God's Doodle by Tom Hickman

Author:Tom Hickman
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448137459
Publisher: Random House

THE NEUROTIC PENIS

All in the mind

CAN A MAN’S penis be stolen from him by sorcery? Once, such a fear seems to have been universal. It looms large in the folktales of preliterate societies. It appears in ancient Chinese medical texts. It was part of the European medieval mindscape, resulting in hundreds of witches being burnt at the stake for penis theft. In the Malleus Maleficarum, the fifteenth-century guidebook on witches and their ways, the German Dominican monk and witchfinder Jacob Sprenger asserted that witches

collect male organs in great numbers, as many as 20 or 30 members together, and put them in a bird’s nest, or shut them up in a box, where they move themselves like living members and eat corn and oats, as has been seen by many and is a matter of common report . . . a certain man tells that, when he had lost his member, he approached a known witch to ask her to restore it to him. She told the afflicted man to climb a certain tree, and that he might take which he liked out of a nest in which there were several members. And when he tried to take a big one, the witch said ‘You must not take that one, it belongs to a parish priest.’

Such was the pathological state of medieval thinking that witches were believed to have intercourse with the devil, whose penis was said by some to be at the rear and covered in scales, while others declared that it was forked or, indeed, that he had two, in either case for the purpose of simultaneous front and rear penetration. The devil’s ejaculate was reputed as cold as ice and exceeded that of a thousand men. Freud believed that the witch’s broomstick was really a metaphor for ‘the great Lord Penis’.

In the modern world, the delusional disorder of penis theft is largely confined to the countries of West and Central Africa. Those from Malaysia, Borneo and southern India and China have a related but different anxiety – the belief that it’s possible for their penis to shrink into their abdomen, which will cause them to die and become ghosts. Periodic epidemics of hysteria occur, sweeping through towns or cities or even entire countries. In a recent isolated instance in the Sudanese capital Khartoum, a rumour warned men not to shake hands with a ‘mysterious West African’, whose handshake melted genitals. Scores who thought themselves afflicted sought medical treatment. Alleged penis thieves in Africa are routinely hanged or set alight with petrol by angry mobs. But the mysterious West African was never found, which isn’t surprising: the rumour was a hoax – spread by text-messaging.

Anthropologists call penis panic a culture-bound syndrome; South East Asians call it kora: ‘head of the turtle’ in Malay. And from time to time kora packs outpatient departments with terrified men, as it did in Singapore during an unaccustomed spell of very cold weather in 1967. Cold naturally tightens the genitals. Hundreds of men were

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.