Herm today, gone tomorrow

What would you rather have stuck up on a pole  outside your house,  the photograph of a contemporary politician or the image of a god? I was going to write something about the election, but Herms seem far more entertaining. However as a sort of PS, didn’t you think that Mr Brown’s farewell was the most puke-inducing dollop of stage-managed lachrymosity since Gwynnie Paltrow’s Oscar award speech?

 The “Sunday Times reported on the 11^th  (no, not the first) of April that  the culturally-challenged police had seized a four foot phallus from a store in Yorkshire under the Public Order Act 1986. As these things are sacred to Dionysus,  I would suggest that the owner, Jason Hadlow has strong grounds for a claim based on religious discrimination. After all, dafter suits launched by the professionally disgruntled and  based on affronted “faith”, seem to be reported from our courts on a daily basis.

Notwithstanding that  the sacred phalli on Delos are photographed by many thousands of tourists a year, apparently a single member of the public complained about the Yorkshire organ, - and let’s face it “a single member of the public” can be relied upon to complain about anything on Earth. Of course all those thousands of  tourists may well have visited the site to look at the stone lions which have weathered to the extent that they look as though they have been modelled out of plasticine by a five year old, but it’s not the lions at which every touristic camera is pointed.

Again, it may be argued that a static phallus is far less a threat to public order  than a host of burka-clad women wandering through a shopping mall where they may not only be seen by hundreds of potentially “affronted” members of other faiths but are  never prosecuted. Clearly, once again the police are having a go at a “soft target” If I was a Greek ex-pat, I would definitely complain..

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The single uniting theme that runs through history is that one interferes with a Herm and his apparatus at one’s peril. The plods who arrested the Yorkshire phallus should bear in mind the dire fate of the Athenians whose Gods were mutilated in 415 BC and particularly that of Alcibiades himself  who was said to have personally wielded the lethal chisel[i]

The Romans more or less adopted the idea from the Greeks and mounted the phallus on a column with a god’s head at the top.  Unlike Priapus, so unabashed and so totally uncompromisingly a fertility God that his body was more or less entirely reduced to a gigantic penis, the deity  portrayed on the columns was more often Hermes.  These popular garden ornaments were known as “Herms” and although modest by classical standards, were somewhat blatant nevertheless. In particular their phalli were often designed to go “clack clack” in the wind to frighten the crows so the foolish complainant of Yorkshire should be thankful that she didn’t have one of these keeping her awake at night  One is reminded of  Horace’s Priapic satire  (1 :8)

I was once a fig-tree’s trunk, a lump of useless wood,

Till the carpenter, uncertain whether to carve Priapus

Or a stool, decided on the god. So I’m a god, the terror

Of thieves and birds: my right hand keeps the thieves away

Along with the red shaft rising obscenely from my groin .

I know it is traditional that the fourth/fifth line “nam fures dextra coercet obscaenoque ruber porrectus ab inguine palus….”,      is normally left untranslated on the grounds that only the classically-educated upper classes are sufficiently sophisticated not to fall over with an attack of the vapours upon reading it. However apart from the “single member of the public” in Yorkshire, I think these days we are better able to cope with phalli than with Latin text so I have given the  translation as it appears on the excellent website  http://www.poetryintranslation.com/PITBR/Latin/Horacehome.htm

should you  feel like researching further.  

It is virtually impossible for any one of my generation, educated at the end of two millennia of Christian–inspired shame and smut to envisage the Roman concept of guilt- free sex. Perhaps today’s teenagers are the first for centuries to take it in their stride and rather than tut-tutting, it may be healthier to say good luck to them provided we aren’t expected to pay for the consequences. However for those modern gardeners who would prefer not to be seen giving their Herm a little rub to make their sprouts grow, there are Terms. These unfortunate chaps have been emasculated, indeed those in Vinckboon’s Seventeenth century   “Susanna” , look positively androgynous, -  and  their name although similar, is derived from their marking the boundaries of a garden, thereby falling under the aegis of the god Terminus.. They are thus pillars with a deity on top, intended less to bring fertility to the garden than to provide good fortune to those travelling from its borders and beyond, which is why they are also frequently  found at roadsides. Lewis and Short’s standard Latin dictionary 1880 edition coyly  confuses the issue by defining “Herm” but only mentioning the head on the pillar, so apparently describing a “Term” not a “Herm”, but this is not necessarily the instance of Victorian prudery it initially appears. The extent to which the tutelary deities, Hermes and Terminus differ from one another is blurred, in addition mythologists seem to think that the attributes of Terminus were those of Jupiter until he became a God in his own right.

The basic divisions of  Priapus, wholly a phallic garden fertility deity acting under Bacchus; Herms, less well endowed but slightly more house-trained, looking after the fortunes of the family as well as their fertility under the auspices of Hermes/Mercury, and the emasculated Terms of Terminus generally working outside the domestic orbit breaks down time and again under closer examination.  Unfortunately, such an examination has  been neglected  for, since the eighteenth century schoolmasters  have preferred to concentrate their efforts upon  studies of syntax, rather than explaining the witty obscenities of classical authors. In so doing, they have given generations of students  a life-long aversion to the classics but on the other hand, their concern for our moral welfare has provided  endless amusement for the sarcastic writers of  our own days. An  example of the smudging of the lines between the deities is Walter’s suggestion[ii] that Herms rather than Terms were erected to wish travellers bon voyage at intersections and cross roads. Although I have seen little to back up this assertion, she may have a point in that it was Hermes who escorted travellers on their final journey to the underworld and could be expected to look after them at other times too. Against this, most of the shrines, pillars etc found at intersections were dedicated to Hecate, the Goddess of all dark things.. Whether she got the job because of the popular habit of gibbeting criminals at crossroads or whether the hanged were originally sacrifices to her, no one knows. Either way, a traveller faced with a mouldering corpse “Le soleil dessechiés  et noircis: pies, corbeaux, nous ont les yeux cavés, et arrachié la barbe et les sourcis” as the ever-cheerful Villon, himself reprieved from hanging, was to write in the mid fifteenth century,  would doubtless be assailed by worries wholly unconnected with fertility, -either his or the god’s. Instead , he would  feel in urgent need of a good-luck Herm, Term or whatever to send him on his way.

In spite of the blatant manner in which  the prototypic Greek Herms displayed their masculinity, Farrer[iii] points out that many Roman Herms were actually provided with cloaks and often portrayed society’s most desirable role-models notably at Welschbillig, Here many of the sixty eight busts represent philosophers and other idealised personalities, whose presence seems more to pre-figure the open-air philosophy schools of quattrocento Florence. than an exhortation to enjoy a  bit of rumpy-pumpy behind the shrubbery. It is a relief then, to find amongst all these sternly moralistic images  Venus herself. Obviously she lacked the necessary bird-scaring appendage so her invocation to the garden’s fertility is unequivocal..

The earliest Terms were little more than piles of rocks to mark a roadside and these were echoed millennia later in the earliest French “montjoies” which again are reminiscent of the  English commemorative  Eleanor crosses.  Crosses have a particular affinity with Herms in that the “arms” provided for hanging the god’s cloak on, would give a  cross-like silhouette. The Terms evolved into elaborate statues, and the tiny cairns or montjoies  into the magnificent structures which decorated the road from Paris to Saint-Denis, one of which appears in the “Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry”. Whether these have anything in common or whether they are  an  instance of convergent evolution is an interesting point for speculation.  The little structure in the Limbourg brothers picture looks more like an over-decorated toll booth or security man’s hut and fits in with the alternative term  “Garite” which equates to the medieval French “Guet”, or watch tower. It isn’t necessarily coincidental that at the height of their development these appear to be similar buildings to the no less elaborate pavilions known as “Gazebos” or “Garettas” at the intersections of paths in palatial medieval gardens. Harvey though is doubtful, suggesting that the structure and names were derived from the “Glorieta” of Moorish Spain[iv] rather than a Greco-Roman classical source  

A more common medieval practice amongst those who could not afford a full-blown pavilion was to  erect a small pillar at the intersection of paths in the medieval garden. Obviously no one would admit that it was a pagan fertility symbol though I suppose that the function of a talismanic insecticide may have been permissible, provided  it was regarded as “natural magic” rather than “Black magic”

 All this obfuscates the more interesting question of for how long did  Priapus and Herms survive?. The answer is not only  long enough for one of these exuberant deities to pop up in twenty first century Yorkshire, but he also raised his head in Renaissance paintings and literature, most notably in  the “Hypnerotomachia Poliphili”  of Colonna. The author was supposedly an early sixteenth century  gentleman in Holy orders, clearly demonstrating that you can never  keep a good herm down. This makes for a further question: where did Herms hide during the grim theocracies of the Dark Ages and of Medievalism? In fact they probably never went away, their worship carried on as before in the remote hills and valleys of the former Roman Empire. This theory is supported by the medievalist Frank Barlow’s  brief comment on Neckam[v] “Neckham (sic)  declines to describe the scarecrow (larva) and the masked image of Priapus -  the tutelary gods of the fields.....”  suggesting that although undescribed,  Priapus was happily keeping his end up during the thirteenth century. Moreover Kieckhefer[vi]  devotes some pages to the barely literate secular clergy who carried on celebrating pagan fertility rights uninterrupted by the Inquisition    A few badly written web texts suggest that, unable to stop women using their statues as magical  fertility aids,  the deities’ attributes were transferred  to Christian saints, in this instance St Fiacre, St Ters and St Foutin. Perhaps the ecclesiastics hoped that if they chose sufficiently obscure saints no one would take much notice. In this  context one is reminded of Claudius of Turin’s  comment “many folk worship images of saints after the fashion of devils….they have not left idols but changed their names”[vii] One of these changes on a practical level may have been the introduction of scarecrows not so much as sex toys for frustrated  housewives but as fertility aids  for the crops they were guarding, so that ”scarecrow” seems to be a polite euphemism for their true functions . A handsome one is illustrated under “October” in the “Très Riches Heures du Duc de Berry, who, in a token nod to medieval technology, (or bowdlerism)  has had his phallus replaced by a bow and arrow. Predictably , the birds ignore him and the sower looks thoroughly disgruntled about the birds flocking to the seed he is.spreading. A few years ago, members of the web-based Medieval Gardening Forum pointed out that the Latin word “Formido” translated by Lewis and Short   as “scarecrow” occurred in Latin texts such as Horace as well as Latin translations of the Bible and Apocrypha, most notably in Jeremiah 10 : 5 and Baruch 6 :70, the latter stating “for as a scarecrow in a garden of cucumbers keepeth nothing; so are their gods of wood” Well it wouldn’t, would it, if like the Limbourg brothers later “scarecrow”, it was intended to be something other than a bird scarer? Perhaps one of the medieval forum gardeners put her finger on it when she wrote “Looking for scarecrows in cucumber beds, the word that is used for scarecrow, at least in the bible is Greek 'probaskanion' which seems to be also glossed as a protective talisman. (like giving a pottery kiln a satyr-like face)” so could it be that the biblical “Formido” was something more than an inadequate bird-scarer, after all the use of  the word in this context doesn’t seem to accord with the infinitely more scary deities  with which the word is more usually associated,-  perhaps the terrifying “larvae” mentioned by Barlow. By the Middle Ages the “Larvae”  or returning “revenants” of the Romans had long since been replaced by other spooks so it is not altogether surprising that Neckam failed to comment on them and that the little archer of the “Très Riches Heures”  has excited little subsequent comment. That said,  scarecrows do bring to mind  Niketas Choniates’ description  of “impaled captives as swaying in the wind like scarecrows in cucumber beds”[viii] . It seems likely that Niketas was drawing on one of the  biblical texts above to give his analogy  some sort of immediacy, but  as in the quotation from Villon above, everyone was aware that corpses attracted rather than frightened crows. I suspect Grigson possibly hit on the explanation when he wrote of the threat supposedly made by a Priapus “Don’t come here and steal the fruit or the lettuces: if I catch you stealing the figs, it’s my weapon which will be stuck into your fig”[ix]Admittedly  since this remark is unreferenced, one wonders whether Grigson himself made it up or whether it was really a classical warning. Being ritually sodomized  as a punishment for profaning the god and his garden makes far more sense than a vain attempt to frighten a flock of indifferent birds. It is certainly something that people would have preferred not to talk about.. A further tantalising puzzle are the links between Neckam and Choniates who were almost exact contemporaries: can one read anything into the facts that Neckam was  a brother by adoption of Richard 1^st,  .England’s crusader king, and Choniates, embittered by his expulsion from Constantinople by the crusaders in 1203. Although Richard himself was dead by then, Neckam’s links to the military elite means that he may well have picked up on the story from a member of the returning army True, this may smack of “conspiracy theory” rather than sound research but it leaves me wondering why did Barlow, a precise academic write about something that wasn’t there unless he had something else at the back of his mind?

It would seem then  that  the early “scarecrows” were the linear descendents  of the Phoenician fertility gods who bequeathed Priapus his  bird-scaring function, but were also something far more sinister, for the Phoenicians were notorious for ritually eating their own children.   As the “Wisdom of Solomon 12 : 5” has it “ And those merciless murderers of children, and devourers of man’s flesh….parents that killed with their own hands” Impaling a captive on a fig tree seems an obvious preparation for chucking him on the barbie with a side dish of cucumber salad. Again, Wolschke-Bulmahn[x]  mentions an epigram on a statue of Hermes threatening nameless horrors upon  wayfarers who carelessly damage the garden he is guarding, thereby indicating that in his list of priorities, the gardens’ well-being comes way above his duties to travellers. Some things  like the Mysteries of Eleusis are more terrifying if left unsaid and “Formido” may be among them. The great universals,  the provision of food, sex and death, are for ever embodied in permutations of Herms and scarecrows

It all seems a long time ago now, but is it?  The next time you pass a tatty scarecrow, think of those guys armed with cameras and rifles in the movie “Dr No” and pass quietly by on the other side.