Fig. 1: Marko Rupnik: The Anointing at Bethany (date unknown)
Fig. 2: Marti Blue in Dirty (dir. Annabel Lee and Tessa Hughes-Freeland, 1993)
'And there will be a time of crisis, of worlds hanging in the balance.
And in this time shall come the Anointed.'
Or the Accursed ...
I.
If you know your Greek, then you know that the title Christ does not mean king or saviour, but, in fact, derives from the term Χριστός (Khristós), which means the Anointed One [1].
II.
Anointment is a ceremonial blessing, both sweet and useful, in which sacred aromatic oil [2] is ritually poured over an individual's head and/or body in acknowledgement of their divine nature and in order to provide protection from dangerous spirits and demons (which were widely believed to cause disease) [3].
It's a Jewish practice that many other peoples adopted, including the Ancient Greeks, and the concept of a sweet-smelling Messiah is, of course, central to Christianity; a faith whose oily followers we might legitimately describe as unctuous.
I'm not sure, but I would guess that the practice has its origins in prehistoric cultures; the fat and blood of sacrificial animals being smeared on the body as a powerful form of sympathetic magic. To believe that anointment with sacred oil imparted the Spirit of the Lord [4] is really not all that different from thinking that to rub oneself with lion's blood makes one strong and fierce in battle.
Finally, it might be noted that Jesus was never officially anointed by a High Priest in accordance with the ceremony
described in Exodus. He was, however, considered to have been anointed by the
Holy Spirit during his baptism. And he also has his feet lovingly oiled by Mary of Bethany shortly before meeting his sticky end on the Cross [5].
And speaking of sticky ends ... Not everyone in this life is lucky enough to be anointed: indeed, some individuals - let us call them the accursed [6] - have filth poured over them rather than fine oils.
III.
Without wishing to go into too much detail, punishments involving the covering or pelting of people with bodily waste matter, rotten food items, or other types of filth, have a long and disgusting history.
Sometimes these punishments were designed to publicly shame or appease the anger of the mob; sometimes, however, they were meant not only to shame, but to result in the person's (often slow and agonising) death ...
One thinks, for example, of the ancient Persian method of execution known as scaphism [7], in which the naked victim would be trapped between two boats, with only his head, hands and feet sticking out.
They would then be force fed with excessive quantities of milk and honey, causing them to vomit and soil themselves and thus left festering in their own puke and excrement, attracting the attention of voracious flies and other egg-laying insects.
Maggot infestations and bacterial infection would eventually lead to sepsis and death, but the whole ghastly process could take many days.
Readers who know their Bible will not be surprised to learn that the idea of being metaphorically shit upon - or turned into a piece of fly-covered meat - in order to demonstrate one's accursed state and vileness in the eyes of Man and God alike, can also be found in the Good Book.
The prophet Nahum, for example, makes perfectly clear what God will do to anyone who dares to break his Law, including those women branded as witches and harlots: 'I will cast abominable filth upon thee, and make thee vile, and will set thee as a gazingstock' (3:6), saith the LORD.
IV.
Of course, there are some today who couldn't care less about the threats of a dead deity; indeed, there are some who have even transformed their own abjection and accursed status into an erotic pleasure ...
For these perverts - coprophiles and urophiles - being covered in (or interacting with) bodily waste materials is better than being anointed with the even the holiest of holy oils.
Mysophiles with an abnormal attraction to filth and salirophiles who love to despoil or dirty the object of their affection, may horrify those like D. H. Lawrence who think such kinky individuals degraded and unable to differentiate between the flow of sex on the one hand and the flow of excrement on the other [8], but, for writers like Georges Bataille, such transgressive paraphilias play a vital role in a Nietzschean revaluation of values and in his fiction he delights in presenting readers with characters such as Dirty; a incontinent foul-smelling alcoholic who engages in debauched sexual acts with her lover Troppmann [9], and the teen terror Simone, who loves sitting in saucers of milk, being urinated on, smearing herself with mud whilst masturbating in the rain, and inserting globular objects (soft-boiled eggs and eyeballs ripped from their sockets) into her anus or vagina [10].
I'm not sure I'd like to date either girl, but perhaps Bataille is right to suggest that divine ecstasy and extreme horror are identical and that this is ultimately what the anointed and the accursed both discover.
Notes
[1] And if you know your Hebrew, then you also know that this Greek term is a direct translation of מָשִׁיחַ (Mašíaḥ),
which again refers to the Anointed One and is transliterated into English as messiah.
Fans of Buffy the Vampire Slayer will at this point be keen to remind us all that the character played by Andrew J. Ferchland in the series was also known as the Anointed One - and the epigraph at the top of this post is in fact a reference to this character and not to Jesus.
See the season 1 episode of Buffy entitled 'Never Kill a Boy on the First Date' (dir. David Semel, 1997).
[2] The oil used in a ceremonial anointment is called chrism, from the Greek χρῖσμα (khrîsma), and is commonly a mix of olive oil and balsam oil. These days, different traditions of Christian faith use different ingredients in the mix - not always following the biblical formula (discussed in note 4 below). and monarchs have sometimes.
[3] Anointing was also understood to literally seal in goodness and, during the medieval and early-modern period, the practice of oiling the dead was thought to provide posthumous protection from vampires and ghouls who might otherwise feast on one's corpse.
[4] See chapter 30 of the Book of Exodus, verses 22-25: click here.
Apparently, God not only gave Moses specific instructions for the preparation of anointing oil, he even provided a list of ingredients to be used; essentially expensive spices blended and mixed with olive oil. The resulting mixture was to be reserved exclusively for religious purposes and the recipe was not to be duplicated for personal or everyday use under any circumstances (breaking this commandment would result in a severe punishment).
The oil symbolised the presence and empowerment of the Holy Spirit and its purpose was to sanctify (or set
apart) people and objects, highlighting the distinction
between the sacred and the profane.
[5] See John 12:1-8: click here.
[6] The term accursed may not be a precise antonym for anointed, but it's the best I could think of and I believe it has a theological resonance as well as a more general meaning.
Arguably, I suppose, the accursed might also be thought of as a class of the damned. But the accursed, unlike the damned, are more loathsome and detestable than they are evil and whilst they may be marked for destruction by God, they are not necessarily heading for eternal punishment in the depths of Hell - although it's not always clear cut: see Matthew 25:41, for example, where Jesus is depicted as telling those who find themselves unfortunate enough to be standing on his left hand side at the Final Judgement: 'Depart from me, ye cursed, into the everlasting fire, prepared for the devil and his angels'.
[7] Plutarch discusses scaphism in his
Life of Artaxerxes, detailing the execution of a Persian soldier named Mithridates. His account originates from a source considered unreliable, however (which is not to say the practice didn't take place). See section 16 of the above work: click here.
[8] See D. H. Lawrence, 'Pornography and Obscenity', in Late Essays and Articles, ed. James T. Boulton (Cambridge University Press, 2004), p. 242, where he writes
"The sex functions and the excrementary functions in the human body work so close together, yet they are, so to speak, utterly different in direction. Sex is a creative flow, the excrementary flow is towards dissolution [...] In the really healthy human being the distinction between the two is instant [...]
But in the degraded human being the deep instincts have gone dead and the two flows become identical. [...] Then sex is dirt and dirt is sex, and sexual excitement becomes a playing with dirt [...]"
[9] See Bataille's novel Le blue de ciel (1957), trans. by Harry Mathews as Blue of Noon (Penguin Books 2001).
Dirty - or Dorothea to give the character her Christian name - personifies Bataille's philosophy of base materialism. Her utter degeneracy - moral and social - is contrasted with the ideals of purity and goodness that characterise both bourgeois and fascist society.
Interestingly, the character was modeled on Bataille's real-life
lover at the time, Colette Peignot, a revolutionary Communist (known by the pseudonym Laure) whose (short and tragic) life was lived to (and at) the limit.
[10] See Bataille's novel Histoire de l'oeill (1928), trans. by Joachim Neugroschal as Story of the Eye (Penguin Books, 1982).
