IF YOU could have managed to find Cerne Abbas in Dorset this summer through the torrential rains you would have been able to see the famous 180 ft giant with his erect fertility symbol next to another icon of rampant manhood. Yep, suddenly overnight a baggy Y-fronted, donut eating, giant size Homer Simpson had appeared as his doppelganger.
Apparently the locals down the pub thought it a great laugh; as one wag said, they now had Homer erectus in their village. Sadly, the Pagan society of Great Britain weren’t smiling, they were outraged at the degradation of their holy site. But hang on a minute, according to historical evidence, the Cerne Abbas giant dates no further back than the 1600s, around the time of the Civil War. Are these roundhead or cavalier Pagans?
Meanwhile, in the depths of Wales a holy cow was causing mayhem. Loved and revered as a God by the local Skanda Vale Hindu temple, when it was diagnosed with TB they fought for it to be given a special stay of execution. Well, actually it’s not a cow it’s a bull, called Shambo, which raises questions of accuracy; as far as I remember, it is the female of the species that is most beloved and sacred in India as the provider of milk and sustenance for life, not the male.
Quite rightly, the judge has ordered the bull be slaughtered; over 22,000 cattle were culled in Britain in accordance with EU law last year, and given that the disease crosses over to humans and given the moral responsibility of protecting other people’s children this seems only honourable. Maybe the monks in Wales should have seen the number of cases of childhood TB in India that I saw when I lived there and heard the hacking cough of the baby next door each night before it died.
And that’s the problem, isn’t it? Playing the ‘but it’s my faith and therefore you are upsetting my sensibilities’ card is starting to become a game of stand off between universal laws for the common good and the rule of ‘it’s my religion, and I have the right to do anything as religious law transcends the secular’.
This is what was worrying those pro-secularism voters in Turkey who have seen the countries around them become increasingly fundamentalist. How long they might ask before the freedom to go unveiled, drink alcohol, or free speech is revoked? The strength of secular governments is that they allow all faiths to have equal status within the law. As soon as one religious group becomes dominant over the political process, the inevitable consequence, it seems, is persecution or civil war.
And civil war brings us back to the well hung white giant on the hillside in Dorset, where historians suggest it is was, in fact, a satirist statement drawn by villagers defending their loyalist roots against the puritan Oliver Cromwell, “ the English Hercules”. The very first cartoon controversy. But, as if to prove the difficulty of interpreting icons, I prefer the explanation told me by a cider sodden local in the bar at the very old New Inn in Cerne Abbas a few years ago, “It be where the giant died and we drew around him”.
Did I believe him? Nah. Do I think he has the right to believe it? Yep. Should he be allowed to let his interpretation and the laws of giantism dominate over all others? Of course not: that would simply be a load of old bull.
