Luke Wilson
From top to bottom:
Figure 1. Aspergillum. Author photo.
Figure 2. Aspergillum. Author photo.
Figure 3. Walters Art Museum. “Book of Hours, Ram, with situla, sprinkling holy water with an aspergillum, Walters Manuscript W. 102, fol. 80r detail”
(CC BY-NC-SA 3.0).
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Mostly, though, the aspergillum was used by Catholic priests to sprinkle holy water on the congregation. After the use of holy water was written out of the English liturgy in the 1549 Prayer Book, the aspergillum (or
“holy water sprinkle,” as it was more commonly called) didn’t get used so much, in England, at least not as an element in the official liturgy.1 But it was still good for a few laughs, as in the following jest from the popular joke book, Nugae venales (1642):
Mulier Hugenota & Papistica quaenam?
Hugenota est, quae omni tempore desiderat carnem; papistica quae saepe voluit & tractat aspergillum.
[Which is a Huguenot woman, and which a Papist? A Huguenot woman is one who at all times longs for meat; a papist woman is one who often craves, and handles, the aspergillum.]2
Or consider Henri Estienne, who in mocking fake learning and papist practices tells the story of
An other [divine] (of more learning but of lesse wit) [who] being asked in Latine, Quot sunt septem Sacramenta, answered, Tres, Aspergillum, Thuribulum, & Magnum Altare: which is in English, How many be the seuen Sacramentes, the answere, Three, the Holye water Sprinckle, the Sensar, and the highe Altar.3
These jokes rely on the idea of an inordinate interest in liturgical tools on the part of lascivious Catholic women and dimwitted Catholic priests alike (leaving aside the Huguenot women, who evidently have their own issues); both kinds of Catholic err in investing these tools with excessive importance by way of an improper substitution. Or rather, importance at all: underlying the joke that the women find the aspergillum so useful as a dildo is the scandal that, from the Protestant English perspective, that instrument is all too useless: no holy water, no need for an aspergillum.
1 Eamon Duffy, The Stripping of the Altars: Traditional Religion in England c. 1400–
c. 1580 (New Haven: Yale university Press, 1992), 465–466.
2 Nugae venales, sive, Thesaurus ridendi & jocandi (1642), 16, sig. A8v.
3 Henry Estienne, The stage of popish toyes conteining both tragicall and comicall par-tes: played by the Romishe roysters of former age (1581), 13–14, sig. B3-B3v.
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This uselessness makes the priest’s error, for the Protestant, a metonymy (though for the Catholic, in contrast, it is a synecdoche). And since the association on which the metonymy is based is in error—since the asper-gillum has no part at all in the Protestant liturgy—the materialization it represents imports the violence of sacrilege (abuse of the tool) only for the Catholic. It’s as if Protestant women are free to use aspergilla as dildos if they like: doing so is simply finding a use for something useless, rather than abusing that which ought to be used otherwise.
What is interesting here, however, is that the aspergillum itself is, archaeologically speaking, built on a foundation of repurposed elements.
This fact emerges clearly if we look at the aspergillum’s original, which came to me as I present it here, by way of Julia O’gara’s recent drawing, entitled “Aspergillum” (Figure 4).The reference is to Leviticus 14, which presents “the law of the leper,” including the process by which the leper, having been healed, is to be cleansed:
4 Then shall the priest command to take for him that is to be cleansed two birds alive and clean, and cedar wood, and scarlet, Figure 4. Julia O’gara, “Aspergillum.”
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and hyssop; 5 And the priest shall command that one of the birds be killed in an earthen vessel over running water: 6 As for the living bird, he shall take it, and the cedar wood, and the scarlet, and the hyssop, and shall dip them and the living bird in the blood of the bird that was killed over the running water: 7 And he shall sprinkle upon him that is to be cleansed from the leprosy seven times and shall pronounce him clean, and shall let the living bird loose into the open field. (KJV)
This is a complicated, hybrid device, consisting of no fewer than five dis-tinct parts (two birds, wood, thread and hyssop), and in which the living bird becomes a part of the instrument delivering the blood of the dead bird, though, having served this purpose, it is freed to return to its kind in
“the open field.” O’gara’s drawing represents a complex gesture. It follows the instructions in Leviticus in assembling the five elements into a func-tional and functioning pictorial and conceptual whole; and at the same time, by calling itself “Aspergillum,” it presents itself as a disassembly of the liturgical device into which that whole was subsequently rationalized.
It makes us ask: in what sense does Leviticus 14 describe a thing (rather than, say, a bunch of things)? And, in what sense is this original of the aspergillum already a device or instrument? What the passage tells us how to construct seems to me to stand just at the edge of being a thing, a device, tool, or instrument. The functional nexus it represents is both structurally loose (susceptible of disassembly) and destined, in the fulfill-ment of its function, to disassembly. The release of the living bird repre-sents the completion of the process the priest performs with its help; and if a tool must be useful, must be used, to be a tool, this one becomes a tool only in the moment of its disintegration. This is not the only tool that is used up in being used; you could call such tools devices or contraptions, but better perhaps to call them contrivances in order to show that they are jerry-rigged and precarious, and to remind us that their assembly always has disassembly and disintegration in mind.4
4 Despite not appearing until the early nineteenth century, “contraption” would also work well here, in emphasizing “ingenuity rather than effectiveness” (OED), and thus assembly rather than utility. “Contrivance” has the advantage, however, of appearing in English as early as 1599 (with its verb form much earlier), and also of suggesting etymologically an ingenuity that expresses itself in working with found objects, and beyond that with stirring things up (< It. con, with + Fr. trouver, to find
< L. turbare, to disturb, stir up, wake up), as it were by repurposing them (OED). The
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Another way to approach the contrivance that becomes the aspergillum is to ask what’s it good for? And when’s it good for it? The answers— not much, and not for long—point toward two indices: usefulness and dura-bility. As we have seen, when it becomes rationalized as an aspergillum it scores higher on both indices, both until and, in an altered sense, after the Reformation. But rationalization itself buries rather than eliminates its beginnings as a hybrid contrivance composed of disparate parts that have an unsettled relation to one another. It is as if these parts are not used to one another, and, as a result, they will talk. Here, for one thing, the dead bird, in its blood, is in conversation with the living bird, even if it’s hard to tell what they’re saying. (As we will see, Christian commentators were sure they knew what the conversation was about; but we can afford to understand less.) Consider in this connection Sarah Stengle’s Blade Tool for Easter (Figure 5).5 This is a very different tool, but the communicative air of fraudulence with which its use was associated is also relevant. But really the choice is not very important. As we’ll see, for the aspergillum as an achieved form the best word is probably “utensil.”
5 Sarah Katherine Stengle and Michael Joseph, Useless Tools For Every Anxious Occa-sion ([Clinton, NJ]: Hunterdon Art Museum, 2011), 9. I thank Stengle for generously permitting me to reproduce the Blade Tool here, and for many stimulating conver-sations about it.
Figure 5. Blade Tool for Easter by Sarah Stengle. Photo: Cie Stroud, 2011.
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ratio of end to end is similar: the knife-like end is in a formal and func-tional conversation with the tail-like end that it has already, or might even still, cut off.6 In both it is as if it is the very idea of the tool to unsettle a separation of instrumentality and organic form. And, notwithstanding the sense, whatever it might be, in which it is “for Easter”—there is plenty of wit in just this “for”7—this tool wears on its sleeve its own uselessness in a way that the rationalized aspergillum managed to escape, though only until it took its place in the imagination of Protestant Englishmen, where if in one sense it remains very useful as a dildo, as in the joke from Nugae venales, in another it is the very essence of the criminal pointless-ness of Catholic ritual.
In the Blade Tool, the wheel-set that provides the pivot on which the tool balances cites the expectation of both functionality and coherence, of which it is almost a burlesque: surely something with wheels can do something, and surely it must have a center, an armature around which its parts are organized into a meaningful whole. The Blade Tool is, in this sense, a meditation on the process exemplified in the conceptual assembly of the contraption of Leviticus 14 into a proper instrument in the form of the aspergillum. This process is reflected materially in two developments:
first, reusability; and second, that sine qua non of the hand-tool, the emer-gence, unambiguously, of a handle end and a business end. This appears to have been complete very early on, and indeed, given the presence of the aspergillum (in its brush form) in religious ritual among the gentiles (it is to be seen on coins produced in first-century BC Rome, and surely it originated much earlier), one may ask whether, rather than constituting the original of the aspergillum, the contraption of Leviticus 14 is designed to represent, as it were to partially reassemble, something that already
6 In fact the end opposite the knife blade is Eastern European sambar antler, and specifically the tip of the antler discarded in the manufacturing of knife blanks (personal communication with Stengle). Horn-handled knives are in the best of cir-cumstances bizarre things; but here, communication between the two ends of the tool is complicated by the fact that the horn end is and is not a handle to serve the blade end, as if each end is saying “fuck you” to the other.
7 The relation between the Blade Tool and Easter is actually intelligible, and in fact brings it even closer to the contraption of Leviticus as it is read typologically as fig-uring sacrifice and resurrection. But it would make more sense, if that’s what we’re after, to speak of Easter as being “for” the Blade Tool, rather than the other way round.
THE FATE OF THE SECOND BIRD 159 existed. In any case, Leviticus 14 participates in a network of scriptural passages with which the aspergillum, as an element of Christian liturgi-cal practice, was directly connected. These are united by their mention of the hyssop plant, and in a sermon on Psalm 51.7 (“Purge me with Hys-sope, and I shall be cleane; wash me, and I shall be whiter then snow”), Donne summons together Exodus 12.22 (hyssop used to mark the doors of the Israelites on the first Passover), John 19.29 (Jesus on the cross reached a sponge soaked in vinegar “upon Hyssop,” possibly, Donne speculates, at the end of a stick of cedar), and Leviticus 14.8 He calls the plant itself
“that Aspergillum, that Blood-sprinckler”; and he is so preoccupied with the hyssop that he leaves the living bird out of Leviticus 14 entirely, even though it is his primary example: “In the cleansing of the Leper, there was to be the blood of a sparrow, and then Cedar wood, and scarlet lace, and Hyssop: And about that Cedar stick, they bound this Hyssop with this lace, and so made this instrument to sprinkle blood. And so the name of the Hyssop, because it did the principall office, was after given to the whole Instrument; all the sprinkler was called an Hyssop.”9
Although Donne’s reading is inevitably typological in a broad sense, his omission of the second bird in Leviticus 14 forecloses the typologi-cal account that was preferred almost universally by Protestant com-mentators. Predictably, and at least since Origen, the passage had been read as figuring the sacrifice and resurrection of Christ. As Henry Ain-sworth, analogizing the scapegoat of Leviticus 16 to the birds of Leviticus 14, explains, “Because these two things [viz., Christ dead, Christ resur-rected] could not be shadowed by any one Beast, which the Priest hav-ing killed could not make alive again and it was not fit that god should work miracles about Types; therefore he appointed two, that in the slain Beast his death might be represented; in the Live Beast his immortality.
The like mystery was represented also in the two birds for the cleansing of the Leper.”10 Although there is no contradiction between the typological 8 John Donne, LXXX Sermons (1640), 645–46, sig. Iii6-Iii6v.
9 LXXX Sermons, sig. Iii6v. This appears to have been true, though the OED’s only instance dates from 1838.
10 Henry Ainsworth, Annotations upon the five books of Moses (1627), 139, sig. Mm3.
The tradition of reading the procedure and all elements of the contraption described in Leviticus 14 allegorically and typologically is already in place in Ori-gen (early third century CE); see Homilies on Leviticus, trans. gary Wayne Barkley (Washington, DC: Catholic university Press of America, 2010), Homily 8, esp. 168.
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account of the contraption of Leviticus 14 and the idea that that contrap-tion is a prototype of the aspergillum, the two may be said to represent parallel, rationalizing abstractions, and it is almost as if Donne has cho-sen one path rather than the other. The other path predominated among Protestant commentators, to the near total exclusion of the latter, and to the extent that the passage could be read as supplying a scriptural warrant for a liturgical instrument that had been rendered useless by the elimina-tion of holy water, it’s no surprise that this was the case. Perhaps it was owing to his Catholic background and complicated relation to Catholic theology that Donne is able to talk about the aspergillum without the con-tempt that was usual among Protestant commentators and poets alike.
una’s father “sprinkled” “holy water” in preparation for her marriage to the Red Crosse Knight (The Faerie Queene 1.12.37), and that seems to be a good thing; but it is otherwise with Hope, who comes between Fear and Dissemblance in the masque of Cupid in book 3: “She always smyld, and in her hand did hold /An holy water sprinkle, dipt in deowe, / With which she sprinckled fauours manifold, /On whom she list, and did great liking sheowe, /great liking unto many, but true loue to feowe” (3.12.13).11 Significantly, una’s father does not use a brush (that we hear of) to do his sprinkling. As in the dildo joke, it’s the woman who is associated with the instrument. Hope does not abuse the aspergillum, because as we know, aspergilla are useless; she abuses those who trust in her. And her appropriation of the aspergillum for this new, useless purpose reminds us that it always was useless, and /or that it was in itself never more than an instrument of abuse.
useful in being useless, or useless in being useful. The aspergillum exemplifies, in short, the “idle utensils” Marvell invokes in order to dis-miss at a key moment in “upon Appleton House”: “But now away my hooks, my quills, /And angles, idle utensils. / The young Maria walks tonight: / Hide trifling youth thy pleasures slight” (649–652).12 The phrase 11 Compare the emblem titled “Aula” (the court) in Henry Peacham’s Minerva Bri-tanna (1612), which depicts “Favour” holding aloft a holy water brush, “Where with her bountie round about she throwes, Faire promises, good words, and gal-lant shows,” and dangling from the handle end of which is a “knot of guilded hookes,” which Favour presumably uses to ensnare those who seek their fortunes at court (sig. Ff1–1v); the brush and hooks are assembled pictorially into a two-ended weapon of entrapment that also materializes the familiar contrast between fair appearance and concealed threat.
12 The Poems of Andrew Marvell, ed. Nigel Smith (London: Pearson, 2007).
THE FATE OF THE SECOND BIRD 161 has several distinct but related meanings: things useful in some useless pursuit (fishing or poetry, for example); things that have no use; things (utensils) found ineffectual in the performance of some task; and things (temporarily) not being used (“sitting idle”). It brings the useful and the useless together to produce a maximally evocative contradiction: a thing-fit-for-use (from Latin utensilis, useful) that is useless, a useful / useless thing. This paradox, hardly particular to the practice of literature, is never-theless apt in relation to it, though, unexamined, the idea that literature’s use lies in its uselessness takes us nowhere interesting; and it is perhaps central to Marvell’s poetics specifically, a compact expression—coming as it does at the moment the speaker professes to stand aside when Maria Fairfax sweeps onto the scene—of the dialectic of pastoral retirement and political engagement encountered so often in his poems.
But the phrase “idle utensils” also looks back to the devotional and liturgical implements, including their “Wooden Saints” and “Beads” (250–
254), with which the nuns make war against Isabel Thwaites’ supposed rescuer, William Fairfax. In the seventeenth century, “utensil” was fre-quently used to refer to just such objects, particularly in the conventional pairing of “ornaments and utensils” to describe church furnishings. In particular, one nun “bolder” than the others, “stands at push / With their old holy-water brush,” performing a repurposing I have elsewhere described as “tool abuse.”13 (One wonders about “old”: is the brush old because it will have been old, that is, is old at the time the story is told?
Has Marvell made it obsolete anticipatorily?) If they repurpose their holy water brush as if in resistance to its, and their own, imminent transforma-tion into idle utensils, these particular nuns seem likely, in view of the eroticization of their attempts to ensnare Isabel Thwaites (lines 97–196), to have also had other uses for the aspergillum along the lines suggested in the Nugae venales; so that Marvell’s poem is consistent with the latent anti-Catholicism of the representation of the holy water brush as an instrument of female seduction, as in Spenser and Peacham.
The nuns can only remobilize their idle utensils in a narrow and as it were strictly defensive context, but “bloody Thestylis” (lines 401–408) is equipped to undertake a more radical reactivation of the elements of the aspergillum. She is associated with the only death in the poem (that of a
13 Luke Wilson, “Renaissance Tool Abuse and the Legal History of the Sudden,” in Literature, Politics and Law in Renaissance England, ed. Erica Sheen and Lorna
13 Luke Wilson, “Renaissance Tool Abuse and the Legal History of the Sudden,” in Literature, Politics and Law in Renaissance England, ed. Erica Sheen and Lorna