Manuel ÁLVAREZ JUNCO

Original title: La risa apotropaica medieval: visiones de lo obsceno sagrado de la Grecia Clásica

Published in Music in Antiquity, Middle Ages & Renaissance

Keywords: Apotropaic, Classical Greece, Evil eye, Middle Ages, Romanesque, Sacred obscene.

In classical Greece, the images of the apotropaic –protector against evil eye, satanic spirits or misfortune–, together with their magical and sacred aspects, combined the grotesque, the obscene and the laughable. This article delves into the analysis of this surprising conjunction in the symbolic visualizations of that culture, pointed out by some authors as belonging to the “sacred”. It also analyzes them as a possible origin of the images of explicit obscenity of the carvings on the exteriors of many buildings of the European Middle Ages, such as the spinaries, sheelas, double-tailed mermaids, moons, gargoyles, caganers, etc.