Flagellation

Flagellation (usually with whips) has been associated with religious fervor from pagan times. In ancient Egypt devotees of the goddess Isis scourged themselves at an annual festival. According to Pausanias, women were flogged in the temple of Dionysus. Plutarch states that the priests of Cybele were flogged in the temple of the goddess.

In the Christian religion, flagellation found many rationalizations. It was used as an official punishment for priests and monks, a self-inflicted penance, and a dramatization of the sufferings of Christ. There was an epidemic of flagellant sects in Europe during the tenth and fourteenth centuries, associated with penance and love of Christ, and the Catholic authorities took extreme measures to suppress what they considered a morbid enthusiasm for the act. In Latin American countries, flagellation still occurs at religious processions of penitentes.

Symbolic whippings have also been associated with certain Tibetan and Mongolian sects, and some American Indian tribes used whipping to test the endurance of young males in ritual ordeals. In the witchcraft movement of the mid-twentieth century, flagellation was introduced by Gerald Gardner; it is used both as a means of exciting psychic awareness and as a disciplinary measure.

The persistent and widespread practice of flagellation both as a religious ritual and in sadomasochistic deviations appears to be based on the intense emotional and sexual sensations it arouses, sometimes culminating in paranormal consciousness. Although there is widespread sadomasochistic literature for those addicted to flogging and related practices, there has been little attempt to analyze the psychosomatic basis of flagellation.

In his book The Function of the Orgasm (1942) Wilhelm Reich explains masochism as a compulsion neurosis arising from sexual anxiety; he does not accept that real pain is desired—rather that the suggestion of pain evokes inhibited pleasure sensations in individuals with long-established sexual inhibitions. This inhibited pleasure, Reich says, is a longing for release from tensions and is expressed biologically in the organism as in well as the psyche. The historical facts of the association of actual pain and injury with flagellation, however, would indicate that Reich's explanation does not go far enough.

On a more everyday level, devotees of the sauna bath will testify to the overall tonic effect of scourging with twigs. It would seem that flagellation certainly elicits biological and psychic excitation, sometimes involving intense sexual and emotional release, and when associated with religious fervor it may induce almost mystical states of transport, although of a psychopathological kind.

Sources:

Cooper, William M. [James Glass Bertram]. Flagellation and the Flagellants: A History of the Rod in All Continents from the Earliest Period to the Present Time. London, 1868. Rev. ed. Paris: C. Carrington, 1900.

Gibson, Ian. The English Vice: Beating, Sex, and Shame in Victorian England and After. London: Duckworth, 1978.

History of Flagellation Among All Nations. New York: Medical Publishing, 1903.

Reich, Wilhelm. The Function of the Orgasm: Sex-Economic Problems of Biological Energy. New York: Orgone Institute Press, 1942. Reprint, New York: Farra, Straus and Giroux, 1973.

Valiente, Doreen. An ABC of Witchcraft Past and Present. New York: St. Martin's, 1973.

Weigle, Marta. Brothers of Light, Brothers of Blood: The Penitentes of the Southwest. Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1976.