Why Real Priests Don’t Go Hunting

Peter Harper, Smoke Signals #25, May-June 1997

Well, kind of. I remember that, when I was training to become a missionary priest (!), we were told repeatedly that we should never consider hunting either for sport or for food. Hunting was most emphatically to be left to the lay brothers. And we were repeated the examples of many good fathers who had been gored by wounded water buffaloes during hunting expeditions. How the buffalo could distinguish between a priest and a lay brother was, however, never satisfactorily explained. In fact, the old Codex of Canon Law (Can. 138-141) did prohibit priests from indulging in hunting, as it did from carrying arms, becoming surgeons, serving as executioners-hangmen, joining the army, participating in murder trials... What did all these prohibitions have in common?  They were about shedding blood!  Priests should never shed blood...

The Trades of Blood

In many callings, the contact with blood is a daily occurrence; just think of surgeons. In England, surgeons are a race apart from physicians and indeed would never use the title of doctor. They have traditionally been associated with barbers  - the men with the sharp knives and razors - and their profession actually took off only during the Napoleonic Wars, when the megalomania of the Little Corsican Corporal provided them with unlimited material to practice on, in the guise of legs and arms to chop off. But human blood has become a very dangerous substance indeed, and all those dealing with it must now take elaborate precautions. Even dental hygienists use latex gloves and surgical masks and ruin what was essentially the only legitimate way older men like myself could be fussed about by a young woman. But the latex barrier has eliminated that. Happily, some of the hygienists have real beautiful eyes.

Butchers too have refined their art. They are seldom the persons who kill the animals, and even in slaughterhouses, the killing is spread over a number of persons (as in a firing squad) so that the actual killer cannot be strictly pinned down. The role of the slaughterhouse is to transform flesh into meat, calf into veal, pig into pork... and this is best done by draining the animal of its blood. Though blood can in some instances become food, as in blood-pudding, or even medicine (in olden days anaemics would go and drink it directly from the dying animal!), it is on the bloodless flesh, a.k.a. meat, that the butcher's art is exercised. Notice also that we eat only herbivorous animals, rarely predators (wolves, minks, lions...) and never pets (except at the proverbial Chinese restaurant; actually no one would dream of serving Rover or Felix to the family; this would be somehow incestuous). It is as if by becoming meat, flesh had lost its soul (become de-animated) and its connection with the animal world and become somehow associated with the world of plants -  think of this next time you order cornfed chicken.

The Black Blood of the Hunt

Hunting is a different business altogether, and there is no civilised way of doing it, despite all the rituals, because hunting brings out the "savage" in man. Notice, I write man, because women seldom take pleasure in it. And men rarely want them around... at least not the women who happen to be their wives. Which reminds me of a story:  there was a hunting club near our summer place in the Laurentians belonging to twelve Montreal physicians. They met there and had great sport, until early one Sunday morning their wives came up upon them unexpectedly and found them sporting in bed with some of the local lasses... and a number of partnerships in the club came up for sale.

You will object: what about Diana the huntress queen? Do notice that she is an eternal virgin and remember how harshly she treated Actaeon for having seen her beauty, and how dearly Orion paid for the common double sin of hunters, excessive killing of animals and raping of maidens. The hunting and/or soldiering maidens of fable often tend to be somewhat androgynous, and take on these male attributes at the price of losing their femininity, as did the legendary Amazons. Even St. Joan of Arc is always represented dressed in male attire and she was said to eat like a man, pouring wine into her soup ("faire chabrol").

Hunting generates a real fever (Jagdfieber) or fury in its aficionados as the fall season sets in. And the illness can only be cured by the kill and the shedding of the black blood of a rutting stag or moose. The Church has attempted to recuperate some of these barbarous undertakings, and the elaborate rituals associated with the feast of St. Hubert on November 3rd are a witness to this: the so-called Hounds' Mass accompanied by the peals of hunting-horns and the howls of the beasts, the holy bread (pain bénit) fed to the dogs, the first stag deposited on the church steps... There even used to be a solemn St. Hubert's Mass in Montreal, with hunters, horns and hounds, celebrated each year by Bishop Chimichella at the RC cathedral, but I am not sure it still is.

Hunting remained a dangerous sport. The contact with the black blood (rich in black bile) of wild animals would affect the hunter and render him melancholic (literally "black biled" or as Victor Hugo put it "enjoying the pleasure of being sad"). Melancholia could lead to genius and it increased the sexual powers immensely, particularly when the hunter ritually drank some of the blood of the stag or boar, ate some of his organs raw, such as the liver, the heart or the testicles, and cut out the penis bone (Priapus bone). But an excess of black bile generated Heracles' madness and turned the hunter into a savage, a wildman, eventually a werewolf, and in the end gave him rabies. The werewolves or lycanthropes longed for human blood and sex, and attacked lone women who ventured into the forest. They were addicted to raw meat (flesh) and barked like dogs ("maladie de l'aboi"). Such mad persons used to be  excluded from society and were often killed by strangulation as late as in the 19th c. (Balzac). Even dead they were a menace and were thought to roam from their graves, unless a stake was driven through their hearts! Remember Dracula!

Men’s Blood, Women’s Blood

Men and women entertain quite different relationships with blood. In men, blood becomes visible only in traumatic instances, such as accidents, crimes, duelling, sacrifices, murders... It somehow nearly always foretells death. In women, however, blood flows regularly and naturally in the menses, following a lunar cycle. Its absence or presence mark the different ages of life. It is a sign of life and fecundity, rather than of death. Still, women's blood is rarely seen as positive, but rather as impure. The woman is fecund but impure, and somehow fecund because impure...

Why this should be has been the focus of much speculation. There is a close relationship between the notions of sacredness and impurity; and indeed the Latin word "sacer" means both sacred and horrible, as does our English word "aw(e)ful".

Blood partakes of these notions because it sits at the limit of two realms or worlds. When blood flows, it leaves one realm to enter another, and this is always interpreted as a magical moment, considered with awe, fear, and disgust. The fact that women bleed without trauma makes them unusual, magical, and dangerous... and hence impure and to be avoided. It was therefore thought that menstruating women had magical powers (because while they menstruate, the laws of nature are superseded -  blood which should naturally stay inside flows out!). That is why menstruating women tarnish brass, ruin mayonnaises, sour wine, ruin honey-hives, flop whipped cream...

Menstrual blood was said to be black for it had an excess of black bile. If it was not evacuated in the menses, it would cause severe problems of melancholia in women and eventually make them mad. In men, the black blood was thought to accumulate in the hemorrhoids, hence the use of a lancet and/or leeches to remove the blood. A common prescription for the treatment of melancholia was frequent sexual intercourse, for it was well known that men who have no or little sex rapidly became melancholic and dogs rabid. The combination of black bile and warm weather during the dog days often increased the sexual appetite of women to the extent that they often became "devourers of men". The magical element  was particularly evident in witches who while no longer menstruating because of their usually advanced ages nevertheless had red eyes and redheads who were thought to menstruate constantly, while being endowed with unusual sexual powers.

Leviticus 15 forbids sexual relationships during menstruation, "if any man lie with her at all, and her flowers be upon him, he shall be unclean seven days."  A dog eating a menstruating woman's "flowers" would become rabid. It was widely held that redhead and/or freckled children had been conceived during menstruation, and since Christians did not follow the Biblical prescriptions they had a greater number of such children than did Jews. Others traced the origin of leprosy (also rare in Jews) ultimately to conception by a menstruating mother, hence to contact with soiled blood; a cure was sought by the opposite treatment, i.e. contact with pure blood -  that is why the leprous Emperor Constantine was said to have killed 3000 children to secure their innocent blood to bathe his blemished skin.

But menstrual blood could also have beneficial powers: in Scotland, it was said to protect cattle from the Evil Eye. Pliny writes in his Natural History that menstruating women running with bare buttocks through fields infested with beetles effectively chased the pests away.

Another dangerous moment for men was that of the first intercourse with a new bride, when the breaking of the maidenhead often drew blood. So fearful were men of this situation that the deflowering of the new bride was sometimes left to the local lord or squire in what was called the "right of the first night" (droit de cuissage, jus primae noctis). Noblemen, typically mighty hunters, were said to have "blue blood" (as seen through their whiter skin) or "red blood", that is a blood of better quality than ordinary people. Both characteristics allowed them to feed with impunity on venison and other dark meats and only they typically wore fur with the hairs pointing outward. They were therefore immune to black blood and could face the first night's blood better than their subjects... or so did they have them believe. An alternative practice was to postpone the first intercourse for a few nights after the wedding, in the so-called Tobias nights: in the Book of Tobit, the son Tobias did not know his wife Sara until the fourth night, because the evil spirit Asmodeus had killed her 7 previous would-be husbands and the devil had therefore first to be exorcised by ritual ("the ashes of the perfumes" and "the heart and the liver of the fish") and prayer.

Man is born in blood and must die in blood. In the not so distant past, birthing was the business of women, and only they saw the baby come forth in blood. But now reluctant husbands are conveyed to the great arrival... and often the whole family as well as the event is minutely recorded in photographs and on video. In the Middle Ages, the interruption of the menses, which heralded the birth of a child, was thought to indicate that the blood, instead of flowing, was being concentrated to form the foetus. The remaining blood at birth was interpreted as soiled. The new mother therefore was considered impure for 40 days (the lent of impurity), but twice as long if the child was female (double impurity). The traditional place for birthing was in the stable or the barn, not only in remembrance of that of Our Lord, but because it was a place out of the way of the rest of the family and because it was often the place where the child had been conceived; there was little intimacy in Medieval households and lovers often repaired to the barn for their love-making.

The Smell of Blood

There is a strange tradition which holds that the Blood of Christ is sweet-smelling. That is in sharp contrast with ordinary human blood, which has an acrid smell, as do most other body humours (urine, bile, sweat, tears, phlegm, pus...). In fact, most of us are disgusted by our own body fluids and all the more by those of others. When we speak of body odour (BO) it is rarely in a positive way.

Scientists now tell us that we are wrong, and that we should be paying more attention to body odours. Just take, for instance, the renewed interest in "armpit research". In recent years, there has been a lot of studies on the vomeronasal organ, a set of small bodies on the floor of the nasal cavity and set close to the vomer bone. The organ is apparently sensitive to pheromones or semiochemichals (actually steroid compounds such as estratetraenol produced in females and androstadienole in males) secreted by the skin of persons of the opposite sex, and therefore forms an hitherto unrecognised "sixth sense". These chemicals are generally odourless, at least until the bacteria get at them and transform them into the musky stench of perspiration. They are produced in great quantity in some body areas, such as the groin, the armpits, the breasts, the navel,  generally where growths of body hairs serve as wicks to disperse them into the surrounding atmosphere. The chemicals produce a sense of well-being in persons of the opposite sex... and explain (in part) why most men feel great when reclining on an aroused woman's breast... and vice-versa. So think of all you are losing when you shave your armpits and douse them with anti-perspirant aluminium salts (which probably also further your Alzheimer!) to make yourself odourless. You can actually buy perfumes called Realm and Lydia (Erox Corp., USA) which incorporate these semiochemicals, but beware, some scents, such as Musk-2 and Athena contain pheromones from pigs, such as androstenol and androstenone, which are apparently inactive in humans, and which you may not really want to wear for your next visit to the farm!

Plant vs. Animal Odour 

In the Incarnation, Christ the true God became true man, but also true sacrificial animal (Lamb of God). His Blood was thought to be perfect, just as Adam's had been before the fall:  in Medieval humoral medicine, this meant 4 parts blood, 3 parts phlegm, 2 parts yellow bile, and 1 part black bile. In other people, the balance was wrong and much of the work of the physician was to try to restore the equilibrium by blood-letting, enema, leeches... Blood-letting was generally followed by a good drink of red wine, the perfect food for restoring the blood. Still, the balance could never be perfectly achieved, for humans were sinners and this was reflected in their humours. Indeed, blood-letting was often accompanied by confession, to try to cure jointly the body and the soul.

Christ's Blood is given the characteristics of plant sap and it takes on its sweet smell. The "vegetable" proprieties of the Blood of Christ are closely mirrored by the use of wine in the Sacrament. From this transmutation of the animal into the plant world arises the image of the winepress as a figure of the Passion:  as the plant (the grapes) are crushed, they exude their sweet-smelling juice,  so Christ sheds on the Cross His sweet-smelling Blood. Thus the New Testament vegetable sacrifice of an agricultural society replaces the Old Testament animal sacrifice of a pastoral society;  but remember that God rejected Cain's offering of the fruits of the earth only to accept Abel's animal sacrifice. (...)

Blood and Priesthood

The mysterious relationship with blood and priesthood has other intriguing dimensions.  

First, priests were forbidden from shedding blood in ordinary life, because of their role as the shedders of the Blood of Christ in the Holy Sacrifice of the Mass. It is as if a person can only suffer so much contact with blood in what the French call "le cumul du sang" (the surfeit of blood).

Secondly, the prohibitions against priests shedding blood as hunters, surgeons, soldiers... also applied in traditional societies to women, on the basis that women already had a mysterious connection with blood through their menstruation and should not indulge in more, again on the same principle.  

Thirdly, because of these shared prohibitions, priests got somehow assimilated to women. Add to this the priest's celibacy, and you can understand better the suspicion with which he was and is often treated by other men.

Finally, the priestly role has many feminine dimensions:  the long dress, the frills, the lace... the nurturing and suckling imagery of the Eucharist... the birthing dimension of Baptism... These are all roles traditionally vested in women. And many feminists (e.g. Rosemary Radford Ruether. Why males fear women priests. Witness 63:19-21, 1980) have argued that male priests are afraid that female priests would challenge the feminine dimension of their traditional role. If this is so, it may explain why the opposition to women priests is greater in churches which see the Mass as a sacrifice and the priest as the sacrificer and quite absent from churches in which preaching is the main office of the minister. That menstruating women should be excluded from the sanctuary and the priesthood is thus not inconceivable in such a frame of mind.  

Consider finally the relationship between Christian virgins and blood, not only in their martyrdom which is generally a very bloody affair, but also in their emaciated ways of life of fasting and deprivation, which eventually provoked amenorrhea, hence the loss of the menses. A contrived reference can be made to Christ's curing of the woman suffering from an issue of blood:  somehow He liberated her from her impurity, while letting himself being touched by her and becoming impure by association. It is as if being a virgin martyr cured the natural blood-impurity of women by substituting to it the blood-relationship of men, in which blood flows through wounds. Somehow, it is as if women cannot really achieve sainthood without in a way becoming like men...

The heyday of Blood worship in Christianity was the 13th c. when the Lateran Council defined transubstantiation, King St. Louis of France built the Sainte-Chapelle to house the holy Crown of Thorns, St. Francis of Assissi received the stigmata or marks of the Passion in his own flesh, and everyone read eagerly the story of Parsifal and his search for the Holy Grail... The devotion reappeared in the 18-19th c. as the cult of the Sacred Heart, culminating in the construction of that other Parisian monument, le Sacré Coeur. But, I suppose, that is a topic for another day.