While Hellenistic sculptures (sans the decoration) would be at home in a wealthy’s garden of today, they clearly refracted a culture converse to our own, where male nudes were the norm, and female statues were not only few, but usually clothed. Nothing brought this home in the National Gallery's exhibition more than the herms. A puzzling form to contemporary eyes, the ancient herm comprises a sober bust standing atop an austere four-sided pillar, the smooth front plane of which is improbably broken by a certain protuberance. It is as if the bust of the modern-day “term,” a decorative column supporting a sculpted head, were having that nightmare of being naked in public.

What is going on here?

That is the question that launched the current essay as I considered my reactions to the garden’s stinkhorns and the startling herms I’d seen at the National Gallery. But we are circumscribed by culture. Trying to see beyond that boundary to grasp how an ancient regarded a publicly displayed phallus appears as thorny as a future archeologist might find divining American culture by excavating Las Vegas and its squeaky-clean doppelganger Branson, Missouri. Proust—that connoisseur of memory—also answers just such a question in the negative when he imagines a future where actors attempt to reenact a long-abandoned Catholic liturgy: “they can only ever be curious dilettantes; try as they might, the soul of times past does not dwell within them.”

Discerning that soul of ancient times is made harder by a habit of the early church to obliterate pagan artifacts and practices. We live on the more recent side of Saint Augustine, a founding father of the western church who lived during the declining Roman Empire, three centuries after Vesuvius exploded. In his book The City of God against the Pagans, Augustine lashes out at the “unrestrained wickedness” of the festival to Liber, where “the shameful parts of the male were worshiped at crossroads.” Liber (from whom libertarian derives) was an unrestrained Roman god similar to Bacchus, both analogues to the earlier Greek god Dionysus, for whom the phallus was also paraded about. (And still is! …in a playful festival held by the Greek village of Tyrnavos on the first Monday of Lent, akin to a Madre Gras bacchanal). Dionysus was an illegitimate son of Zeus, who gave the infant to the messenger-god Hermes for safe-keeping from Zeus’s jealous wife Hera. It is Hermes who brings us back to the ancient herm.

Herm statues began as piles of stones marking boundaries and cross roads. In a culture certain it was buffeted by the attentions of myriad gods all about, appealing to the spirits to keep thieves and highwaymen at bay might become a natural function of these boundary markers. Today’s gated community hopes to deter thieves at its boundary with bars rather than religious statues. One theory posits that Hermes became associated with the stone piles simply because his name resembled the Greek word for stone, herma, though the association is disputed. Whatever the truth, all the god’s attributes that had accumulated over time—fruitfulness, marking boundaries, protecting travelers, gardens, and more from harm—came to infuse the piles’ replacement as early as the 6^th century BC: carved stone herms adorned with the ancients’ symbol of manly power. (Today in other parts of the world, boundaries and paths are also marked by piles of stones, in the form of cairns that intriguingly often resemble an obelisk.) Over time, the sculpted bust atop a herm included not only gods like Hermes and Dionysus, but Greek heroes and, later, even wealthy gentlemen unashamed to glorify themselves.

In the Greco-Roman world, the improbable plumbing gracing a herm was not an oddity, as public representations of the phallus were commonplace. Herms themselves graduated from warding off harm at cross roads and boundaries to protecting entrances to homes, pleasure gardens, and vegetable gardens where their magic may have assisted the pedestrian role of a scarecrow. And Hermes was only one of many gods associated with a phallus that served as an “apotropaic” charm shielding people, possessions, and even the state of Rome from injury. We have already met the Greek deities Dionysus, whose followers paraded a phallus, and Priapus, who unabashedly displayed his. It is interesting to note that Hermes, Dionysus, and Priapus were all so-called rustic gods, each with specific roles safeguarding the productivity of cultivated and wild vegetation, of pastures, of herds, and the like. Priapus is also said to be related to the Roman fertility god Mutunus Tutunus, whose representation took Priapus’s exaggerated endowment a step further by simply dispensing with everything but. (To gain insight into the ancients’ connection of the male to fruitfulness and fertility, it might help to recall that a baby was believed to originate wholly from the father’s seed, with the mother serving as incubator, a notion of Aristotle that wasn’t fully eradicated until the early 1800s when microscopy enabled research to identify the mammalian egg and its role.)

The simplicity of Mutunus Tutunus also characterized the Roman god Fascinus, whose fuselage often sported wings the better to fly against the evil eye. (Our word fascinate derives from the Latin fascinare, to cast a spell which the evil eye was imagined to do.) Fascinus was iconified by the prick and balls of a brass “fascinum” worn for protection as amulets and finger rings. Pliny tells us a fascinum would be hung from a victor’s chariot as “medicine” against envy. The little fellow even formed a girder from which bells were suspended to make wind chimes.

The squeamishness inhabiting 19^th and 20^th century translators of Parzival may have also infected the important British botanist, Thomas Johnson, who in 1633 added hundreds of plants to John Gerard’s famous Elizabethan compendium The Herball, or Generall Historie of Plantes first published in 1597. Johnson acknowledges that many of the woodcuts of fungi in his revised Herball were copied from the Hollander Carolus Clusius’s Rariorum Plantarum Historia of 1601. However, when Johnson copied Clusius’s drawing of a stinkhorn, he notably turned it upside-down, some say to avert offense! Modesty may have influenced Johnson’s inverted depiction of the fungus, but not his text. He conferred to this stinkhorn the common name “Pricke Mushrum," and a Latin name Fungus Virilis Penis effigie. (With a name like that, we can appreciate Linnaeus's binomial naming innovation 100 years later, by which this stinkhorn is today called Phallus hadriani, after a gentleman we meet in the next paragraph.)

Now Clusius had himself based his right-side-up woodcut of a stinkhorn on an original produced thirty-seven years earlier by fellow Dutchman Hadrianus Junuis. Hadrianus collected his specimens from Holland’s sandy marshes and published his findings in a Latin pamphlet titled Phalli, the first scholarly description known for a stinkhorn. Perhaps befitting the Dutch reputation for tolerance, Hadrianus finds no offense in these fungi's shape, but suggests it simply proved Nature’s “playfulness,” as he repeated the erroneous notion that this “gift” from Nature could treat gout. He wrote first hand of the local’s superstition in naming the fungus the ghost eggs of evil spirits. Hadrianus gives glimpse of modern scientific experimentation when he evidently brings a specimen home, for he comments on the “bad odor, which completely fills even a large room.”

Jump forward nearly three-hundred years, and the same spirit of experimentation is alive in Henry David Thoreau. He inadvisably brings a stinkhorn indoors, where his journal entry for October 16, 1856 records that "in an hour or two, the plant scented the whole house wherever placed--so that it could not be endured.” The shape of the fungus, "offensive to the eye," so impressed Thoreau that he illustrated his journal with a sketch. His Puritan lookout contrasts with that of the Dutch Hadrianus. Rather than finding Nature playful, Thoreau, always the gadfly, takes a poke at her when he concludes a dry botanical description of his dissections with the accusation “what was Nature thinking when she made this? She almost puts herself on a level with those who draw in privies.”

To Charles Darwin’s daughter Henrietta, the stinkhorn’s message was similarly gross. This we know from Henrietta’s niece Gwen Raverat, who included a chapter on her “Aunt Etty” in a charming reminisce of a Victorian childhood spent among Darwin’s progeny (Period Piece, first published in 1952 and illustrated by the author). Aunt Etty bore a Victorian duty to march about the woods armed with a poker, sniffing out the fungi, and harpooning them into her basket. Then, like some perverse observe of the Vestal Virgins, she returned home, locked the door to the inner sanctum drawing-room (thus protecting the maid’s morals), and incinerated the hapless things at the hearth A burnt offering to a goddess of modesty? (Yes, there was a goddess for that). Such strictness in a daughter of Darwin may lend credence to the idea that he hesitated to publish the theory of natural selection, in part, for fear of offending his deeply religious wife. One wonders if Aunt Etty knew that Roman soldiers had left behind in her native England numerous defenses built of incombustible stone carved with the protective phallus? And what would she have thought of the Greek matron who twenty-three centuries prior was painted on a vase actually nurturing a plot of stinkhorn look-a-likes?!

While Aunt Etty was patrolling the woods in Surrey, England, across the pond in the woods of the Ozark mountains young women enacted scenes more akin to the Greek vase. A folklorist reports local accounts that an adolescent girl in the 1870s who encountered a stinkhorn considered it a good omen, and might act on the superstition by dancing about it unclothed, supposing this Dionysian-like ritual would help attain the guy she had in mind.

A tangle of more sinister superstitions precipitated a bizarre 1926 incident in France, where stinkhorns led a dozen members of a religious sect, Our Lady of the Tears, to beat a priest to a pulp. Only the timely arrival of gendarmes spared the abbé worse. Newspapers around the world reported the fracas. According to a January 25 article in the Times of London, a member of the cult testified at trial that the priest had sent birds over the garden of their leader, a Marie Mesmin, where the birds’ “droppings gave rise to fungi of obscene shapes, which emitted such appalling odours that those who breathed them were smitten with horrible diseases.” Mesmin was a troubled soul, who claimed tears flowed from her plaster souvenir of the Virgin Mary—later found to be tap water—and who four years prior had asked the same priest to exorcise a demon from her, which he had. As her feinting spells continued, however, she and her followers logically concluded that the priest was actually a sorcerer who had cast a spell over her. And then sent those naughty birds. One wonders if the yokels had known some natural history if it would have been flies that priest dispatched over the 360 miles from his parish outside Paris to the madam’s garden in Bordeaux. Lest we tsk too loudly at these superstition-soaked events, it bears remembering that only a year earlier a Tennessee educator was convicted at the famous Scopes monkey trial of teaching evolution.