonder if I should put my handkerchief on the door handle before leaving. Naturally, when I read Mary Douglas’s great book ‘Purity and Danger: an Analysis of the Concepts of Pollution and Taboo’, I understood immediately that purity and pollution rivalled good and evil as religious polarities.
From hand to mouth. Oral pollution was not something I conceptualised as a youngster, although some such transference must have taken place. My mother never threatened: ‘You say that again, and I’ll wash your mouth out with soap!’. That was a common parental expression against what was called ‘bad language’ when I was growing up. The idea behind the expression is interesting. Words can pollute the mouth. My mother didn’t have to threaten me because I was an oral prude. I used only the substitute swear words: ‘darn’ instead of ‘damn’, ‘heck’ instead of ‘Hell’, ‘gee-whiz’ instead of ‘Je-sus’. I think I first muttered ‘damn’ under my breath in my early teens. That taboo had been broken, but my transgression was rarely repeated.
Blasphemy is of interest to medievalists, which I became. In a strongly enforced religious culture like that of medieval Christian Europe, persistent blasphemers could face severe punishment. For instance, in the 1,377 statutes of Ascoli Piceno, the city’s patron saint St Emygdius is protected against blasphemers as are God and the Virgin. Offenders must suffer a fine, or, failing that, the cutting out of their blasphemous tongues.
Especially at risk were churchmen. Why? God and his saints were at the centre of their universe, invoked in prayer from day-to-day and especially on holy days. Their names were words of power, which of course they recognised. Oaths were sworn to God. Swear words indeed. The French called the English ‘goddams’ after their addiction to swearing. ‘In God’s name!’ still carries echoes of that now shadowy power.
So what has happened to blasphemy? The simple answer is that with the waning of belief, it has become obscenity. Swearing at present is priapic. These are the new words of power. The libido rules, okay? These are the words we hear when the genitalia speak. Has the commonplace cleansed the mouth of pollution? Is ordinariness the great neutraliser? Has the secularisation of ancient taboos become domestication? Perhaps obscenity, like tattoos, should be regarded as purely a matter of taste.
Gary Dickson is formerly a reader in history and is an honorary fellow at the school of history, classics and archaeology, University of Edinburgh
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