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Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality, and Demonology in the Middle Ages
Medieval clerics believed that original sin had rendered their "fallen bodies" vulnerable to corrupting impulses—particularly those of a sexual nature. They feared that their corporeal frailty left them susceptible to demonic forces bent on penetrating and polluting their bodies and souls. Drawing on a variety of canonical and other sources, Fallen Bodies examines a wide-ranging set of issues generated by fears of pollution, sexuality, and demonology. To maintain their purity, celibate clerics combated the stain of nocturnal emissions; married clerics expelled their wives onto the streets and out of the historical record; an exemplum depicting a married couple having sex in church was told and retold; and the specter of the demonic lover further stigmatized women's sexuality. Over time, the clergy's conceptions of womanhood became radically the Virgin Mary was accorded ever greater honor, while real, corporeal women were progressively denigrated. When church doctrine definitively denied the physicality of demons, the female body remained as the prime material presence of sin. Dyan Elliott contends that the Western clergy's efforts to contain sexual instincts—and often the very thought and image of woman—precipitated uncanny returns of the repressed. She shows how this dynamic ultimately resulted in the progressive conflation of the female and the demonic, setting the stage for the future persecution of witches.
312 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1998
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July 4, 2025
It's crazy how far back trans panic goes. How many theological engagements with the bible were shunted into the dustbin of history because they went against the idea of a gender binary, and thus the naturalised hierarchies of medieval class societies. I learnt, in Leah DeVun's The Shape of Sex, that sodomy originally meant an inversion of gendered sexual practices. Dyan Elliott shows that much of this gender panic emerges from medieval ontogenesis, the proposition that the world is split into various binaries, such as active (masculine) and passive (feminine) matter, and that monstrosities emerge from their imbalance. In other words, it was a normative discourse used to police the borders of gender, the same way reactionaries do today with their pseudoscientific understandings of gendered behaviours, hormones, genetics, and—you guessed it—biological ontogenesis.
These logics play out in 13th century medieval accounts of demons. All the powers demons have derive from their original nature as angels. They're agender and genderfluid, otherwise humans would not be able to comprehend them. They appear as succubi to men and incubi to women. However, it was their nightly visitations to men that terrified the clergy, because though such visits appear to manifest normative sexuality, they were unbidden, transforming men into passive receptors of "nocturnal emissions"—wet dreams, as we know them today. A demon was perverse in its capacity to rape men, when the norm was men were the rapists, enshrined in coverture laws that transformed married women into property. Even more terrifying for the clergy was the idea that men were polluted by their own material bodies the same way women were through menstruation. Demons were a reminder of original sin, and no matter how much the clergy ranted about women and their fallen nature, they could not escape the impurity of their own wretched existence—getting wet dreams.
So, this is a pretty funny example, but there's a lot going on beneath the surface. Just as with Leah's book, the nature of demons reminds us of how nonbinary heaven is. Leah talks about how in the 3rd century Adam was understood by certain rabbinical scholars as an androgyne, because he contained Eve within himself—the implication being that God was of a similar nature. Dyan makes the astute point that while humans were made in the image of God, "the angel was a signaculum—a veritable sign of God." Theories about demons and angels, then, hew much closer to the divine.
These theories get weird when humans themselves are conceptualised as fallen angels. Deeply heretical Gnostic beliefs proposed that it was only through our carnal bodies that we could be redeemed. The body was a site of punishment and penitence, which complicates the belief that sin must be transcended through ascetic practice, because such ascetic practices rid us of the vehicle that delivers us unto grace. These ideas mirror the development of Buddhism from India to China, where, under the Tathāgatagarbha Sūtra, the body itself becomes the vehicle for buddha nature, rather than a dharmic cycle outside of one's control. In both cases, a deeper engagement with one's body is what leads to the recovery of one's angelic/buddha nature.
Y'all can see why this shit was heretical, right? Such thoughts about angels and demons were disruptive to medieval gender norms. While they were used to stoke fear, in both their spread and prohibition, they suggested that gender was open to revision, and much more fluid than medieval ontogenesis would have you believe. They tapped into the poles of cosmic weird and cosmic wonder. Gnosticism and Mahāyāna Buddhism proposed anyone could reach enlightenment, levelling out the religious hierarchies enforced by orthodoxy. They were radical doctrines to both gender and class, hence their historical suppression.
Such accounts also show us that gender has never been thought as a pure binary across history. Trans and nonbinary subjects are not a modern phenomenon. Saints, such as Mary Magdalene and Jesus of Nazareth, were written about in ways that exceeded their assigned genders. They were miraculous beings, after all. One medieval scholar wrote "The fluid flows from the breast of the Virgin and is turned into the blood of Christ" in celebration of the transubstantiation of the divine in the eucharist, and I believe Caroline Walker Bynum's Jesus as Mother goes further into how these saints become metaphorically collapsed, so that Jesus's blood becomes a nourishing milk running from his menstruating breast wound. Inversion, a foundational principle of Christian metaphysics, leads to strange slips and revisions. Menstruation, once a sign of sin, becomes one of redemption, healing, and care.
For those of you on a more anti-religious bent, demons destabilise the very divinity of saints like Mary and Jesus, because demons are also capable of producing immaculate conceptions, squirrelling sperm from one nocturnal visit (as succubi) to the next (as incubi) in a grotesque parody of God. As Midnight Mass shows, miracles can undermine faith as much as reinforce it, due to their otherworldly qualities and ontological ambiguity (it it divinity or devilry at work, here?). A theological argument used to reinforce medieval gender divisions can come to undermine the entire foundation of Christianity.
Honestly, I never thought I would engage with Christian theology, but it's such a powerful way to unsettle reactionary Christians who don't know their own histories. It's rich and varied (and metal af), and there are thousands of heretical strains worth exploring, no matter your background. The Manicheans believed that cum and menstrual blood were the living light of God, so it was your divine duty to goon and release it into the world. Truly inspirational.
These logics play out in 13th century medieval accounts of demons. All the powers demons have derive from their original nature as angels. They're agender and genderfluid, otherwise humans would not be able to comprehend them. They appear as succubi to men and incubi to women. However, it was their nightly visitations to men that terrified the clergy, because though such visits appear to manifest normative sexuality, they were unbidden, transforming men into passive receptors of "nocturnal emissions"—wet dreams, as we know them today. A demon was perverse in its capacity to rape men, when the norm was men were the rapists, enshrined in coverture laws that transformed married women into property. Even more terrifying for the clergy was the idea that men were polluted by their own material bodies the same way women were through menstruation. Demons were a reminder of original sin, and no matter how much the clergy ranted about women and their fallen nature, they could not escape the impurity of their own wretched existence—getting wet dreams.
So, this is a pretty funny example, but there's a lot going on beneath the surface. Just as with Leah's book, the nature of demons reminds us of how nonbinary heaven is. Leah talks about how in the 3rd century Adam was understood by certain rabbinical scholars as an androgyne, because he contained Eve within himself—the implication being that God was of a similar nature. Dyan makes the astute point that while humans were made in the image of God, "the angel was a signaculum—a veritable sign of God." Theories about demons and angels, then, hew much closer to the divine.
These theories get weird when humans themselves are conceptualised as fallen angels. Deeply heretical Gnostic beliefs proposed that it was only through our carnal bodies that we could be redeemed. The body was a site of punishment and penitence, which complicates the belief that sin must be transcended through ascetic practice, because such ascetic practices rid us of the vehicle that delivers us unto grace. These ideas mirror the development of Buddhism from India to China, where, under the Tathāgatagarbha Sūtra, the body itself becomes the vehicle for buddha nature, rather than a dharmic cycle outside of one's control. In both cases, a deeper engagement with one's body is what leads to the recovery of one's angelic/buddha nature.
Y'all can see why this shit was heretical, right? Such thoughts about angels and demons were disruptive to medieval gender norms. While they were used to stoke fear, in both their spread and prohibition, they suggested that gender was open to revision, and much more fluid than medieval ontogenesis would have you believe. They tapped into the poles of cosmic weird and cosmic wonder. Gnosticism and Mahāyāna Buddhism proposed anyone could reach enlightenment, levelling out the religious hierarchies enforced by orthodoxy. They were radical doctrines to both gender and class, hence their historical suppression.
Such accounts also show us that gender has never been thought as a pure binary across history. Trans and nonbinary subjects are not a modern phenomenon. Saints, such as Mary Magdalene and Jesus of Nazareth, were written about in ways that exceeded their assigned genders. They were miraculous beings, after all. One medieval scholar wrote "The fluid flows from the breast of the Virgin and is turned into the blood of Christ" in celebration of the transubstantiation of the divine in the eucharist, and I believe Caroline Walker Bynum's Jesus as Mother goes further into how these saints become metaphorically collapsed, so that Jesus's blood becomes a nourishing milk running from his menstruating breast wound. Inversion, a foundational principle of Christian metaphysics, leads to strange slips and revisions. Menstruation, once a sign of sin, becomes one of redemption, healing, and care.
For those of you on a more anti-religious bent, demons destabilise the very divinity of saints like Mary and Jesus, because demons are also capable of producing immaculate conceptions, squirrelling sperm from one nocturnal visit (as succubi) to the next (as incubi) in a grotesque parody of God. As Midnight Mass shows, miracles can undermine faith as much as reinforce it, due to their otherworldly qualities and ontological ambiguity (it it divinity or devilry at work, here?). A theological argument used to reinforce medieval gender divisions can come to undermine the entire foundation of Christianity.
Honestly, I never thought I would engage with Christian theology, but it's such a powerful way to unsettle reactionary Christians who don't know their own histories. It's rich and varied (and metal af), and there are thousands of heretical strains worth exploring, no matter your background. The Manicheans believed that cum and menstrual blood were the living light of God, so it was your divine duty to goon and release it into the world. Truly inspirational.
November 28, 2012
There are aspects of this book that are really great. Some, not so much.
Dyan Elliott offers up a collection of six loosely intertwined essays touching on topics that include the sexual dreams of clerics (and whether or not they impacted his ability to perform the sacraments), the implications of married couples’ trysts in consecrated churches, the changing perceptions of clerical wives, and the changing theological conceptions of demons (particularly their gradual transition from corporeal to incorporeal). Though each essay stands on its own, the work as a whole combines to emphasize several points of transition. For Elliott, the period from the Gregorian reform through the Fourth Lateran Council – particularly the expanding insistence upon clerical purity, transubstantiation, and lay access to the sacraments – marked a key shift in how women were perceived. The increased emphasis on the physicality of the Eucharist and the purity of the priest resulted in a displacement of fear upon women who could upset the balance, resulting in a harsh clerical backlash against women and their polluting power. They posed an increasing threat to clerical purity and, consequently, sacramental efficacy. Fearing a failure of the sacraments, many viewed clerical wives as having “metaphorically raped and plundered the altar.” When this was combined with a new understanding of demonology – as demons were increasingly understood to lack any sort of physical body – it had the effect of shifting what had previously been relegated to the realm of the demonic onto the human agents through which these demons works: heretics, Jews, and ultimately witches.
It's a really interesting idea, but the degree to which you will find it convincing depends almost entirely on how you feel about Freud. Elliott is certainly a fan, and her work is filled with references to repression and 'splitting' (dividing the world into 'good' and 'bad' parts). This leads to some of her more interesting conclusions, but at other times it feels like she's just forcing the texts into a Freudian framework and giving them an overly-broad application. At one point, for example, she claims that the idea of clerical wives "raping and plundering the altar" was one held by the majority of Western Christendom. There's no way that she could know something like that, and the only evidence provided comes from the pen of one author. At another point, Elliott cliams that a cleric in a penitential manual claiming to have never sinned in a holy place should be read "psychoanalytically as a reluctant affirmation disguised by negation." While that's not impossible, it pretty much amounts to psychoanalyzing a thousand-year-old textbook example, which is kind of extreme. If you're going to say that every no could really means a yes, things get very messy very quickly. Finally, Elliott is never able to adequately address why developments in the 12th and early 13th centuries took so long to burst into the later witch hysteria.
Still though, it's an interesting read. If you like Freud, you'll probably think it's awesome.
Dyan Elliott offers up a collection of six loosely intertwined essays touching on topics that include the sexual dreams of clerics (and whether or not they impacted his ability to perform the sacraments), the implications of married couples’ trysts in consecrated churches, the changing perceptions of clerical wives, and the changing theological conceptions of demons (particularly their gradual transition from corporeal to incorporeal). Though each essay stands on its own, the work as a whole combines to emphasize several points of transition. For Elliott, the period from the Gregorian reform through the Fourth Lateran Council – particularly the expanding insistence upon clerical purity, transubstantiation, and lay access to the sacraments – marked a key shift in how women were perceived. The increased emphasis on the physicality of the Eucharist and the purity of the priest resulted in a displacement of fear upon women who could upset the balance, resulting in a harsh clerical backlash against women and their polluting power. They posed an increasing threat to clerical purity and, consequently, sacramental efficacy. Fearing a failure of the sacraments, many viewed clerical wives as having “metaphorically raped and plundered the altar.” When this was combined with a new understanding of demonology – as demons were increasingly understood to lack any sort of physical body – it had the effect of shifting what had previously been relegated to the realm of the demonic onto the human agents through which these demons works: heretics, Jews, and ultimately witches.
It's a really interesting idea, but the degree to which you will find it convincing depends almost entirely on how you feel about Freud. Elliott is certainly a fan, and her work is filled with references to repression and 'splitting' (dividing the world into 'good' and 'bad' parts). This leads to some of her more interesting conclusions, but at other times it feels like she's just forcing the texts into a Freudian framework and giving them an overly-broad application. At one point, for example, she claims that the idea of clerical wives "raping and plundering the altar" was one held by the majority of Western Christendom. There's no way that she could know something like that, and the only evidence provided comes from the pen of one author. At another point, Elliott cliams that a cleric in a penitential manual claiming to have never sinned in a holy place should be read "psychoanalytically as a reluctant affirmation disguised by negation." While that's not impossible, it pretty much amounts to psychoanalyzing a thousand-year-old textbook example, which is kind of extreme. If you're going to say that every no could really means a yes, things get very messy very quickly. Finally, Elliott is never able to adequately address why developments in the 12th and early 13th centuries took so long to burst into the later witch hysteria.
Still though, it's an interesting read. If you like Freud, you'll probably think it's awesome.
January 25, 2020
In my work on Nightmares with the Bible I repeatedly run into the intersection of three or four elements. Evil, religion, sexuality, and control. Dyan Elliott addresses these things in her Fallen Bodies: Pollution, Sexuality and Demonology in the Middle Ages. This book begins by demonstrating the difficulties our medieval siblings had with embodiment. In the context of a society largely run by the church, understanding the male and female body required quite a lot of guesswork. Science existed at this time, as I’ve noted elsewhere (Sects and Violence in the Ancient World), but microscopes didn’t. Besides pretty much everyone believed in the reality of the spiritual world. You can’t blame people for working with what they knew.
Elliott first addresses the male body, since this was the matrix for priests and other clerics. Nocturnal emissions suggested demonic activity to many. Turning attention to females, menstruation had long been a puzzle to most cultures. Since blood was considered a pollutant, as the Eucharist grew in holiness and importance, the need for limiting pollution rose. It was not until only really a millennium ago that priests were required to be celibate. This led to the problem of what to do with priests’ wives. This “unassigned” female body soon took on the taint of witchcraft.
Demons, the representatives of evil in this equation, began as somewhat embodied spiritual beings. If incubi and succubi (often the same gender-bending entity) carnally visited humans at night, they must have had some kind of body. Medieval thinkers supposed them to be bodies made of air. Eventually they became bodiless, yet they retained enough corporeality to consort with witches. Elliott’s study is, in many ways, a precursor to understanding the witch hunts of the late Middle Ages and Early Modernity. She capably walks the reader through a theological tangle that helps explain, but not excuse, the unfair treatment of women that lasts to this day.
Elliott first addresses the male body, since this was the matrix for priests and other clerics. Nocturnal emissions suggested demonic activity to many. Turning attention to females, menstruation had long been a puzzle to most cultures. Since blood was considered a pollutant, as the Eucharist grew in holiness and importance, the need for limiting pollution rose. It was not until only really a millennium ago that priests were required to be celibate. This led to the problem of what to do with priests’ wives. This “unassigned” female body soon took on the taint of witchcraft.
Demons, the representatives of evil in this equation, began as somewhat embodied spiritual beings. If incubi and succubi (often the same gender-bending entity) carnally visited humans at night, they must have had some kind of body. Medieval thinkers supposed them to be bodies made of air. Eventually they became bodiless, yet they retained enough corporeality to consort with witches. Elliott’s study is, in many ways, a precursor to understanding the witch hunts of the late Middle Ages and Early Modernity. She capably walks the reader through a theological tangle that helps explain, but not excuse, the unfair treatment of women that lasts to this day.
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