Ritual Nudity in History and Religion - Ronald Hutton

This lecture looks at the role played by nudity in European religion and magic from ancient times to the present, with some reference to a global context.

It reveals the unexpected pattern and explains why it has been marginal to religion, except in initiation ceremonies, but very important in magical practices.

This lecture was recorded by Ronald Hutton on 6th March 2024 at Barnard's Inn Hall, London

The transcript and downloadable versions of the lecture are available from the Gresham College website:
https://www.gresham.ac.uk/watch-now/ritual-nudity

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Transcript

0:05

Over 30 years ago, I wrote a book with the cumbersome title of the Pagan Religions of the Ancient British Isles. That was before I started making books sound more catchy towards its end, I made a series of parallels between those ancient religions and the modern pagan religion of wicker, modern pagan witchcraft. One of the differences which I suggested was that quote, no known cult in the ancient world was carried on by devotees who all worshiped regularly in the nude as some traditions of WIC and do. Now, the whole of the rest of this talk essentially consists of a series of reflections on that statement. The Gresham College lecture that you're listening to right now is giving you knowledge and insight from one of the world's leading academic experts making it takes a lot of time, but because we want to encourage a love of learning, we think it's well worth it. We never make you pay for lectures, although donations are needed. All we ask in return is this. Send a link to this lecture to someone you think would benefit. And if you haven't already, click the follow or subscribe button from wherever you are listening right now. Now, let's get back to the lecture. On the one hand, I believe that I shall show in detail why it remains correct on the other. I also intend to expose it as an entirely inadequate consideration of the subject. I intend to start by looking at the place of ritual nudity and wicker itself. Wickens themselves have provided two principle justifications for the practice. One which I have often read in print, is the body naturally releases a field of magical energy, which clothes obstruct. The other, which I have heard more often in speech, is that it reinforces a feeling of equality and democracy within a Wiccan group. Neither seem entirely satisfying to me. I think that the first is probably a self-fulfilling justification in that people who are used to being naked to work ritual magic would very probably feel disempowered if made to do so in robes or another dress, nor do I have any means of evaluating the practical success of groups who practice magic nude as opposed to those who do not whatever one's own views on the literal reality of magic. Whether it is seen as a symbolic system, a means of self transformation or an operative practical tool, there is something disturbing about the concept that clo magicians are somehow automatically second rate. It would consign to the also rams of magical history, the most famous and sophisticated societies for the practice of ritual magic known to history, including the hermetic order of the golden dawn, the stellar Matthew, and the emus. Both my sense of justice and my common sense urge me against such a conclusion as for the idea that ritual nudity is in some way democratic. It runs up against the fact that many wick and covens have been among the most intensely hierarchical groups on earth. This is not necessarily a bad thing in itself. In many ways it suits the nature of the work which they do, but it does make the notion of equality seem rather odd. I would propose that nudity has two other practical benefits for wickens. One is that it powerfully reinforces the sense of a Wiccan circle as a place apart from the everyday world. The combination of candlelight, incense and liturgy all work towards that end and nudity gives a very obvious visual symbol that the normal persona has been stripped away. Many magical and esoteric groups have preparatory exercises before ceremonies to move people into an altered state of consciousness like breathing exercises, meditations, guided visualizations simply to remove one's clothes and step into candlelight and incense is a jolt from the everyday to a different world that is very effective and very easy. The other benefit is that to make it work, it does demand a high degree of mutual trust and comfort within the group. If it produces tension and discomfort instead, then it is an excellent litmus test of a group which has problems. Conversely, if the group gets on well, but the experience of nudity enhances a slight atmosphere of nervousness, then this tendency to put people slightly on edge can actually be quite good in calling forth more powerful ritual performances from them. None of these reflections, however, explain what ritual nudity is doing in wicker in the first place. A straightforward answer to this question, which I have sometimes heard, is that it reflects the personal tastes of the individual who is certainly the first great publicist of the religion and perhaps the main force in its conception. Gerald Gardner. There is no doubt that he was a convinced naris with an ardent belief in the physical, social and magical employments of nudity and left to itself. This could indeed make a complete explanation. It appears trivial. However, when we stand back and look at this aspect of wicker in relation to all its other characteristics as manifested from when it first appears at the end of the 1940s. Here, ritual nudity takes its place as just one feature of a package adding up to a powerfully counter-cultural mystery. Religion reversing most of the norms of mid 20th century Western society. Wicker gave a particular value and emphasis to precisely those phenomena which that society had traditionally feared or subordinated. The night, the moon, the feminine magic, wild nature, paganism and the figure of the witch, it was part of this package that nudity commonly used in Western culture as a symbol of shame or weakness was turned into one of confidence and power within Wicker. Its blatant presence in ritual was just one example of the way in which at the middle of the 20th century, Wicker crashed the barriers of convention. All this is to make the point again that wicker is very unusual. The problem now is to settle the question of how unusual it actually is in this respect. There is no doubt that it wasn't the context of 20th century culture, but did it have ancient prototypes? A scholar moving into this area has few recent signposts. Most of the research into ritual nudity in general and in ancient Europe and the Near East in particular was for some reason carried out by German academics in the decades around 1900. The main book on the subject by Jay Hicken published in 1911 must have been one of the last academic works to be written entirely in Latin. The learned author was clearly terrified that if he used any living language that his subject matter might corrupt the unsophisticated and impressionable as one of the people around the early 20th century who did not read Latin was Gerald Gardner, the concerned German who clearly missed the point. The ancient material shows up some immediate problems of interpretation. It is true that sculptures, vases and wall paintings across the ancient Mediterranean and Middle East show a lot of naked people. The trouble is the near impossibility. In many cases of distinguishing literal re mythological scenes in Greek and Roman artistic convention, most gods like Hercules on the screen. Some goddesses, many heroes are many nymphs were shown naked. This was specifically to distinguish them from ordinary humans. The rulers of Sumerian city states thousands of years earlier are sometimes shown kneeling unc clad before a deity. It may be a literal scene of worship, but it may be an artistic expression of the comparative loneliness and humility of the human worshiper. When all this is taken into account, there is no unequivocal evidence that any ancient pagan religion of the European or near eastern world held rights in which all participants were regularly naked. It is not even certain that just one or two nude people had a regular pace place in ceremonies. Sometimes when it does seem as though proof can be obtained of this, it dissolves on closer inspection. For example, some Roman writers describe the young men who ran around Rome every February at the Feast of the Lu as nude. The more detailed descriptions of the custom, however, make claim that they wore goat skin jock straps, which must have added to something of the challenges of the part in the ritual where stark nudity is described in a ceremony it's associated with special rites of passage rather than regular events. For example, the Man who lights the funeral pyre of the dead Viking chief in ia LAN's famous description of a Vikings funeral in Russia in the night that the nine twenties walks backward and unclothed. The fact that he reverses the normal direction as well as the normal mode of dress indicates that at that moment he is being set aside from the rest of humanity and the general nature of the world to precipitate the dead man into a different realm. So am I saying that ritual nudity had no place in the ancient world save as an artistic metaphor or for very occasional special events like that funeral on the vulgar? No, because the summary above misses out one important area in which it does seem to have had a regular and functional part on initiation into mystery religions. There is reasonably good evidence that in some, at least the init was naked at the time of induction in into the religion and reclothed on completing the process. There is here a clear apparent metaphor for rebirth in the ancient Greek and Hellenistic world. It would've been a particularly strong and familiar point of resonance. The custom of a bath followed by dressing in new robes was not merely the usual purification of somebody about to engage in any religious right, but of anybody about to celebrate their coming of age ought to get married again. However, some care is needed in interpreting the evidence. Not all the texts which have been taken at times to support the idea of nude initiation can do so beyond doubt. For example, the Greek playwright aristophanes has a character in a comedy speak the line. It's the custom for novices to enter unclothed nudge nudge. This may be a reference to religious mysteries, but you have to remember that one of the signs of coming of adolescence in a Greek boy was that he was allowed to put off all the girlish clothes of childhood and strip naked to participate in the adult male world of the gymnasium where Greek adult males exercise naked. In some places, the novice youths were therefore called the EK Dino. Those who undress, and this could be Aristophanes point. Likewise, the great Greco-Roman philosopher Plaus asserts at one point that those who would rise through the degrees of the holy mysteries must cast aside their clothes and go forward naked. It may be taken literally or it may be a reference to the need for spiritual purity and candor. A similar case attends the women's mysteries celebrated at the sanctuary of Artemis at brow Ron in Greece, which were rites of passage for young women approaching the age of marriage vs. Paintings associated with the brow. Ronia suggests that for some of the time the girls were naked, but again, these scenes may have a mythological significance when all these citations have been entered and cautions entered against them. There remain two pieces of good evidence for nude initiation into mystery religions. One which is on the screen is a set of wall paintings at a raum, one of the temples of the mystery God RAs In Italy, they show an initiation into RA's religion and in every one of the paintings the init is naked and blindfolded and the in initiator is clothed. Two other and stunning pieces of evidence consists of ancient Judaic and early Christian baptism under the Roman Empire. Both Jews and Christians were noted for their extraordinary dislike of the human body and their aversion to its display. The Greek gymnasium in particular disgusted them. This makes it all the more remarkable that contemporary testimony strongly suggests that converts to Judaism were baptized, nude and makes it absolutely certain that Christians were baptism in the early churches was very much a reception into a mystery religion. The postulant had to prepare for two years and enter into an intensive period of fasting and prayer during the final seven weeks. The actual right was a private one among a circle of inis in which the postulant removed all her or his clothes was anointed in holy oil and immersed in water and then dressed anew in white. It was directed that in the case of a woman, another female should do the anointing, which had to be at several points of the body. If there was no other woman available, however, the priest had to do it. There is a cautionary tale of a Palestinian monk called Conan Conan, the bashful who had to baptize a particularly beautiful woman and could not find a female Christian to help him. He fled in panic only to be intercepted by John the Baptist, come down from heaven, who helpfully signed his genitals with the cross three times and so made him permanently impotent. After that, he got on just fine with his job. It's hard to imagine that such a customer would be incorporated into a religion which loathed and feared nudity as much as early Christianity unless it were regarded as an indispensable part of initiation to mystery faiths. All this data seems to be tending to a conclusion that ritual nudity had a place in ancient European religion at certain key moments of transformation, but that any other real for it is unproven and that it vanished from the western religious tradition at the end of the ancient world once again, however, the conclusion would be premature for it ignores the association between mixed sex, nude rights and Christian heresy. Such rights were a recurrent theme of denunciations by orthodox churchmen of deviant sorts of Christian from the second to the 17th centuries it must be admitted it wasn't a very common theme. Christian heretics were mostly and persistently accused of devil worship, cannibalism, sexual orgies, incest, and child sacrifice. It must be thought that in that catalog nudity would be such a tame or incidental item as to be hardly worth mentioning. This can nonetheless be argued the opposite way, that in those few cases where it is included, it may be the more significant or perhaps believable. The trouble with those cases is that neither of them are supported by the two sorts of source material which give us insight into the genuine beliefs of the unorthodox writings which they produce themselves or confessions provided by them under interrogation and deposit hidden legal records. Instead, the all allegations invariably consist of accusations made against them by orthodox churchmen determined to blacken their reputations and who may have had no firsthand knowledge of them. Thus, in the ancient world, the Adam Amna was said to live and worship naked a a nudist colony and the Brazilian is to read the Bible in the nude. The enes and the barbell gnostics were likewise said to have unclothed ceremonies after that we have to wait almost a thousand years for the accusation to reappear, but it does. In the case of the 14th century French sect, the tur who were supposedly given to nakedness and licentiousness, another group calling themselves the men of intelligence condemned by the bishop of Korey and Flanders in 1411 were said to preach inner enlightenment by the Holy Spirit and go naked and practice free love. As a result, there's nothing to prove whether any of this is sociology or fantasy. The most notorious holy natures of the entire Middle Ages, where the Adam Knights of Bohemia who appeared in 1420 as a sect which believed that the Catholic mass was wrong and that all true believers needed was a simple meal together as a sacrament. Their enemies accused that some of them when wandering through hills and forests threw off their clothes to recapture the primitive innocence of Eden. It must be noted, this isn't actually ritual nudity and may itself have been a libel will never know because to attack the Catholic mass in 1420 was to play in the top league of medieval heretics and almost all of the mites were wiped out within a year. Nonetheless, for the next four centuries, the mites were to be the classic naked worshipers in the Western European imagination, TROs it out every time that conservative Christians wanted examples of the dreadful consequences of religious toleration. One of those occasions was during the English revolution of the 1640s and in July, 1641 accusations were made in English newspapers that Adam Mites had appeared in England. Suspicion may be fostered of these reports by the fact that the most detailed eyewitness account of their activities insisted they were meeting in large numbers in London parks. Nobody else seems to have seen them there. However, and by the end of the year, people had stopped looking for them.<laugh> probably the most exciting thing ever alleged against Kensington Gardens in Hyde Park <laugh>. The whole catalog of ancient and medieval Christian heresy therefore proves that ritual nudity was an occasional charge used by the Orthodox against their enemies, but not whether any of those enemies actually practiced it. It is not surprising therefore that it became associated with the deluxe heresy of the later middle ages and early modern period. The new religion alleged religion imagined religion of satanic witchcraft, which some churchmen and magistrates came to believe in and to accuse people of having joined from the early 15th century onward. It is not, however, a charge much made by the demonologist who wrote about the witch religion over the next 300 years. Neither the for aria nor the male malefic harum in the 15th century, let alone the later witch hunting manuals of Jean boda Martin del Rio Bou Nico or Pierre de make much reference to it. Nor does it feature much in the confessions made by alleged witches. Interestingly, when it does, it echoes the ancient tradition of in initiation into mysteries. In 1480, a woman interrogated at Breia in northern Italy claims that when she made her pact with the devil, she offered homage nude. A kneeling by contrast, the nudity of witches is a very prominent feature of the art of the period, especially that of northern Europe and above all of Germany. From the opening of the 16th century onwards, artists regularly portrayed witches casting spells and attending the witches Sabbath as an clad. This may again have been a reflection of the fact that most of the alleged practices of witches on which demonologist concentrated devil worship, cannibalism orgies did not lend themselves to respectable representation in high class works of art. To paint or draw witches nude was an easy shorthand for representing their essential depravity. It may matter more however that to portray witches was one of the very few socially sanctioned ways in which artists in Protestant Germany in particular could express the female nude. It must be significant in this context that the first notable artist to represent the nude was ura, who used poses ultimately from ancient depictions of pagan goddesses. The latter were not normally considered fit subjects in the northern Protestant world and therefore witches could take their place. It probably counts for something too that the artist who really turned naked witches into a genre. Dara's pupil, Hans Baldon Green is one of his works on the screen, use them to convey a sense of linkage between the female body, sexuality, corruption, and death. This may just have been green's thing, but it may have been provoked by the epidemic of syphilis then sweeping Europe. There is also, however, a slight possibility that the same image was rooted in popular tradition. The only occasions in which it appears in works of demonology is when anecdotes reported by common people are printed. A classic case is Martine del Rio who repeats a story of how near Cali in 1587, a soldier shot, a naked woman outta a cloud should been hit in the thigh by his musket ball and proved to be middle aged, plump, drunk, and wildly indignant and refused to answer any questions as she limped off the tradition, which features in such popular anecdotes is always of people traveling to and from the witches Sabbath. It's possible that this is simply because witches were supposed to fly to the Sabbath from their beds and most Europeans of the time slept naked, or it could be that many witches were supposed to get to the Sabbath by rubbing a magic flying ointment on their nude bodies and therefore took off at once. Whatever its origins and its reason the artistic tradition of the nude witch became established and persistent, it is possible that this is simply, uh, part of the male gaze. As such, it features in the 19th century in the work of such prominent figures as Goya and it's still found at the present day the question of whether early modern witches actually worked naked is rendered a known sec with her by the total absence of evidence for any actual witch religion in the period. The Satanic cult of the demonologist does seem to have been a complete fantasy. The one possible emergence into reality seems to be in the affair of the poisons in late 17th century France when the king's mistress Madam Desal allegedly allowed a black mass to be performed over her naked body in order to secure her power over her royal lover. Even that's still a long way from a tradition of ritual nudity among worshipers and once again, it may never have happened. The only text before the 20th century, in fact, which makes nudity a general rule for witches at their rituals is the very late and utterly unique one. Charles Godfrey Leland's Raia. This states unequivocally and famously to witches that as the sign that you are truly free, you shall be naked in your rights, both men and women also. It is notoriously hard, however, to determine how far raia actually reflects a genuine peasant folklore tradition, let alone a genuine witch religion. As a result, this strange work of the 1890s cannot yet be used as any conclusive evidence for the matter. Once again, our quarry seems to elude us. It may, however, make the European context planer to broaden the scope of this study still further to consider the rest of the world here. The ancient European pattern does seem to be reproduced. Ritual nudity is restricted to special individuals playing particular roles such as undergoing rites of passage or to exceptional moments. The nakedness of Indian fake ears like the one on the screen, setting them apart from the conventional human world is one aspect of this. Though it could perhaps be termed symbolic nudity rather than ritual nudity, as it's not confined to worship two naked men, personifying spirits presided over sacrificial rights among the coastal tribes of what is now British Columbia. In Samoa, a sacred virgin would appear nude for the right by which she made her transition to a married woman after in the Marza islands also in the Pacific, women would dance naked at the funeral of a chief apparently as representations of life and vitality. Other examples all seem to be of this order. There are sometimes rumors of cults in India, which involve naked worship, but none of these seem to be so far confirmed and seem also to be confined to members of one sex. The most famous one is uh, attached to the worship of a South Indian goddess and her temple called re Camba, but that is an ordeal. It's not an act of worship. It's confined to individuals who were until the Indian government banned it in the 1990s, expected to run five miles across country to her temple in order to fulfill a vow or obtain a wish. It's not an act of ritual worship. It's uh, an act which is regarded as dangerous, risky, and unpleasant, and performed as a means of showing sacrifice to the goddess. The pattern seems to hold in world religion. There appear to be no certain historical examples of religious traditions practiced by worshipers of both sexes regularly meeting in the nude. It seems that a consistent picture is being constructed here for humanity as a whole until wicker bucks the trend, it might be concluded. Therefore, that wicker boldly goes where none have gone before either by taking a Christian stereotype of bad behavior and giving it positive and sacred connotations, showing the good in it or by investing the whole of its workings with the intensity commonly associated with ary rites of passage or both, it might be concluded, but it can't be for. There's an entire dimension to the subject which I've missed out and which I must confront as the final part of this exploration. It takes as its starting point the fact that in every inhabited continent of the world, there are peoples who have believed in the figure to which the English traditionally give the name of which in the bad sense of the world, that as a human being who works secret and malevolent magic against other members of the same community, from motives of pure malice and that a hidden tradition passed on by inheritance in initiation or contact with powers all over the world. Likewise, peoples who have believed in this figure have also commonly believed that witches work naked. This is found among tribes all over tropical Africa from Zimbabwe and the trans vol to Tanzania, Uganda, and Kenya, although not apparently in West Africa in the recent past anthropologists studying those beliefs sometimes suggested a rational explanation as I did. In the case of the European witch is Sabbath, that as these tribal peoples usually slept naked and as witches travel from beds at night, they go as they have been sleeping. The African beliefs also, however, included other aspects of the witch stereotype, which favor a less functional explanation. Thus, the witches concerned were believed to ride on baboons or hyenas to walk on their hands, not their feet, to paint their black skins white and to eat corpse flesh. All these mythological actions are reversals of accepted human behavior and the nudity of witches in these societies in which complete social nudity is unacceptable, was unacceptable and is represents the same effect at work. We are also customer, which is also customarily regarded as operating at night and naked among the Troian islanders of the southwestern Pacific, the Navajo of the southwestern United States. The Arabs are many of the peoples of India. In Bengal, a would be witch who lacked a teacher was expected to go to the cremation ground at midnight, take off her clothes. Bengali witches were stereotypically female and commence a right to gain power over spirits, even in northeastern Siberia, not one of the world's regions apparently friendly to nudity the Chukchi people who had shamans to work. Magical operations expected a shaman wanting to utter a curse to perform naked and in the moonlight healing operations by contrast or indoor events requiring special clothing. Once again, it seems possible to work to towards a conclusion that all over the world there is an ancient belief that which is in the bad sense work naked as part of their general symbolic function of breaking the rules of conventional human behavior. Again, too, it seems possible to credit wicker with inventing those symbolic functions with positive qualities and their worldwide description. Distribution strengthens its claims to be a counter-cultural religion, par excellence redeeming traditionally despised aspects of human potential and once again, such a conclusion would be pme. The most revealing way of putting this image of the witch into perspective is to take a sideways step into the broader world of magic. Here I'm putting my weight behind a holy traditional distinction between religious and magical activities, one used by many anthropologists and most ancient historians till recently, but first formulated by the ancient Greeks and built into subsequent western culture in acts of religion. The human being is essentially a supplicant according to this definition, seeking to ask the divine for favors and then wholly dependent on the divine will for results in acts of magic. The human being has some measure of operative control over the result at the least by an arcane understanding of the mechanisms of the natural world and at most by compelling superhuman entities. In holding to this distinction, I don't deny that religion and magic represent different points on a spectrum rather than two distinct and opposed phenomena. I do not deny that magical acts often take place in religious context and vice versa. I certainly don't suggest that magic should be seen as in some way inherently inferior to religion or that this dichotomy should necessarily applied to extra European cultures. I just find it a distinction which works well in certain contexts and one of those contexts is that of ritual nudity acts of magic after all represent ritual applied to special and extra extraordinary occasions requiring a shift of consciousness or a redefinition of being every bit as much as rites of passage. It should therefore not be surprising to find that nudity plays a very prominent part in magic. It is found in the Bible where both a king sa and a prophet is equal, are portrayed as removing their clothing in order to obtain the gift of second sight. It is found in ancient Greek and Roman literature where certain potent herbs are specified as to be picked by a naked person operating at night. Pliny the Roman natural historian describes a cure for an abscess consisting of a poltus applied by a nude virgin speaking a charm to Apollo. It is plain in the medieval and early modern period too. In particular, nudity was employed by young women in solitary spells and charms by which they sought to win a husband or to learn the identity of a good future partner. These are recorded in a series of 16th and 17th century spell collections, and one example was given by Martin Luther, the great German reformer himself in his table talk. This context makes it very significant, if not very surprising, that when nudity does feature in the confessions of people accused of witchcraft, it is usually in the description of acts of solitary spell casting. Women tried for sorcery in late 14th century. Italy gave accounts of such acts by starlight and involving candles in dishes. One of the women accused of witchcraft at Aberdeen in 1597 was seen by a neighbor allegedly engaged in a writeup upon her own farmland at harvest time of pulling up her clothes over her head and walking backwards while casting stones back and forth. This account rings true because of the parallel operations recorded in the European folklore collections of the last 200 years. Once again, solitary acts by young women interested in their marital prospects. A prominent one of the most commonly quoted at the present consisted of running over the stone circle of the Midlands, the roll right stones on midsummer night. Sometimes they were collective. A rainmaking spell recorded in Romania consisted of the floating of a harrow, an agricultural tool in a brook at midnight by a group of naked women. Finally, such associations are also found across the extra European world in Ben Gaul drought was said to be ended if nude women dragged a plow across a field after dark, remembering that the same region a woman was supposed to undress to become a witch. This is fairly obviously an act of good witchcraft. There are parallel male rights elsewhere in the globe in Peru and Indonesia. Men and boys would assemble naked by knight in plantations of fruit or spice trees and conduct races or incantations supposed to encourage the crops among the pondo people of South Africa. Anybody wishing to protect a house from lightning was expected to perform the spell while unclothed. It might be wise to suppose that different symbolic systems may be an operation across this range of examples. In many of them, the connotations of sexuality or fertility involved in nudity may have been important even there. However, the general sense of an empowerment of an ordinary human being by the act of removing the garments by which she or he is usually recognized and familiar seems apparent. This is not very far from one function of nudity, which I have suggested in er of separating the participant from the everyday world. It is probably in fact identical in this perspective. Therefore, the place of nudity in wicker is dependent not so much on its character as a countercultural religion apparent, though that is, but on its character as a magical religion. As I've argued elsewhere, wicker self-consciously dissolves the traditional human distinction between religion and magic. In this perspective also, there is a litmus test we can apply, which is to find another religion in the modern world which has deliberately fused magic and religion and see what happens there. Another one in which the whole group of participants regularly operated naked and it is voodoo. A detailed account, for example, of the Midsummer night ritual, the famous voodoo Queen Marie Lavo held in Louisiana in 1872 clearly shows that the entire congregation undressed for the main ceremonies. So it seems there is an equation, religion plus lots of magic equals nudity. So wicker is not unique in this respect, even though it's unusual. What I have tried to suggest in the last 45 minutes is that the examples of wicker and n voodoo can be used as a means of opening up the human religious and magical psyche to reveal that ritual nudity. So peripheral to religion has actually been central to many views of magic after all, and has a place in the human experience of how to step from one world to another in a ritual act. I rest my case. Thank you. Thank you very much, professor Hutton. Um, so perhaps, uh, a first question perhaps I I I might have on the, on the gender balance, I would say of, uh, female and compared to male nudity. Um, has female nudity perhaps been more prevalent in history, uh, compared to male nudity? And if not, or if so, um, do they operate in different way? Does do they, um, in a way serve different, different purposes? Do we know about these? The straightforward answer is no <laugh> that, uh, ritual nudity is not gendered worldwide and through history, except in specific places and societies, but that is true of so many other things, like who is a witch in some societies globally, which is a stereotypically female in like Europe, much of it in many others, they're stereotypically male in some they're old in some they're young in some they're rich and some they're poor. And so it is that ritual. Nudity is gendered one way or the other in particular societies, but overall, there is no listing towards one side or the other. Yeah. Thank you very much. I I think you began to touch on this towards the end, but isn't this nakedness thing, this kind of primeval force, which is all about fertility and childbirth and procreation and male prowess, hunters and warriors, and so you see it in Venus figurines or in cave art or rock art that shows naked hunters and warriors. Isn't isn't that what it's all about really? It's, it's that sort of prime evil fertility and prowess thing. I'm being terribly negative tonight. The answer is no, <laugh>. Uh, we don't actually know what a lot of these prehistoric images mean. Uh, the Venus figurines, IE the images of, uh, naked women from the European and Asian old Stone Age could be deities. They could be used in healing rights for women. They could be representations of priestesses, they could be works of art. We just do not know it could be any of those things and more, and the Victorians and the Edwardians were mad about fertility as being the basis of, uh, indigenous and pagan religions, and in fact, they are confined to only a, it is confined to only a small portion of them. And in many of these nude rituals, there seems to be no obvious connection with fertility or sexuality at all. The lowest common denominator is transforming oneself into a magical space by getting rid of one's clothes. It's a stepping from one world to another, from one identity to another in a very striking, jarring and, uh, counter-cultural way, a way that shocks people into realizing they're different. Um, we've got a question online from someone asking about baptism and, and and Judaism and early Christianity, if they could not be explained just by the fact that bathing being a new to activity and baptism being birthing off impurity. Yes, that is correct, but, uh, the common ritual found throughout the ancient mystery religions, including RAs, which involved no bathing Mm-hmm <affirmative>, but involve putting off clothes and them being dressed anew and going through the heart of the right arm. Clad is a very clear metaphor for rebirth. Um, there is no reason whatsoever why people being bathed and cleanse couldn't have done so in a simple garment, but they had to be completely naked and anointed to cleanse them, and that was a part of the process of recreation of somebody's identity. My question is wouldn't require putting on a new personality or rebirth, um, require putting on some gear or some jewelry or some robe in addition to just getting naked because, um, just getting naked can, can also be okay. You, it's like an dressing for the night or go bathing or go swimming and, uh, so that does nothing to my personality. Yeah, but just, um, so that's, I'm, I'm not, uh, convinced yet by just getting naked without putting No, It's, you're absolutely right. Uh, and it's not just getting naked. The being re clad in new garments that are loaded with symbolic significance is a vital part of it. Uh, I was simply hunting for ritual nudity, so I homed it on that stage of a long and complex process of initiation, but the fact that it is so common in the ancient world and permeates even religions like Judaism and Christianity, I think is significant. Thank you. Um, another question from online before you, sir. We'll, we'll get <laugh>, um, uh, someone is asking you about the, um, Roman Festival of Luca, and if you could expand on, on the, the, the nudity and how it operated in, in Rome at that time. Well, it wasn't complete nudity. It's, it consists of a bunch of noble young men. This is an elite thing on for the city, for the, it was a great honor to do it. So the, these are toffs, uh, who stripped down to a goatskin jockstrap meet together in a primeval cave, uh, on one of the Roman hills that had been preserved for this and go around, uh, the streets running around, uh, hitting women, uh, it seems politely, uh, with strips of goat skin to encourage them to be fertile<laugh>. There, there was a, a Roman phobia, particularly around the end of, uh, the Republican era about the population of Romans declining. Oh, declining. All right. And so, uh, great lengths were encouraged in order to make the Romans have more children, like bachelor taxes was, uh, was one of them. But also just trying to get Romans who wanted to produce babies to produce them faster and more easily was another obvious recourse, and that was what Luther Cario was all about. Just thinking about the, the sort of shock factor of, of the ritual, uh, nudity, is there any evidence that in, in, in societies where it doesn't generate the shock factor such I'm thinking, you know, typically, uh, modern Germany or something that, uh, they have an alternative for? Uh, for ritual nudity? It's A very good question. Again, uh, I do not have a clear answer to it. Uh, there are peoples in the world who have habitually gone naked, uh, especially in parts of South America and there, there are a few other places, but, uh, it's, uh, those peoples do not seem to regard nudity as magical as a result. But there are very few human societies who have traditionally practiced social nudity, and it's surprising to us in fully clothed societies how little it takes for certain indigenous societies in the past to regard themselves as clothed and not naked. Uh, for example, uh, in the early 19th century among the expanding Zulu empire, the Zulu people among, uh, well, the Zulu men were regarded as being fully dressed and fit for polite society. If the genitals, uh, alone were covered or even if, uh, the main item in them was sheathed fully, they're regarded as being able to go out and present themselves without shock. But if they were fully undressed, it was shocking. So humans establish different boundaries at different points for what's regarded as nakedness. There's something similar in parts of Pap Puni Guinea again. Thank you. Um, another question, this is, uh, related to wika. A neo paganism is, um, it's, um, the practice, the ritual nudity of, of wika is often referred as being sky cla. Um, is this a translation from the Jane tradition, N ga Skylar meaning, uh, with nude monks? Yes. Spot on. Absolutely correct. Uh, wicker, or let's be precise, Gerald Gardner lifted some of its, well, a few of its most evocative to terminology from the Indian subcontinent, but then Gerald was very well read in Indian and far Eastern religions 'cause he spent most of his life out there in Malaysia. Hi. Yeah. Um, is there, sorry. I'll do that.<laugh>. Is there any evidence, um, that practicing naked also had an element of having nothing to hide? So if you do believe that what you are doing has very real effects on the world around you, this idea that you are, you are naked so that you uh, don't have any ill intent or any ulterior motive that could be otherwise hidden by clothing, I think that's a very good point. I think it's entirely possible. It's hard for me to pinpoint specific sources that explicitly enunciate that, but I think it's extremely compelling. Truthfulness, <laugh>, there's a gentleman over there. Thank you very much. Just kind of following up on that actually in the, um, in Tibetan Buddhism like should practice the charnel ground practice, like you were talking about with the Bengali, uh, es is usually performed in the nude and uh, that is very much about nudity being associated with the natural state and the symbolism of na naturalness. And that kind of seems in contrast to what you're saying about nudity as something otherworldly. Uh, I just wonder what you think about that in terms of religious context. I think it's probably quite correct. I think it's another aspect of another dimension of the ritual use of nudity. Uh, I'm very shaky on indigenous beliefs in other parts of the world outside Europe because they're so don much of it. And, uh, so really I'm just cherry picking. Well, not even cherry picking. Cherry picking means you select the most convenient or the most attractive items, really. I select the items I run into in the course of reading and the amount that I can read in depth on any one next to European culture is going to be limited. So I confess my limitations there. Uh, thank you very much, professor, professor, uh, Hutten and uh, please join us for professor uh, Ronald Hutton next lecture, uh, on the.