International Clitoris Week on The ASpoonfulOfSuga Blog: Day 2: Gothic Cathedrals, Hunchback & the Clitoris

International Clitoris Week on The ASpoonfulOfSuga Blog: Day 2

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Given the history of the Church it would be surprising that I would take you here to celebrate the clitoris, but I have gone to church to pick up women so it’s not too far-fetched. But I am not just taking you to any church. I’m taking you to a Gothic cathedral. Gothic cathedrals are very interesting for a variety of reason. Deep within the Book Le Bossu de Notre–Dame (The Hunchback of Notre Dame), Victor Hugo has dedicated a whole section to the Gothic Cathedral known as the Books of Stone,  but I will not get into that esoteric lore and deep philosophical reflections on the essence of human communication and conscious evolution through time. You don’t come to a blog with a guy sitting on a toilet to here that kind of stuff.

What I will tell you is that Cathedrals and the Cave paintings at Lescaux and Altamira were places of initiation, so both places are centred around the idea and theme of rebirth. The openings to the cave of initiation were always much smaller in comparison to the vast cavernous spaces inside. This was to mimic, when the initiate came out, being born a again , aka passing through the birth canal out into a new world.  This is an ancient theme as old as humanity itself, especially if you read a lot of myth and work in dream analysis. The Gothic cathedral was a continuation of this theme. The cathedral was a vast structure with a smaller, by comparison entrance way. Take a look at this:

Many people over the years have associated the basic shape of the Gothic arch with the human vagina. This assertion was buttressed (see what I did there see the word play. see Flying buttress) by the fact that it was not uncommon to find the form of a rosebud carved into the very point of Gothic arches. The arches representing a Vagina and the rosebud at the top represents the clitoris of the man other things,

Moreover if you look at the over all geometry of a Gothic Cathedral you will see a vesica pisces repeated over and over again A Vesica Pisces is an important ancient symbol later adopted by Christians to represent Christ which when vertically depicted, the Vesica Pisces represents the vagina of the goddess mother and as such was associated with fertility and birth. Christ is often depicted inside the Vesica Pisces in a vertical position like in the ‘Last Judgment’ of the tympanum above the West Royal Portal of Chartres cathedral. This symbolism therefore refers to the rebirth or Second Coming of Christ at the ‘End of Time’.

Vesica Pisces

Vesica Piscis

Image of Jesus in the vesica

an actual bas-relief of jesus in the Vesica

Do you see the overall geometric pattern ?

As you know I am not a religious men at all, after all I put out on the first date and all my imaginary friends are pagan.  I spent what seemed to be a lifetime studying medieval mystical symbolism in my late teens and early 20’s. Yes while you were busy exploring your sexuality with various latex implements or experientially and consensually ploughing through accessible orifices (yours or another) MrMary was in the library reading old dusty books. An interesting and odd book one can look at is: Le Mystere Des Cathedrales et L’interpretation Esoterique des Symboles Hermetiques du Grand-Oeuvre.

Conclusion

It seems that vaginas are not just for ploughing. What I mean to say that our bodies when viewed under proper light can be the vehicle of deeper insight that unite us as living beings, but more importantly they can if one would approach them with reverence instead of the disgust and bizarre ways we approach them with, they can help us anchor ourself more in a deeper experience that for millennia was our heirloom  as a species on the planet.

I noticed something else significant too. The clitoris is the only organ in the human body that is there solely for pleasure. Pleasure is the one thing I have never seen expressed in any religious gathering. Religion nowadays doesn’t concern itself with  joie de vivre. They seem well Abrahamic religions, to lead us into the belief that pleasure is wrong or takes us away from some overarching goal that only those in the know can guide you to. And yet Jesus’ first miracle wasn’t saving anyone’s life, he hooked up a party with more wine. he knew the deal. Fornicating cant be bad when the “Son of God” hangs out with a prostitute and turn water into wine for a party. Anyway

When I look back to mythology and the many cultures old and new that the world has housed I always see initially an acceptance of the constant strife and change but a light-heartedness. A need for celebration of being alive, of our bodies, of the good times and bad time, and now today the clitoris too.

That’s it

MrMary

Notes of Interest

From Victor Hugos Hunchback of Notre Dame

“Printing will kill architecture.”

In fact, from the origin of things down to the fifteenth century of the Christian era, inclusive, architecture is the great book of humanity, the principal expression of man in his different stages of development, either as a force or as an intelligence.

When the memory of the first races felt itself overloaded, when the mass of reminiscences of the human race became so heavy and so confused that speech naked and flying, ran the risk of losing them on the way, men transcribed them on the soil in a manner which was at once the most visible, most durable, and most natural. They sealed each tradition beneath a monument.

The first monuments were simple masses of rock, “which the iron had not touched,” as Moses says. Architecture began like all writing. It was first an alphabet. Men planted a stone upright, it was a letter, and each letter was a hieroglyph, and upon each hieroglyph rested a group of ideas, like the capital on the column. This is what the earliest races did everywhere, at the same moment, on the surface of the entire world. We find the “standing stones” of the Celts in Asian Siberia; in the pampas of America.

Later on, they made words; they placed stone upon stone, they coupled those syllables of granite, and attempted some combinations. The Celtic dolmen and cromlech, the Etruscan tumulus, the Hebrew galgal, are words. Some, especially the tumulus, are proper names. Sometimes even, when men had a great deal of stone, and a vast plain, they wrote a phrase. The immense pile of Karnac is a complete sentence.

At last they made books. Traditions had brought forth symbols, beneath which they disappeared like the trunk of a tree beneath its foliage; all these symbols in which humanity placed faith continued to grow, to multiply, to intersect, to become more and more complicated; the first monuments no longer sufficed to contain them, they were overflowing in every part; these monuments hardly expressed now the primitive tradition, simple like themselves, naked and prone upon the earth. The symbol felt the need of expansion in the edifice. Then architecture was developed in proportion with human thought; it became a giant with a thousand heads and a thousand arms, and fixed all this floating symbolism in an eternal, visible, palpable form. While Daedalus, who is force, measured; while Orpheus, who is intelligence, sang;–the pillar, which is a letter; the arcade, which is a syllable; the pyramid, which is a word,–all set in movement at once by a law of geometry and by a law of poetry, grouped themselves, combined, amalgamated, descended, ascended, placed themselves side by side on the soil, ranged themselves in stories in the sky, until they had written under the dictation of the general idea of an epoch, those marvellous books which were also marvellous edifices: the Pagoda of Eklinga, the Rhamseion of Egypt, the Temple of Solomon.

The generating idea, the word, was not only at the foundation of all these edifices, but also in the form. The temple of Solomon, for example, was not alone the binding of the holy book; it was the holy book itself. On each one of its concentric walls, the priests could read the word translated and manifested to the eye, and thus they followed its transformations from sanctuary to sanctuary, until they seized it in its last tabernacle, under its most concrete form, which still belonged to architecture: the arch. Thus the word was enclosed in an edifice, but its image was upon its envelope, like the human form on the coffin of a mummy.