Pus and disgust.

There is the story of the Holy Woman/Saint Catherine who  in order to punish her wilful body, and get a saint-like hold on herself, (you know what these saints are like) Catherine, while attending a very sick woman who was seeping pus from an open wound, in a supreme act of self abgenation decanted the pus into a cup and drank it.

Ughhh aah...how fucking disgusting, I hear you gasp.

Needless to say the  patient was less than grateful; she came to loathe Catherine, taking the rather modern view (have you heard what those Nuns get up in the Abbey...jaysus its awful) that whenever the holy maid was anywhere out of her sight ... she was about some foul act of fleshly pleasure.

She was not so far wrong. So, get this. Christ apparently appeared to Catherine in a dream, and as a reward for subduing her nature, drew her mouth to the wound in his side and let her drink to her heart’s content. On a Freudian take sucking and being sucked is at the core of our happiness apparently.  Hmmn, I find that a little bit 'disgusting'.

You, yourself, depending on your belief systems, culture, profession you may find such 'supping' disgusting, mildly disgusting  or utterly disgusting, or if you have the mindset of say someone like  Keith Richards -  in his most anarchist days, mildly amusing.  

 But if you find it utterly disgusting, as I do,  if we dip into relativism on a scale of 1 to 10 how disgusting do you find these practices?

There  are South American peoples who regularly feast on manioc root softened with the saliva of the women of the tribe, and groups who make soup out of the ashes of their dead.

Ok we accept these relatvist claim that it is a variable world, all sort of things go on, for as they say up North 'there is nowt so strange as folk'. None the less, whicever way you spin, relativist or not, Caherine's pus drinking is pretty disgusting.

However as in all things we must be cognisant of polemical barrage (all those wise savants loud hailering us with their wisdoms on how we should react).

This polemical tsunami must not stop us ignoring the fact that some of our emotions

(South Ameriican Inidans drinking soup made the ashes of dead) such a disgusting habit to us

generate the culture fo these people, wheras in the West our culture is generated by the notion of disgust. And after all 'disgust' is just a word and we must not treat it as an entity.