Terms of Venery

What do Venus, venison, venom, the color white, and wonder all have in common?

Desire shoots through me, like birds singing (quite as fluid)!

- Sleater Kinney, “Get Up"

Photo Credit: Dreamstime. Image purchased by author.¹

Terms of venery

The word venery is very interesting in English because it means both the hunt and the pursuit of sexual pleasure.

Examples of both usages:

1) “And very carefully the Queen's Highness observeth the laws of the chase, of venery and hawking” — Ford Madox Ford. Source.

2) “Rarely use venery but for health or offspring, never to dullness, weakness, or the injury of your own or another’s peace or reputation” — Benjamin Franklin. Source.

Here is a poem titled "Venery" that gets to this second, and (in modern English) more unusual meaning.

Hunting and the pursuit of carnal enjoyment have conceptually linked at least as far back as in ancient Mesopotamia, but the connection is probably much older. I will share only a brief selection of artistic and literary works below.

Connoisseurs of language, such as Geoffrey Chaucer, will often use “venery” in both senses, such as the monk in Canterbury Tales who describes himself as “An outrider, that loved venery.” Quite unmonklike, the character described by the narrator as a “manly man” wore fine clothing, decked his horse out in bells, and loved to hunt — an activity usually forbidden to monks, just like the other kind of venery. The narrator suggests that the monk was in such good condition that if he were not constrained by monastic vows he would surely father many children. The monk then regales the company with a gloomy series of tales in which people with wealth and status are undone by fickle fortune.

The Monk in the Ellesmere manuscript of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales. Early 15th c. Wikimedia.

A very aesthetically pleasing interweaving of the themes of hunting, love, and death is elaborated in e.e. cummings’ “All in Green Went My Love Riding,” which is available here from the Poetry Foundation.

Illustration of a woman hunting from the early 14th-century Taymouth Hours. Source.

The engraving below puts a few more sordid twists into the dual motifs.

Allegory of the Hunt, engraving by Georgio Ghisi, after Luca Penni, 1556. Wikimedia. Unfortunately, I never learned Latin, so I had to rely on Google Translate to create this English version of the inscription: “Dwelling in the woods, I believed I was free from the prison of love. I had believed that a madman could live a long time. But that god is able to confound the mind of this man who is unwilling to love like a wild beast.” What does it mean? The museums exhibiting this engraving don’t say, but by comparing the image with others, I deduced that it depicts a scene in Ovid’s Metamorphoses of the giant Orion, who was blinded and exiled as a punishment for raping a princess named Merope. Diana sits on his shoulders, and, out of love and/or pity, helps him find his way through the dense forest.

Murder & co.: nouns of assembly

Usually, when English-speakers refer to “terms of venery,” what they have in mind are “nouns of assembly” — colorful names for groups of animals. Examples include: a murder of crows; a parliament of owls; an unkindness of ravens; a wake of vultures; an exultation of larks; a pride of lions; a paradise of echidnas; a cackle of hyenas; a smack of jellyfish; and a wisdom of wombats.

This originated from the language of the hunt, but it remains a living tradition, in which older terms are honored and new ones are continuously added.

A (small) shakka of quokkas. Wikimedia.

Venery enters the English language

The use of specific terms for animals in the context of the hunt (in English) can be dated to the late Middle Ages. In David Dalby’s Lexicon of the Mediaeval German Hunt,² he writes that the deliberate cultivation of “correct” language was introduced into England after the Norman invasion, and it arrived in Germany in the post-medieval period. In both cases, the origin of the tradition was in medieval France. Besides the group nouns, the language of venery was marked by a proliferation of names for the same part in different animals. The language was deliberately self-referential: understood to be special because it differed from common speech and thus set the speaker apart from the common folk.

Hunting was an elite activity, and the ongoing development and elaboration of its terminology was part of a general trend toward ever-more-refined courtly culture in this period (14th-15th centuries). Being versed in courtly language proved they belonged to the class that enjoyed the prerogative of hunting, since it was often limited or forbidden to commoners, much like using in-group slang from an elite school marks one as part of an elite class.

And despite the hot takes you find on places like Medium, the hunt was not only a place to engage in conspicuous leisure, and the language of venery was not just silly in-group slang. Blood sport was practice for war: it was a way for knights to practice their bravery and skills, and to prove they enjoyed divine favor. What is specific about the use of terms of venery, like other languages that are only used for special purposes (e.g. the “Salt Language” of Tibet, or the magical languages that I will describe below) is it separates the activity from the realm of the mundane, and invites the participation of spirits, deities, or daemons of one kind or another.³

Since ages immemorial (and by this, I mean before the emergence of Homo sapiens), hunting has been fraught with both obvious and liminal perils. Legends, myths, and fairy tales tell of how kings are made and unmade through encounters with enchanted animals and other liminal beings they happen upon while hunting. Magical animals may appear, or seemingly-ordinary animals may transform into gods or human beings, or they lead the noble hunter into a realm of supernatural powers, with fateful implications. As Celtic scholar Miranda Green put it, “Because hunting was a serious matter, involving the destruction of part of nature, it may have been perceived as an activity in which the gods must play the key role.”⁴

Henri Breuil’s sketch of “The Sorcerer,” a cave painting in “The Sanctuary at the Cave of the Trois-Freres, ca 13,000 BCE. Wikimedia. This interpretation of the cave painting is controversial, and the shape of the head and the presence of antlers are ambiguous in the original ancient artwork, but there is no question that the hybrid figure has an animal tail and it seems to also have front paws.

In the chase, it remains unknown until the end who is going to be the hunter and who is the prey: it depends on whose side the forces that bring life forth and take it away are going to favor that day. Surviving the hunt indirectly puts a divine seal upon the hunters’ rule over their community. Being killed invites inquiry into what moral flaw the hunter had that brought such a fate upon him.

Closeup of Actaeon's Hounds, by Lucius. House of Octavius Quartio in Pompeii, 1st c. CE. Wikimedia. Taboos on hunters engaging in sexual activity are found worldwide, and there is a certain prevalence of goddesses of the hunt and other important female mythical figures (e.g. Atalanta) who are strongly associated with hunting to be chaste, and to insist upon chastity in their priestesses and attendants, or in those who wished to enjoy a successful hunt (e.g. Dali) and to punish sexual transgressions with unusual harshness. Of course, exceptions confirm the rule (e.g. Diana’s dalliance with Orion).

Going deeper

When we dig deeper into the etymology of venery, we uncover a wide-branching web of associations.

Venery’s Proto-Indo-European root, *wen-, has also yielded venerate/veneration/venerable; Venus/venereal; venial; venom; venison; wean; ween (don’t laugh - it’s not what you think!); win; winsome/ wish, and wont.⁵

Wiktionary prefers the spelling *wenh₁ , and they note that some scholars dispute the linkage with “venery” via the Latin venor. However, the linguists who edited this page agree that the root develops into “wonder” and “Venus” (as a personification of “loveliness”), as well as with “suffering” and “venom,” and — via Welsh and Cornish, gwyn (white, blessed). As I have written about in my book The White Deer: Ecospirituality and the Mythic, and also, for example, in "The White Deer as Memento Mori" here on Substack, there are many robust associations between the color white and death/realms of the dead.⁶

Etymonline lists “wynn” as one of the scions of *wen-, and Wiktionary’s entry for gwŷn links back to it, and it also connects to the lexical terms “ache,” “smart” (in the sense of stinging pain, not intelligence), and “lust,” so it seems that there really is a valid derivation. (See the footnote for a digression on another connection between all these terms.⁷)


XXXImage of Robert Baratheon on his boar hunt, which I paintedXXX.⁸

There is another Proto-Indo-European root word that has a similar set of connections: *gher- (the second entry). According to Etymonline, it may be linked to: Sanskrit haryati "finds pleasure, likes," harsate "is aroused;" Avestan zara "effort, aim;" Greek khresthai "to lack, want; use, make use of," kharis "grace, favor," khairein "to rejoice, delight in;" Latin hortari "exhort, encourage, urge, incite, instigate;" Russian zhariti "awake desire, charm;" Old English giernan "to strive, desire, yearn;" Gothic gairnei "desire."

If we compare *wen- and *gher- we find that *wen- is the root of Vanir, and *gher- is one of the roots of Asgard (the word’s second syllable). I don't know a lot about Norse mythology, but in general, the older Vanir are associated with agriculture, fertility, magic, death, and prophecy, while the newer Æsir are associated with bravery, power, war, and political influence. Scholars of myth and history have debated whether the Vanir represent the encounter between a peaceful and contemplative pre-Indo-European culture and a more warlike one, or if, instead (the structuralist view) the distinction between the Æsir and Vanir was created as part of a Proto-Indo-European mythology that expressed its values by contrasting them.

Freyja, an illustration by Arthur Rackham for Wagner’s Das Rheingold. Wikimedia.

There isn’t a hard line between the two semantic ranges, but there seems to be more of a tendency for the first set of words, the *wen- words, to indicate a longing and desire that is moved by beauty, which chases pain and annihilation, while the *gher- words relate to arousal, effort/striving, and, finally, enclosure/ownership.

We also find this etymologically unrelated line of association: one of the Czech terms of venery is morda, which refers to the muzzle of a bear or a carnivorous animal. It does not refer to the muzzle of a cow, horse, or other such domestic, herbivorous animals. The PIE root of this word also yielded the Czech word mrdat: “to fuck.” It wouldn’t surprise me if there are many other such overlaps — and it might make for an interesting linguistics research paper.

While “terms of venery” have specific cultural settings, we can trace through the word “venery” the slipperiness and duplicity of language itself, which is both hunter and hunted. At the slowest pace of historical time, it traces for us what Jacques Derrida called différance: this is both the difference between words and the perpetual deferment of a word's meaning. Language’s imprecision and failure to capture what speakers truly mean lead to subtle changes, where an older word is redefined, and the difference splits the two terms to mean something as different as "venom” and “wish.” The oldest words lie buried, just beneath our conscious awareness, but where is the original term, the ur-origin? Nowhere. Languages are like the ever-renewed Ship of Theseus, or, alternately, like a web that that only captures as many terms as people are willing to keep using, or bringing back up into awareness.

Image credit: Sondra Charbadze.⁹

It is just as deep as it is banal to state that all language is language of venery.

1. Image author credit: ID 233126557 | Birds Flying © Victor_Tongdee | Dreamstime.com .

2. Dalby, David. Lexicon of the Mediaeval German Hunt: A Lexicon of Middle High German (1050-1500), Associated with the Chase, Hunting with Bows, Falconry, Trapping and Fowling. Walter de Gruyter, 1965.

3. See Lazcano's article “The Salt Trips in Tibet and the Himalayas” and Ulrike Koch’s 1997 documentary film The Saltmen of Tibet on the extraordinary traditions and special language used in pursuit of this crucial commodity. “Saltmen” are only men: no women are allowed on their expeditions, and men are assigned roles of “father,” “mother,” and “son,” who “salt language” is vulgar, sexual, and allows them to step outside their accustomed roles and expectation of dignity.

Once the point was reached from where they could no longer see the mountains that were home to their local deities, the saltmen had always to follow the established rules. This was because they were beyond the scope of their local protective deities and, therefore, if they did not comply with the rules or offended the divinities of the territories they passed through and/or of the lake, those deities could get angry and punish them in some way. So as not to irritate the local deities and to protect themselves from the demons that inhabit the north they followed a very strict script. Each member occupied his position within the group and even had his assigned place within the tent, they had to observe good behavior among themselves and respect a series of prohibitions: it was forbidden to have disputes and discussions, contact with women, meet recklessly with the locals, expel flatulences, and even that beggars, women and dogs spent the night near the camp. They had also to speak the "salt language". Very little is known about this secret "language". It is passed down from father to son and is never spoken in the presence of women. It seems to be used by most traditional saltmen and probably varies with each Tibetan dialect, although in eastern Changthang it could be more uniform. It is primarily made up of specialised jargon or slang, consisting of the local dialect with some systematic changes made to make it incomprehensible to others, and with a lot of vocabulary known only to themselves. The "salt language" contains many vulgarisms and also has a "spicy" or erotic connotation. Speaking this jargon during the expedition could be an excuse for the saltmen to be able to talk about sex and joke about women without their dignity and social status being weakened. This type of slang among people who carry out a trade is not exclusive to the "men of salt" and it occurs in other groups in Tibet such as hunters (emphasis mine).

4. Green, Miranda. Animals in Celtic Life and Myth. Routledge, 1998, p. 65.

5. According to Etymonline's derivation,

*wen- is the hypothetical source of/evidence for its existence is provided by: Sanskrit veti "follows after," vanas- "desire," vanati "desires, loves, wins;" Avestan vanaiti "he wishes, is victorious;" Latin venerari "to worship," venus "love, sexual desire; loveliness, beauty;" Old English wynn "joy," wunian "to dwell," wenian "to accustom, train, wean," wyscan "to wish."

6. Although “venery” does not appear in e.e. cummings’ poem, he gets not only at both senses of the word, but also at the cruelty and pain implicit in its branching derivations, and at the “whiteness” of his lover’s prey, which foretokens his “death” of his heart at the end. The key shift is in the lines:

Paler be they than daunting death
the sleek slim deer …

because the had previously described the deer as red roebucks at a white water. Was the “white water” merely a stretch of rapids? Could be, of course. But if the stags’ color changed after they encountered this water, it is probably something more. They are a living omen of death, which makes them (as an image) more powerful (i.e. “paler”) that death, which is otherwise only an abstract notion.

7. Looking at the word roots and scions above, focusing on the Latin for poison, and realized that a slight tweak to the familiar veni vidi vici motto ...

During Italy’s Renaissance period, there were so many murders among the powerful that natural death was thought impossible in cases of royalty and the highest church officials (popes, cardinals). The Borgia family enjoyed an especially noxious reputation for crimes and moral indiscretions including larceny, bribery, incest, simony, adultery, and murder. They were believed to avail themselves of several kinds of poisons for disposing of their enemies, but allegedly a pleasant-tasting white powder called cantarella was their favorite.

Thus, a slight tweak to the familiar motto veni vidi vici yields one that might have better suited this family of intriguers:

veneno vidi vici = “I poisoned, I saw, I conquered.”

See Karimanou et al, "Toxicology in the Borgias Period".

John Collier, A Glass of Wine with Caesar Borgia, 1893. Wikiart.

8. King Robert Baratheon is a character from George R.R. Martin’s A Game of Thrones. He sets off after the rumor of a white hart (stag) in the woods, but is fatally wounded in the groin. His death was partly the result of his wife and his squire conspiring to give him fortified wine, so he is too drunk to reckon with the monstrous boar he meets in the woods. I discussed Robert Baratheon’s death in my book The White Deer: Ecospirituality and the Mythic in some detail, since it conforms to many ancient mythic tropes.

More about Robert Baratheon and other characters from A Song of Fire and Ice can be found on this fan site.

9. Sondra Charbadze is a philosopher and writer, and she’s a friend of mine. The essay this image was borrowed from is available here.