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.The Host is dis-gusted by the Pardoner s daring to ask the Host to kiss his relics (his balls, THE EXCREMENTAL HUMAN GOD 99his excrement); but the Host goes one further by making explicit theassociation linking relics, balls, and shit, thus threatening the controllingfiction of pilgrimage wherein relics function as part of the symbolicweb of detritus.What is shocking about the Host s insult is not that hethreatens to cut off the Pardoner s balls, which is a rather conventionalattack on manhood; rather that the Host exposes what is underpinningthe pilgrimage indeed, all pilgrimages itself: that, discursively, relicsare no more than symbolic excrement.70 This is literalized in one ofthe stories in Thousand and One Nights that suggests how Muslims readChristians as embodying defilement.In this tale, the high patriarch ofConstantinople is so revered that his dried excrement is utilized as holyincense for ceremonial purposes.In order to produce more of this sacredfilth, the priests used to forge the powder by mixing less holy matterswith it, that is to say, the excrements of lesser patriarch and even of thepriests themselves. Christian soldiers then kiss a cross smeared with thismatter. [T]here could be no doubt as to the genuineness of the powderas it smells terribly and would have killed any elephant in the Muslimarmy. 71 While this story is meant to parody Christian ritual, at the sametime it touches on a potential aspect of the relic: the fact that it is acommodity and, as such, filthy.Chaucer s Host implies that the shrines visited in the pilgrimage arememorials to what imaginatively is no more than excrement.By ver-bally linking relics and excrement, the Host confuses vilified shit andlife-giving, healing relics/dung.As Raison argues in Roman de la Rose,meaning is imposed arbitrarily on a word by the user and fixed by customand society.Raison argues, If.I had called testicles relics and haddeclared relics to be testicles, then you, who here criticize me and goadme on account of them, would reply that relics was an ugly, base word. Testicles is a good name and I like it, and so, in faith, are testes and penis. 72 The Host s words expose the edifice upon which Christianpilgrimage is based by pointing up the arbitrary divisions between thefilthy and pure, the sacred and profane.Canterbury is presented as a placewhere filth is not only present, but valorized: the relic as redeemed dung.There is mockery of Thomas s beshitten breeches and hostility to theenshrined turd/balls, but there is hope as well.The Host falls into thecategory of the joker who appears to be a privileged person who can saycertain things in a certain way which confers immunity. A joker caneven be read as a ritual purifier, 73 for the Host s insult ultimately resultsin the kiss between him and the Pardoner initiated by the Knight.ThePardoner, sullied as a filthed relic himself, is kissed by the Host in a ritualparodying the kissing of relics.Dung contains redemptive powers; hencethe kiss of peace at the end of the Pardoner s Tale despite the virulent 100 EXCREMENT IN THE LATE MIDDLE AGESinsult of filth and violence uttered by the Host.Excrement can be purga-tive and curative.The kiss may be imposed and unlikely, yet it suggestsredemption.Only the kiss of peace can rectify the transgression voicedby the Host.74All references to excrement gesture simultaneously to its oppositepurity.As orchestrator of a supper (never eaten, it is true), Chaucer sHost functions as an (admittedly debased) similacrum of the other Host,the Host par excellence, the Host of the Last Supper, Christ Himself.Considering that Chaucer is continually playing with multiple meanings,it would be surprising if we were not to consider the double meaning ofthe Host, more often referred to as the Hoost than as Harry Bailey.75 Infact, according to the MED, the use of host as bread consecrated into theEucharist proliferates in usage in the 1390s when Chaucer was writingThe Canterbury Tales
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