Flagellation
Beating the body with whips, for punishment, religion, or sexual practice.
Flagellation, from the Latin flagellum ('whip'), is the act of beating the human body with implements such as whips, rods, or the cat o' nine tails. It has been imposed as punishment on unwilling subjects, but also submitted to willingly or performed on oneself in sadomasochistic or religious contexts. Strokes are typically aimed at the unclothed back, though other areas, such as the soles of the feet in bastinado, may be targeted.
Current or recent past use as punishment
Officially abolished in most countries, flogging or whipping remains a common punishment in some parts of the world, particularly in countries using Islamic law and in some territories that were former British colonies. Caning may be ordered by courts in Singapore and Malaysia as a penalty for certain crimes, a legacy of British colonial rule in the 19th century. Unlike typical Sharia court floggings, which are public, these punishments take place behind closed doors, with the accused tied to specially constructed frames and a doctor in attendance. As of 2024 in Singapore, caning and imprisonment is mandated for approximately 30 different offenses, including certain cases of rape, robbery, and drug trafficking. In Malaysia, 60 offenses during 2024 were subject to caning; judges routinely mandated it for crimes such as kidnapping, rape, and robbery, as well as nonviolent offenses like narcotics possession, criminal breach of trust, migrant smuggling, and immigration offenses. On 5 September 2023, Tanzania was ordered to remove corporal punishment from its laws by the African Court on Human and Peoples' Rights. In the Maldives, where Sharia law is mixed with English common law, flogging is legal punishment, most commonly used on those convicted of extramarital sex, who are most commonly women. The object used is typically a paddle, but a less harsh tool—such as peacock feathers, a handkerchief, or a single lash with a string of 100 rosary beads, each bead counting as a separate lash—may be substituted when the offender has more political influence. According to journalist Robert Fisk, from circa 1993–1995, hundreds of Asian young women guest workers in Saudi Arabia and the United Arab Emirates were sentenced to flogging by sharia courts before being expelled penniless to their home countries. The US State Department Human Rights Practices Report for 2021 states that flogging under the UAE federal penal code was abolished, but is still imposed under the UAE's separate sharia courts for adultery, defamation of character, and drug or alcohol use.
Historical use as punishment
According to the Torah and Rabbinic law, lashes (Malkot) may be given for offenses that do not merit capital punishment, with the number not exceeding 40 strokes. In the absence of a Sanhedrin, corporal punishment is not practiced in Jewish law. Halakha specifies lashes must be given in sets of three, so the total cannot exceed 39, and the person whipped is first judged for their ability to withstand the punishment. In the Roman Empire, flagellation was often used as a prelude to crucifixion, sometimes referred to as scourging. Most famously, according to the gospel accounts, this occurred prior to the crucifixion of Jesus Christ. Whips with small pieces of metal or bone at the tips were commonly used, capable of causing disfigurement, serious trauma, and loss of blood leading to hypovolemic shock. The Romans reserved this treatment for non-citizens, as stated in the lex Porcia and lex Sempronia. The poet Horace refers to the horribile flagellum in his Satires. Typically, the victim was stripped naked and bound to a low or upright pillar. Two lictors (some reports indicate four or six) alternated blows from the bare shoulders down to the soles of the feet, with no limit to the number of blows inflicted, though they were normally not supposed to kill the victim. Livy, Suetonius, and Josephus report cases where victims died while still bound. Flagellation was referred to as 'half death' by some authors. Cicero reports in In Verrem, 'pro mortuo sublatus brevi postea mortuus' ('taken away for a dead man, shortly thereafter he was dead').
As a religious practice
In ancient Rome, during the festival of Lupercalia, young men would race through the streets wielding strips cut from the hides of goats that had just been sacrificed, striking people with them. Plutarch recorded that women would deliberately step into their path to be hit on the hands, convinced this would boost their fertility or make childbirth easier. The galli, eunuch priests of the goddess Cybele, would whip themselves until they bled at the annual Dies Sanguinis festival. Ritual whipping also featured in the initiation rites of Greco-Roman mystery religions and in the Spartan cult of Artemis Orthia. In Christianity, the Flagellation is a scene from the Passion of Christ before his crucifixion. Since the Great Schism of 1054, various Christian groups have practiced mortifying the flesh for religious reasons. The tool used for this penance is called a discipline, a cattail whip typically made of knotted cords, thrown over the shoulders during private prayer. In the 13th century, a Roman Catholic group known as the Flagellants took this self-punishment to an extreme, traveling to towns and publicly beating and whipping one another while urging repentance. Because these displays were grim and chaotic, authorities sometimes suppressed them, though they kept reappearing until the 1500s. During the Black Plague, people also used flagellation to cleanse themselves of sin and avoid the disease. Pope Clement VI allowed it for that reason in 1348, but the next year he condemned the Flagellants as a cult.
As a sexual practice
Accounts from the 1300s mention people willingly being tied up or whipped as part of, or instead of, sexual activity. By the 1590s, erotic flagellation was documented in a John Davies epigram and in references to "flogging schools" in Thomas Shadwell's 1676 play The Virtuoso and Tim Tell-Troth's 1680 work Knavery of Astrology. Seventeenth-century visual art, like the late 1600s English mezzotint "The Cully Flaug'd" held by the British Museum, also depicts such scenes. John Cleland's 1749 novel Fanny Hill includes a flagellation scene involving the protagonist and Mr Barville. This was followed by many publications, such as Fashionable Lectures: Composed and Delivered with Birch Discipline from around 1761, which advertised women offering this service in a lecture setting using rods and cat o' nine tails.
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