The origin of the word "bugger" is actually not only tied in with some interesting history, but it highlights early mass political movements and just why the church has been so opposed to "unnatural acts" in the past few hundred years.
The OED is beautifully vague about the meaning of the word, but it does give the correct etymology: "bugger" < MF "bougrer" < MF/LL "Bougre," a Bulgar.
Here's the story: In the 11th century or so, a heresy (the Albigensians, aka the Cathars, aka the Bulgars because of their place of origin) cropped up and started to spread across Europe like wildfire. The theological content of the heresy was that the material world was evil, a creation of the devil (and yes, this idea was recycled from the Gnostic concept of the Demiurge) and that Christ was never a material man, so his physical death on the cross was meaningless and the veneration of the symbol is idolatry.
OK, this is what theologians talked about, but the man in the street - and this was a movement of the poor, by the way - understood none of this. The politics of this was a response to the horrible economic situation, the rising gap between rich and poor (and when "rich" means "feudal lords" and "poor" means "serfs," this can get pretty extreme) combined with the increased ease of travel and communication between cities - after the peace treaties of the early 11c stopped most of the internal wars in Europe for a while, and everyone got together to fight Crusades against the Muslims, it was suddenly possible to move around in Europe, and a bunch of serfs were wondering just why they were chained down to their estates.
So the meaning of the heresy was this: First of all, the physical world is evil - not a surprising thing to think if you're an 11th-century serf, but it was in direct contradiction to what the Church was telling everyone, that this is exactly the way things are supposed to be, and that the current political setup is an Earthly mirror of a divine plan of rulership. Second, Christ was not physical - thus his death on the cross was not real - thus his investiture of Peter was meaningless as well, and so priests should have no authority over the souls of men.
Basically, this turned into a mass popular movement in which serfs and peasants of various sorts formed into giant groups and travelled across the countryside, acknowledging no authority of lords or priests, living essentially as mendicants (since they had no real employment) and generally screwing with the medieval economy. The Church obviously really didn't like this, and they got wiped out in a particularly bloody manner. This was really the first major heresy war. (I should say that the Cathars turned very, very nuts towards the end, and got amazingly bloodthirsty themselves - nobody was very sorry to see them go by the end of this)
So anal sex mixes in to this because of another belief of the Cathars: Since the physical world is evil, to bring more things into the physical world is wrong. Phrased another way, the Cathars believed in birth control, something which the Church was fervently opposed to at the time because they needed people to do things like fight on the front lines against Vikings and Muslims and so on. Unlike some other heretical sects, who practiced abstinence, the Cathar doctrine suggested that nothing you do physically could be sinful - they preached free love and birth control, which in those days (pre-pill, pre-condoms of any useful sort) meant you just had to find another orifice.
Which is why the Cathars - or Bulgars - got associated with anal sex, and so the word "bougrer" entered the vernacular. So the next time you're involved in anal sex, whether giving or receiving, just think back for a moment and remember that what you're doing is one of the most radical acts of political protest against the power of the medieval church.
(Incidentally: I think that this may be the origin of the Church's opposition to "unnatural acts." Can anyone back or refute this statement?)
October 13 2002, 22:42:01 UTC 13 years ago
OK, more carefully: The Cathars definitely were a large-scale phenomenon with some very powerful political backing, ultimately those people who would profit from a decline in the power of the various lords and so on which the mobs opposed. But ultimately they did attract large populist followings, in the sense that many of the large mobs that went across the countryside identified themselves as Catharist; what the theologians would have thought of this was another matter. It's these mobs who ultimately led to the word bugger, rather than the nobles. (AFAIK)
The "perfecti" were a popular notion among the Cathars, and to me it sounds like Donatism revisited; perfect priests who by virtue of their spiritual level were entitled to grant absolution etc in ways which ordinary priests (by Catharist ideology) couldn't. But of course the bulk of the populace wanted nothing to do with this, and to the mobs freed from the constraints of their ordinary lives (what one of my profs would call a "liminal environment") celibacy certainly wasn't going to be sold...
But the extent to which they actually practiced buggery is, in fact, a mystery. They were certainly accused of it often enough, and general sexual libertinism seems to have been the word of the day among the mobs, but their association to a particular orifice is difficult to document.
On the subject of Church opposition to homosexuality, though, I can suggest a source: The "Book of Paradise" (I can dig up the editor etc somewhere) is a handbook of how to be a good ascetic monk, written in chunks from the 4th through the 10th centuries, and is basically two volumes of stories of various great ascetics. Since most of the text is concerned with their temptations and avoidances of sin, it seems like a good place to check what sorts of sins are most forbidden. So one day I got very bored and went through the text and surveyed for this... homosexual and heterosexual intercourse are railed against with more or less equal frequency, and interestingly in more or less identical language. No particular tropes of condemnation emerged which were unique to either. I think this is good evidence that the people who were writing this text (who represented both the most extreme ascetics in Christianity, for the 4th-century writers, up to much more moderate monastics for the 10th-century texts) didn't see much of a difference.
(Actually, the big temptation that got the most text space - by something like a factor of two - was monks being tempted by food. I guess that's not so surprising for people who are living in caves and eating grass or what-not. Some of those early ascetics were nucking futs.)
October 14 2002, 01:31:46 UTC 13 years ago
This is, of course, almost-but-not-quite what Catholicism has: an elite group of holy men and women who don't succumb to the temptations of the flesh. Now it used to be (as late as the 11th c., and I suspect later) that the official Church view was that the life of a monk was the desirable thing, and that the laity were weaklings and sinners and so forth for not having the resolve to not have sex. Again, this was the church thinkers talking, and probably didn't affect the way parish priests and so on acted. It wasn't really until the late 11th c. that the church really hit upon a good way for lay people to participate in the life of the church. This was, of course, by participating in the First Crusade, and it's a mark of how much a need for this was felt that you then get these so-called "People's Crusades" (which probably contained a lot of knights, actually, but I'm on a roll here)which are, in a lot of ways, very similar to the marauding bands of peasants and so on you get in Italy in the 14th c.
All of which is by the way, of course; the big difference between the Cathar perfecti and Catholic priests (I don't think the perfecti conducted services, but they were clearly seen as being the "spiritual leaders") is that the perfecti rely on their personal holiness, while of course priests rely on their ordination. A priest can be the worst sinner in the world, but still give sacraments, because his personality doesn't affect his juju. This is another common feature between the Cathari and the wandering-mob types: one of the "errors" of the heretical groups who arose from the Spiritual Franciscans was to claim that priests who were in a state of sin could not effectively give sacraments.
I think this is good evidence that the people who were writing this text (who represented both the most extreme ascetics in Christianity, for the 4th-century writers, up to much more moderate monastics for the 10th-century texts) didn't see much of a difference.
Yeah, for monks. For lay people? Even "moderate monastics" don't think that monks are supposed to have sex.
ultimately those people who would profit from a decline in the power of the various lords and so on which the mobs opposed.
I don't know about that... in many cases, these are the immediate temporal lords of the Cathar population. I really don't think southern French Catharism was the kind of populist movement you describe. It seems to have been very strong among the urban middle class, and to have included a lot of lords (mind you, everybody's always willing to believe that they're poor and oppressed, no matter how wealthy they are - and the rich probably hated getting their money jacked by the Pope as much as the poor). The lines weren't always fixed, either: Raymond VI (all counts of Toulouse are called Raymond) started out with the Crusade, then switched sides, Pedro II started out trying to mediate, then jumped in. I don't doubt that there were elements of populism and anti-clericalism, but I think that the Albigensian heresy is more complex than that, involving among other things the search for a distinctive religious expression of the cultural identity of Languedoc.
the thing is, of course...
October 14 2002, 02:33:59 UTC 13 years ago
Jesus. Replying to my own posts.