I discussed nuns at length in Part 1. But nuns aren’t the only ones to find themselves in a sexually awkward situation. There are a couple more virgin birth, and sort-of virgin birth, stories worth a brief discussion. The first story involves a French noblewoman named…

…Madeleine D’Auvermont, wife of Jerome Auguste de Montleon, who lived in Grenoble. Yes, this image looks a lot like Joan of Arc, but I will use it anyway. It is from Madeleine that we learn something both fascinating, as well as rather dangerous. Not having seen her husband for four years, she nonetheless gave birth to a child in 1637. Naturally enough, adultery was suspected. But when she was put on trial, she claimed that she became pregnant by having sexual fantasies about her husband, who, it turned out, had died in Germany. To make matters even stranger, four of Madeleine’s BFFs testified that not only was this possible…it had happened to them too! And so when the verdict was reached on February 13, 1637…Madeleine was declared innocent, and her mamzer-child Emmanuel was recognized as the heir of Jerome. Yes! That is quite a joke…isn’t it! The commonly misunderstood prophecy about Emmanuel in Isaiah 7, whereby a virgin gives birth to…Emmanuel…well, Madeleine apparently had a good sense of humor. The case fascinated Europe, particularly in the Netherlands, and a small book was produced on the subject…

On February 13, 1637, Madeleine was found to be not guilty and, despite her Bun in the Oven, this allowed her son to inherit his father’s wealth. However, the Parliament of Paris reviewed the matter, and issued an opinion stating that it was hoax, and attempted to ban publication of the story…

As I said, the story became popular in the Netherlands…

And so medical and religious experts confirmed that this was possible, though there were some dissenting voices. Of course, if it were true that sexual fantasies can make you pregnant, your average male would have thousands of children running around, and Playboy models would be the mothers of thousands more.

Moving right along, one must discuss…

…Legrand G. Capers, who wrote a very interesting article in a medical journal in 1874, titled Attention Gynecologists! Notes from the Diary of a Field and Hospital Surgeon. Was he a gynecologist? And! If so, it would be a good thing he was there…after all, I’m sure all those male Civil War soldiers were in need of a good gynecologist! So I bet he didn’t have much to do. Perhaps gynecology was just a hobby. Attention!

Apparently, something very strange happened during the Battle of Raymond on May 12, 1863. As the battle raged, a mother and her two daughters were standing on their porch watching the battle. Yes, in those days people made a point to have a picknick and enjoy watching the human carnage occurring in front of them. The doctor heard one of the women scream, and also noticed that a wounded soldier fell to the ground at the same time. Rushing over to the soldier, the doctor discovered that among his injuries, it was unfortunately the case that a bullet called a…

…minnie ball…had torn off the soldier’s left testicle. Ouch! Still, it took balls to rush to his aid. And a wound like that might have you feeling kind of testy.

But maybe that’s why they come in twos…a twist on the old adage…two heads are better than one. Rushing to the porch, Our Good Docter found that one of the sisters had been shot in her abdomen. So he treated her and went back to camp. Capers returned to visit the wounded woman six months later, found that she was pregnant, and claiming she was a virgin. Eventually, she gave birth to a son. However, the child had a problem with his testicles, and when the doctor examined him, he found a minnie ball in the boy’s scrotum. So it wasn’t hard to figure out what happened…the bullet that tore off the soldier’s left testicle was the same bullet that penetrated the poor woman’s abdomen, carrying with it enough semen to impregnate her. The bullet remained in her womb, and eventually ended up in the fetus’s scrotum. The woman swore up-and-down that she was a virgin, and the good doctor told her family that her hymen was intact. So our virgin gave birth, though the baby had a strange father, and thus gave rise to the wonderful story of the Civil War Bullet Baby. Capers was probably shocked at how seriously people took the story, with the latest article that seems to accept it as historical was written in 1959 by Dr. Donald Napolitani. But the whole thing was a hoax, and the editor of the journal later published the following statement…

DR. L.G. CAPERS, of Vicksburg, Miss., disclaims responsibility for the truth of that remarkable case of impregnation by a minnie ball, as reported in No. 19 of this Journal. He tells the story as it was told to him. He does not say it is untrue, but is disposed to appositely remember the truth of the old adage, that "accidents may happen in the best regulated families." The joke is, that the Doctor reported the case without any signature, but as the editor is indisposed to be made the victim of canards, and recognized the writing sent, he was unwilling to deprive the author of the contemplated fun, and allowed him to enjoy even more of this than was anticipated. The readers have enjoyed the story much, but not enough "to cut capers" after reading it.

Apparently, Napolitani didn’t read the second article. But I guess you could say that the baby boy was literally a Son Of A Gun. And how seemingly logical it is that a ball was in his scrotum…three are better than two!

Now for a far more troublesome, yet hilarious, account of a miraculous pregnancy. But Reading Discretion is Advised. In ancient Egypt, the gods…

…Osiris and Set didn’t get along with each other, even though they were brothers. One day, they got into a fight…one that Set won and Osiris came to rue. Well, temporarily at least. Set killed his brother, then dismembered his body, scattering the body parts all over the place. Osiris’s main squeeze…Isis, wasn’t willing to give up on Osiris, so she collected the parts of his body and put them back together again…

There was one problem…a big problem, she couldn’t find Osiris’s phallus, but not from want of searching. Perhaps she should have talked to Agnes. It turns out that Set threw his brother’s phallus into the Nile, and it was swallowed by a catfish. They’ll eat anything. And the story may not have been known the first, or second, king of Upper and Lower Egypt…

…Narmer, whose name means…catfish king.

If you want to know more, talk to Agnes.

Now, metal implants and artificial limbs are nothing new. And no one knew this better than Isis. Rather than get a new husband, she decided to just put Osiris back together again. The image of Isis reassembling Osiris made its way into the strange world of alchemy…

And unlike the hapless…

…Humpty Dumpty, Isis was able to pull it off. There was one little problem, but Isis remained undeterred. After putting Osiris back together, she made a Golden Phallus, and attached it to Osiris. Now, behold!

And then…

…Wait! I thought it was gold. Thus the two were able to conceive Egypt’s greatest god…Horus. Depending on how you look at this story, Isis made the most expensive sex toy in history. And so it is that Isis really got pregnant by a metal phallus…at least that’s one way of looking at it. I’m having lunch with her on Friday, and I’ll find out for sure. Time for censorship! I show again an image shown above…

…the scratched lines show the way they do because someone took a chisel and removed Osiris’s phallus…that’s twice! Some guys just can’t win. The chiseling away of a deity’s phallus inside Egyptian monuments is believed to have one of two explanations…Christians who utilized the ancient temples, or others who wanted the stone phalluses for souvenirs. This type of damage is commonly seen, and the terms…Fertility Gouges, or…Pilgrim’s Gouges, are applied to it. Still, the story puts Osiris in good company…

…with the likes of the Egyptian god Min. There is a strange dichotomy in Greco-Roman culture. First there are…

…Pan and Priapus. But then there are other images…

…of a bunch of guys with nothing to brag about, and simply don’t measure up to Min, Pan, and Priapus…or even these guys…

So there are Greek statues who should be driving Corvettes. I would also mention another strange family-centered birth story involving a virgin…

…yes…Plato…the Great Philosopher who, unlike his teacher Socrates, left behind a plethora of written works referred to as the dialogues, which usually feature Socrates debating various sophists. Plato’s mother’s name was Perictione, and his father’s name was…hold that thought a moment. Perictione, was a name also borne by one or two philosophical writers…

…though a connection to Plato for either of them is tenuous. But Plato’s Perictonie also bore Glaucon, Adeimantus, Plato, and Protone. Her first husband was Ariston, and both Ariston and Perictione claimed rather illustrious family backgrounds…

…Perictione claimed descent from Solon, the Great Athenian Lawgiver. For his part, Ariston claimed descent from…

…the noble and self-sacrificing Athenian king…Codrus. At war with the Dorians, a prophecy circulated that the army whose king was slain in battle would prevail. Ok, it doesn’t usually come out that way…but still. Putting the fate of his comrades before his own, Codrus disguised himself as a peasant, he wandered around until he founded someone willing to kill him. The title of king would, in Athens, give way to that of…archon, a position similar to that of the consul in Rome. Plato’s brothers…Adeimantus and Glaucon, featured in some of Plato’s dialogues, including the Republic, the Apology, and Parmenides. And it was history’s greatest philosopher…Aristotle, who studied under…

…Plato (left), Aristotle (right). And it is the Republic that gave us a truly great theme…

…the Ship of Fools. Darla told the nuns at school that I was on the Maiden Voyage. I don’t know how she figured it out, but I wasn’t the only one aboard that ship…

What do you mean you don’t serve Filets-o-Fish or Big Macs on this cruise!

The Ship of Fools is Plato’s term for a government made up of people who are not experts in the subject matter they are exercising power over; and it is democracy where this is, perhaps, most notable so…welcome aboard!

After her first husband…Ariston…died, she married …her uncle Pyrilampes. Ouch! But it was the ancient world, and something like this would happen again…

…Emperor Claudius, who received the purple after the assassination of his unpopular nephew…Gaius Caligula. Claudius would marry a total of four times. First…

…Plautia Urgulanilla. Ok, those aren’t exactly marble busts, but I think the images are cool. She bore Claudius’s first son…Claudius Drusus. Some people die by mis-adventure, and some people die by stupidity…and some people die by both…

 He lost Drusus at Pompeii, when he was very young; he being choked with a pear, which in his play he tossed into the air, and caught in his mouth. 

 Suetonius, Life of Claudius, 27.

Beware of pears! They can make or break emperors. I’ll admit to trying this trick with grapes. Darla tried it with a coconut, which ended up costing me a lot of money in dental bills. But a pear? Apparently it plunged down upon Claudius Drusus with such velocity that it became lodged in his throat.

Then Claudius married wife number two…

…Aelia Paetina, whose adopted brother was …

…the infamous Praetorian Prefect named Aelius Sejanus, the man who Tiberius relied upon after he retired to Capri, and it was Sejanus who murdered Tiberius’s son Drusus…also known as Castor. Sejanus became the cutting edge of Tiberius’s sword, until Tiberius found out the truth. The emporor then launched a massacre in Rome of all those associated with Sejanus. All memory of Sejanus was erased, including…

This is not an uncommon last resort in human history. It is what you do if you have something you can’t do without, but it has the face or name of someone on it that you would like to do without. In ancient Rome, the Senate had the power to deify a deceased emperor, or issue a damnatio memoriae, the ultimate parting shot at an emperor you don’t like. Ultimately, 38 Roman emperors met this fate in death, beginning with Caligula. The flip side of this is a decree of apotheosis…whereby the emperor, and some non-emperors as well, were declared to have become gods. Claudius received this great honor. But he was a bit of a dufus, and one Roman writer described him as undergoing apocolocyntosis….the acting of becoming a pumpkin.

Hail, Claudius…the god of pumpkins!

I made a Claudius-o-lantern!

There are interesting parallels to what befell Sejanus and his coins! Yes…

… the coins of Domitian, a first-class receiver of a damnatio memoriae. Not to mention…

…the removal of Domitian’s name from monuments. And then there’s Emperor Damnatio Memoriae himself…

…Emperor No Face! Actually, it is…or was…Commodus, who was surely one of the worst emperors in history.

And Caligula…a bronze bust with the face punched in and thrown into the Tibur river, and a gold coin with his face defaced by defacing. And there’s…

…the attempt to remove Geta from history. And I have medical advice for…

…Nero…it will never heal if you keep scratching it. And now for the most ridiculous case of damnatio memoriae, again involving poor Geta…

…ah, yes…very subtle. Modern history has done this too. Following the surrender of Nazi Germany in 1945, Berlin was divided in to separate occupation zones. Things were a mess, but people still had to send mail. Rather than print a bunch of new stamps, the allies decided to use some of the Hitler stamps, but with a shot to the face of the Führer…

…ah, yes…very subtle. Take that, Chancellor Sejanus. I did ask him what he thought about what happened to his stamps. He said he prepared a speech on the subject…

…well, it can be said that politicians should memorize their speeches…

Never mind. Still, at least they never talked tough and then…

…ran away. But pumpkins, damnations, German dictators and cowardly senators aside, somewhere in the list of the ladies who became romantically involved with Emperor Pumpkin, we must include two women who had, at some time, been engaged to Claudius…

…Amelia Lepida. But this was eventually broken-off at the command of Augustus. Then there was…

…Livia Medullina Camilla. An how unlucky was Claudius! It would seem that Camilla died on their wedding day. I wonder if Camilla liked pears…or pumpkins for that matter.

However, we are on much surer ground with wife number three…

…Messalina! Here we go! A whole mythology has grown up around the person of Messalina…none of it good. She is portrayed as an excessively over-sexed woman…

…and this has survived up to this day, with Messalina becoming one history’s most notorious nymphomaniacs. I can not resist the urge to indulge myself.

…ok, enough of that, though it was fun. The definitive portrayal of a beautiful, scheming, highly intelligent and manipulative Messalina was that of …

…Sheila White (center), who even challenged Rome’s most famous prostitute…Cylla, to a contest to see which of the two Unladylike Ladies could have sex with the most men. And yes, Cylla, 3 gold pieces a head is a funny way put it, and Osiris would probably be somewhat unable to measure up. It would seem that Claudius was prepared to ignore the whoring of his wife, no doubt because he had his own affairs and eventually, Messalina lost her head…literally…

And as an interesting aside, the classic depiction of Messalina holding Baby Britannicus is oddly reminiscent of…

…then there’s the right arm…

…very interesting. The Queen of Heaven and the Empress of Rome. And! Both women had sons who were executed, dying relatively young, though Jesus was an adult, whereas Britannicus was eleven years-old when he was killed. And so Messalina was put out of Claudius’s misery. Not my head! Cylla? Osiris and the Catfish King. Given Claudius’s disastrous experiences with women, he pledged to remain unmarried for the rest of his life. In fact, he told the Praetorian Guards that if he ever again even entertained the idea of marriage, they should kill him. Unfortunately, he married again. Fortunately, the Praetorians chose to take his earlier statement as bluster.

A member of Claudius’s inner circle…Marcus Antonius Pallas, a former slave who became one of the richest men in Rome, not so strange since Pallas served in the role of Treasury secretary, became involved. He allied himself with…

 …Julia Agrippina the Younger, mother of Nero, who was so expertly played by…

…Barbara Young. This marriage was shocking indeed. So the niece marries her uncle…Agrippina married her uncle Claudius. But what about the charge of incest, something that was abominable to the gods…somewhat ironic given the fact that Zeus married his sister Hera? Well, he simply changed the laws dealing with incest, and then…it was no longer incest to marry your niece. And it’s that easy. And, Perictione married her uncle Pyrilampes. But whereas Plato’s mother was a virgin, Agrippina was certainly not, and bore no children for Claudius. But who was Plato’s father? Who impregnated the Virgin Perictione? Ariston? No. Pyrilampes? No. One legend states that while yet a virgin, she was impregnated by the god Apollo, thereby making Plato the son of a virgin and a son of a god. And that seems somewhat familiar. Jesus ultimately spoke the Word of God. And when Plato was yet an infant, sleeping in his crib, bees suddenly appeared and settled on his lips. These bees brought the gift of philosophy, and thus Plato spoke the Word of Philosophy.

Another point is worth bringing up. In the essay…The Search for the Panther, Part 8: The True Logos, I discussed the Toledoth Yeshu, a Jewish work that mocks the life and person of Jesus of Nazareth.

 And Tiberius appears in one version of the Toledoth…

 In this story, Jesus is an honorable young man, a student of John the Baptist, and himself a teacher with many disciples, and "Kepha, that is, Peter" was one of them. Despite his recognition, Jesus is accused of "much mendacity" and put in jail by Emperor Tiberius. In order to uphold his reputation, Jesus promised that the emperor's daughter would become pregnant without the agency of a man and would give birth to a son. She, however, gave birth to a stone.

This version is that described by Agobard, Bishop of Lyon. I also noted that one of the strangest elements is the mighty contradiction of these statements with what is known about Tiberius. Tiberius’s first wife was Vipsania, who was the daughter of the mighty Marcus Vipsanius Agrippa…Roman general, builder, and key supporter of Augustus.

…Vipsania Agrippina and her father, Marcus Agrippa in all their splendor. Noses seem to take a lot of punches in ancient Rome. By Vipsania, Tiberius had a son, named Drusus Julius Caesar, who married…

… Livilla, daughter of Drusus the Elder and Antonia (daughter of Marc Anthony). Livilla and Drusus had a son, named Gemellus (above, right). Thus, since Drusus the Elder was the brother of Tiberius, Drusus Julius Caesar married his first cousin. This, unlike his cousin Tiberius’s eventual marriage to his niece, was permitted under Roman law. Drusus himself at odds with both his father, and his father’s right-hand-man…Sejanus. Eventually he was murdered. The definitive Vipsania was played by…

… Shelia Ruskin. Darla said she went back to ancient Rome and got her autograph.

Gemellus was later killed by Caligula. Augustus and Livia forced Tiberius to divorce Vipsania and marry Julia…daughter of Augustus and …

…Scribonia, Augustus’s first wife. Tiberius was forced to marry…

…Frances White. Tiberius didn’t like Julia, and although they had a son, now called Tiberillus, the child died in infancy. However, the Toldet’s use of Tiberius in a virgin birth story is somewhat puzzling…

Pontius Pilate informed Tiberius of the reports which were heard abroad through all Palestine concerning the resurrection of our Savior Jesus from the dead. He gave an account also of other wonders which he had learned of him, and how, after his death, having risen from the dead, he was now believed by many to be a god. They say that Tiberius referred the matter to the Senate, but that they rejected it, ostensibly because they had not first examined the matter, for an ancient law prevailed that no one should be made a god by the Romans except by a vote and decree of the Senate. But in reality, the saving teaching of the divine Gospel did not need the confirmation and recommendation of men. But although the Senate of the Romans rejected the proposition made in regard to our Savior, Tiberius still retained the opinion which he had held at first, and contrived no hostile measures against Christ.”

 Eusebius, Church History 2.2.1-3.

Accordingly Tiberius, in whose time the Christian name first made its appearance in the world, laid before the senate tidings from Palestine which had revealed to him the truth of the divinity (of Jesus) there manifested and (Tiberius) had supported the motion by his own vote to begin with. The Senate rejected it because it had not itself given its approval. Caesar Tiberius held to his own opinion and threatened danger to the accusers of Christians.”

Tertullian, Apology 5.1.2.

This is more than remarkable, seeing that early Christianity was very hostile to Roman emperors. But not Tiberius. And it is clear that Tiberius knew the distinction between Christianity and Judaism. The issue of the Jews living in Rome during the reign of Tiberius centers around the emperor’s decree that all Roman Jews of military age join the army, and all other Jews were ordered to leave the city of Rome. So, we know that Tiberius did not have a daughter.

Things were confusing for the Jews during the reign of Caligula…the imperial government was not overtly hostile to the Jews, as long as they paid their taxes, something influenced by the emperor’s friendship with Herod Agrippa. In 37 A.D., Caligula made Agrippa king over several territories in Israel, and eventually, he was made king of Judea.  

Herod Agrippa was dedicated to Jewish Orthodoxy, and, consequently, was hostile to Christianity. He murdered James, son of Zebedee and brother of John…

Herod also went after Peter...locking him up in prison. But this lead to the story of the Liberation of Peter by an angel…

So things went better for Peter than they did for James. The real disruption caused by Caligula was the result of an event to which the emperor took great offence. In Jamnia, Jewish zealots destroyed a pagan altar that had been dedicated to Caligula. Furious, he sought to teach the Jews a lesson by decreeing that a statue of himself be raised in the temple in Jerusalem. He did not, nor did he intend to, actually do it. He was making the point that the Jews had their temple, and the gentiles had their temples. Religious liberty goes both ways. But this disruption primarily affected the Jews, and Herod Agrippa was the driving force behind a disorganized persecution. Caligula died at the hands of assassins. In I Claudius, Caligula dies as a coward, strangely calling out to his dead sister Drusilla. In reality, his last words were…And yet I live! Herod Agrippa also died tragically, and he was assigned the ultimate horrible death for great villains…Eaten By Worms. This involved a body full of living fly maggots, eating away the villain’s body from inside. This is somewhat similar to the fictional Persian method of execution called…Killed By Boats, involving the intentional infliction of Scaphism…ultimately, Eaten by Worms. The only ancient, original source for the soldier Mithridates dying By Boats is Plutarch, whose source, an anti-Persian writer named Ctesias, sought to play up the barbaric nature of the Persians, with Plutarch gladly adding to what amounts to a fictional horror story. Examples of those who died of some form of myiasis include…

…Herod the Great, the grandfather of Herod Agrippa; Antiochus IV Epiphanes; and the former slave named Eunus, who lead a slave revolt now known as the First Servile War. But also…

…Galerius, the Cyrenaean Queen Pheritima; the Spartan poet Alcman; and the Roman dictator Sulla. What a cast of characters! It does seem a stretch that Herod the Great and Herod Agrippa died of the strange Eaten by Worms disease. However, these deaths began with wounds or sores, which became infested with a type of fly larvae like the…

…botfly or screw-worm fly, the latter being known to lay horrid maggots that eat their way through live tissue.

And that’s not the most pleasant way to end an essay. Although I must admit…I’ve done it before. But if you talk about Herod Agrippa, it’s hard not to make a few remarks about his dreadful death. It beats Jiggers and Guinea Worms, though not by much. I apologize for the long-winded, meandering discussion of a bunch of…stuff. But it all was connected in a very disorganized and unconnected manner. Most of us would agree that you don’t marry your neice, even if the emperor tells you he’ll make it legal. And Plato, it would seem, is the son of a god, just not the…Son of God. Even if you don’t like flies, you certainly feel differently about Platonic Bees resting on your lips and giving you the gift of philosophy…it sure beats a pear stuck in your throat.  And if you’ve been drafted and are heading off to the Civil War, watch out for minnie balls…you don’t want your wife thinking you had an affair. Of course, I shouldn’t waste time running out of it. You know what flies when you’re boring people…and no, not botflies. I would turn it back if I could, but I don’t have any to spare. So I will not kill anymore, since we know that it heals all wounds…well, most of them. So I will save it in an attempt to keep it on my side, and apparently, I have too much of it on my hands anyway. And a word of advice from Madeleine D’Auvermont…Be careful what you dream tonight! You might wake-up and find yourself in a Family Way.