The castrated body of the beaver was frequently linked to Christian ideas. If the animal was hunted again after its castration, it would stand upright or lie on its back to display its castration scar, thereby causing the hunters to lose interest. However because the animal knew why it was being pursued, it would mutilate itself and throw its genitalia in the face of the hunter in order to keep from being killed. This meant that it was regularly the prey of hunters. According to a myth which dates back to Aesop, the beaver was a peaceful creature whose testicles were key to the preparation of many remedies. A hunter aggressively gestures with his hand and spear towards the other beaver who is in the act of castrating himself with his teeth. His genitalia are located in the hand of one of the hunters. In this image, one beaver is castrated, and he is bleeding freely. It appears in an English medieval bestiary, a compendium of animal lore, iconography, and proto-zoological illustrations. Description: This illumination depicts a group of hunters pursuing beavers.Current Location: London, British Library MS.Related Work: Selection of other illuminations within the manuscript:.Subject (See Also): Castration Celibacy Eunuchs Masculinity Nuns Origen (Theologian).Abelard compared his own castration on the orders of Heloise’s uncle to that of Origen, and the Roman de la Rose categorized Abelard and Heloise as similarly foolish. Furthermore, the choice to restrict the scene to Origen and a nun against an abstract diaper pattern recalls the famous contemporary illumination of Peter Abelard and his lover Heloise from a Roman de la Rose in the Musée Condé. The nun’s ambivalent gesture, which could be either prayer or alarm, may underline the simultaneous nobility and foolhardiness of Origen’s act against Nature for the sake of religion. Origen and the nun appear to stare at one another intently. The most unusual aspect of this representation of Origen’s castration, therefore, is the inclusion of a nun as witness. Nuns appear in the Bodleian castration scene, yet the women sit within a cloister and seem unaware of Origen taking extreme action outside the walls. The two scenes appear together in other manuscripts of the Roman de la Rose now in the Bodleian Library and the J. Origen’s removal of his masculine attributes violated Nature’s construction of maleness just as his counterpart, Empedocles, defied Nature’s control over his death by throwing himself into the fires of Mount Etna. In the Roman de la Rose, the personification of Nature names Origen among a list of men who thought they could act against the destinies she had wrought for them. Eusebius explains further that Origen castrated himself in order to teach women and avoid any accusations of inappropriate behavior Historians have debated the veracity of Eusebius’s claim, but autocastration in general conformed to early Christian ascetic rejection of traditional marriage and sexual union.
The early church historian Eusebius of Caesarea tells that Origen castrated himself according to the gospel of Matthew, which describes men who “make themselves eunuchs for the kingdom of heaven” (Matthew 19:12). Origen was a renowned scholar and writer in late second/early third-century Alexandria whose Platonist teachings, though they bordered on heresy and thus denied him sainthood, remained influential throughout the Middle Ages.
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