his Testicles in a Box, and deliver’d it unto the King, to be kept as some Jewels of value enclos’d; and afterwards when he was suspected of Incontinency with the Queen, he was acquitted of the Accusation, by that pledge of Fidelity he left in the Custody of the King, when the Box came to be open’d.12
Swearing on the testicles as a gesture or “witness” of fidelity is here carried to a preposterous narrative pitch, but Marten’s anecdotal sensationalism is nevertheless consistent with the examples above, and marks one of the typical narrative tactics by which Enlightenment writers would distinguish an older symbolism associated with male genitalia. When we examine the underlying codes of seventeenth and eighteenth-century commentary below, we will see that the testes no longer have a dominant sense of male legal status but rather are situated among a hierarchy of bodily organs whose closest relative is the brain. And the testicles-brain homology, as one might expect, represents a significant shift in symbolic emphasis, with important implications for how masculinity and male identity would be figured.
A similar retrospective is to be found in introductions to the yard, in which the moderns briefly recount the mythical, military, or racial symbolism most prominent in earlier constructions. Although the classical deity Priapus is not a significant presence in seventeenth and eighteenth-century uses of mythology, it is this older ithyphallic god of fertility which Enlightenment treatises associate with the emphasis of a classical symbolism.13 Montaigne, one of Pope’s favorite writers, reminded the reader in his essay “Upon Some Verses of Virgil” that the ancients commonly deified the erect penis:
The Aegyptian dames in their Bacchanalian feasts wore a wooden one about their necks, exquisitely fashioned, as huge and heavy as every one could conveniently beare…. The greatest and wisest matrons of Rome were honoured for offring flowers and garlands to God Priapus. And when their Virgins were married, they (during the nuptials) were made to sit upon their privities.14
John Marten’s Gonosologium Novum (1709) would similarly recall that “The Ancients ranked the Yard of Man among the number of their Gods,”15 as would Voltaire: “The Egyptians were so far from attaching any depravity to what we dare neither uncover nor name that they carried in procession a large image, named phallum, of the virile member, to thank the gods for their goodness in making this member serve for the propagation of mankind.”16 De Graaf would isolate the same symbolism in his characterization of an earlier cultural construction of the penis, but with the addition of military and racial contexts:
How much esteem and dignity the male member enjoyed among the Egyptians as well as among not a few other peoples can be seen in Riolan’s Anthropographia (2.30)…. [De Graaf quotes verses which refer to the public decoration by reputable women of a huge artificial phallus carried through the main square.] A story told by van Linschoten in his Itinerario is also worthy of note. The Kaffir peoples of Ethiopia, who dwell on the sea coast at the Cape of Good Hope, are constantly engaged in wars with one another. Victorious warriors cut off the penises of those they have slain or captured, dry them out and regularly offer them to their king in the presence of the other noblemen in this fashion: they each take a number of penises in their mouths and spit them out at the feet of the king, who gathers them together, picks them up and restores them to the victorious warriors as royal gifts; the warriors string them together to form necklaces which they hang from the necks of their betrothed or their wives. (45)
The racialized image of penis-spitting African tribesmen is as startling, perhaps, as Marten’s testicles-in-a-box anecdote, especially when contrasted to De Graaf’s medicalized penis, but it also indicates the range of an older symbolism which associated male genitalia with contexts of military victory, war trophies, or aggressive penile display.17 And the anthropological account also anticipates early modern racial stereotyping which would assign the threateningly over-sized or grotesquely infibulated penis to primitive non-white males. Certainly the phallus as scepter, weapon, or castrated trophy can be found in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century records, particularly around Charles II’s notoriously phallic reign, and, forms of priapic worship are still evident in pornographic works such as John Oldham’s Sardanapalus (late 1670s),18 Alexis Piron’s Ode à Priape (1710),19 and John Wilkes’s Veni Creator; Or, The Maid’s Prayer (1750s)20; but Pope’s culture had assigned to the penis/phallus a new role whose symbolism was about a potentially problematic masculine identity rather than externalized signs of mythical generation, military prowess, or the racially exotic and monstrous. For the ancients, both the yard and stones were relatively direct signs of status or legal character; for the moderns, signification could be a more difficult matter, especially when the relationship between groin and mental identity was viewed as an inverse or incommensurate one.
I dwell on the historical and anthropological note-taking of these Enlightenment commentators to illustrate just how self-conscious they were about the older constructions of the meaningfulness of male genitalia. In the cases of the testicles and penis, earlier representations were either no longer a part of the insistent medicalization of physiological systems within the new health sciences, or their legal, social, and military metaphors had been absorbed but largely rewritten within a newer cultural mapping of the human body as machine.21 Semen was another matter, however. Despite debates by classical medical theorists about the make-up of male seed, its genesis, and its function, older morphological models had nevertheless produced two generally agreed-upon concepts which were to be absorbed almost completely by the new physiology and its popular transmission, either literally or figuratively: semen was (along with animal spirits) one of the most spiritous and vital fluids, and therefore exceedingly important to the well-being of the male body; and the production of seed and its discharge were linked directly to the brain.22 In both instances, the moderns would medicalize and concentrate these beliefs through a newer physiology which increasingly located an essentialized maleness exclusively within the microscopic workings of the tubes, glands, tissue, and fluids of the parts of generation. The new constructs of male reproductive biology would recall the older medical symbolism while ushering in very different cultural contexts and symbolic codes.
From the earliest narratives of its essence, sperm was seen as a vital pneuma associated with heat, fire, fertile foam, and an ineffable admixture of spirit and matter.23 A liquid with a supreme generative power, seed had acquired the status of a life-force itself. The new physiology and the sexologies repeat this conceptual rhetoric with approval. On the refinement of semen in the epididymis, De Graaf writes that the watery parts of the seminal liquid “foam more as they pass through the tubules and bestow final perfection upon them, a process which we believe Hippocrates to have understood similarly to ourselves where he says that foam is of ‘the essence of semen’ ” (32); he concludes that “the most noble” semen “is a hot and humid spiritous body produced in the testicles or a body full of spirit capable of generating a soul” (44). Paraphrasing Hippocrates, Samuel Tissot’s Onanism: or, A Treatise Upon the Disorders Produced by Masturbation (4th ed., 1772) ranks “the seminal Liquor … [as] the most valuable” of bodily humors, and, with Galen’s authority, calls it “the most subtle … vital spirit…. the Essential Oil of the animal liquors” (48–9, 52). Venette’s encomium is also typical, claiming of “Sperma” that “The moisture from whence the seed is derived … is the most refined and noblest part of the human frame, containing, in itself, the whole nature and complexion of every part of the body; or in other words, being the very essence of man” (38–9). Other medical treatises offer up a similar rhetorical palette of heightened agency, privileged status, or sublime creativity: Joseph Cam’s A Practical Treatise: Or, Second Thoughts on the Consequences of the Venereal Disease (3rd ed., 1729) registers a sense of awe that “such noble Virtues are hoarded up in that Matter elaborated by the Testicles” (2); Robert James’s A Medicinal Dictionary (1745) calls semen “the Flower, and choicest Part of the Blood, and nervous Fluid”;24 and Pierre-Louis Moreau de Maupertuis’s The Earthly Venus (1753) asks whether “the seminal spirits” are “not the fire sung by poets as having been stolen from the gods by Prometheus.”25 By far
