Nudist or naturist?
An age-old question. I argue that the naked sages in ancient times can help us unpick the nudist/naturist conundrum. Let me tell you about the time Alexander the Great met some nudists. Way back in the 4th century B.C .the Macedonian king was travelling on the eastern fringes of his empire when he captured a group of sages, who were acting as advisers to one of his enemies. One detail the historical record is quick to point out: these people had chosen to live permanently naked.
Avoiding all clothing as a matter of principle, the captured sages were described as 'Gymnosophists' by the ancient Greeks, a word that translates as 'naked philosophers'. They believed that clothes were a distraction from clear thinking, and their stripped down lifestyle also included strict vegetarianism, and earnest contemplation about moral behaviour.
In this famous encounter Alexander the Great posed the philosophers a series of 10 questions, and was so satisfied by their wisdom he decided to let them go free. The questions were along the lines of 'how can a man become a god?', to which the reply came: 'by doing something no man can do.' Short and pithy, as one might expect from a group of people so earnest about living the simple life. One question was never asked of these sages. I am sure they would have been admirably suited to answer it: 'what is the difference between a nudist and a naturist'.
It is a question that might prompt some modern-day naturists to run for the hills in avoidance, claiming that it is both pointless and unanswerable. But I think it is of vital importance. To my mind our inability to answer such a basic question does a great disservice to our way of life. It also lies behind a worrying inability to explain ourselves to the general public.
More to the point, it fails to explain quite what we should call those Gymnosophists of antiquity. Can they be called nudists? Yes, quite clearly. These were men and possibly women, who went out of their way to spend time in the nude. It doesn't really need much more of a complicated definition than that. Nudists are people who avoid clothes in situations where most other people choose to wear them. Clearly even Alexander and his Greek friends thought this nudity was remarkable enough to mention, despite coming from a culture where such activities as athletics and communal bathing were commonly practiced naked.The Greeks could easily have called them 'vegetarian philosophers', but it was their nudity that stood out as most noteworthy.
Living naked full-time is as pure an expression of nudism as you are likely to find. For the Gymnosophists, it was backed up by a fully formed philosophical rationale about avoiding all worldly comforts and distractions. They weren't simply naked without any explanation, but as part of a carefully developed outlook on life.
In order to demonstrate that these naked thinkers were not a one-off aberration, I would like to briefly go through a description of some other unclad practices in times gone by, people whose deliberate practice of nudity stands out just as starkly. There are nudists wherever you look in human history!
I have written extensively in academic research about another naked figure from Classical times, a Christian hermit who lived without clothes on the flanks of Mount Sinai for 50 years. Much admired by the early church for his single-minded dedication to solitude, this nameless monk lived in the 4th century. He is documented by the Christian writer Sulpicius Severus, from Gaul, who wrote approvingly of this naked devotee around the year 400.
This hermit’s nudism arose from a very different place to that of the Gymnosophists. He explained that his reason for stripping off was that he wanted to be alone. Casting off all trappings of civilisation, including clothing, was his way of making real his desire to reject society in its entirety. His nudism was a deliberate way of excusing himself from human company, and it rests on the very clear notion that nudity is essentially anti-social. So striking was his witness I named my 2019 book The Naked Hermit in his honour, and find it interesting how far Christians today might accept this holy man's lonely witness as an expression of high-minded devotion.
There is of course no reason why such solitary nudity could not be practised by women too, since the nakedness goes hand in hand with complete isolation from society. So in like manner St. Mary of Egypt is said have gone naked in the desert for decades, a famous figure in the early church and much revered in some denominations even today. Mary and the hermit of Mt Sinai, along with a few other documented examples from the eastern deserts, prove beyond doubt that hermit nudism was a movement rather than a one-off aberration. A small one, but a distinctive and authentic one.
Moving forwards a millennium or so through history, we can find a third use of deliberate nudity in a spiritual context, this time taking place in Britain. The earliest Quakers and their close cousins the Ranters were known for taking off their clothes on occasion and running down the street. Their reasons for doing so were different again, a way of demonstrating their rejection of rigid social hierarchies and rules that restricted freedom to worship.
One image from the 17th century shows a group of such Quakers standing naked in front of a bemused onlooker, with the caption 'Above ordinances', a sarcastic way of saying these were people who thought they were 'above the law'. As an aside, one other lesson to take from this is that naturism is not the first form of nudism to be mocked for deliberate nudity. Another image shows some naked Neo-Adamites protesting in Amsterdam, men and women being arrested for their dedication to (among other beliefs) the nudist cause, an image of prejudice that we naturists do well to remember. Some indeed were executed as heretics.
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
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The arrest of Adamites in a public square in Amsterdam. Etching by F. Morellon la Cave.
after: Francois Morellon de La CavePublished: -
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
These examples of rebellious nudism are essentially a rejection of society's norms, a rejection of the social contract that binds us to the authority of the state. Not for nothing were dissenting groups such as the Quakers known by the term 'non-conformist'. This is nudity as a form of protest and has obvious parallels to some of the nudity we see today, such as the Naked Bike Rides. You might also have read about the campaigning academic Dr Victoria Bateman, an economist from Cambridge who has used nudity to great effect in order to express dissatisfaction with aspects of contemporary politics.
There are many other forms of deliberate and sustained nudity being used in a wide range of contexts, but I will finish with one modern example. This is nakedness used in outdoor ritual, as a way of communing with the natural world. Modern Neo-Pagan ceremonies such as Wiccan gatherings often incorporate some form of magical nudity, forming a circle in which participants go 'sky-clad'. The reasons to explain this are many and varied, and some claim the custom was inspired by an Indian philosophy related to those Gymnosophists we met at the start of this article. Many Wiccan practitioners would also add that they are not so much naked, but rather they are wearing the environment.
Many of the early adherents of the Neo-Pagan revival in the 20th century were also naturists, as it happens, but that is by no means essential among the Pagan community today. I met a Wicca practitioner recently at an academic conference on New Age spirituality who described nudity as a matter of strict ritual necessity, and argued that the movement should both minimise it and downplay it as far as possible.
All of the above are ways people have chosen to go naked, and there is only word I can possibly think of that would encapsulate all of these practices: nudism.
By consciously deciding to go naked where others would expect to be dressed, they are deliberately practising or embracing nudity. There are many reasons that drive them to do this, as we have seen in this short history of a few nudist cults and movements. Some were moved to bare all for profoundly philosophical reasons. Some were deeply spiritual, some were anarchistic, and some gently communing with nature. It is nice to think that the experience of being naked can mean so much to so many people, and has created such a rich culture of nudism over so many millennia of human history. As modern-day naturists this is also our heritage, and we would do well to embrace all of it. We should celebrate all the millions of men and women who have put their bodies on the line to keep the nudist flame burning from as far back as the historical record stretches. Indeed go all the way back to the starting point for three of the world's great religions, and you end up with another pair of nudists in the form of Adam and Eve.
One thing I would like to stress is that nudism is an integral part of the human story. Stretching back to some of the earliest recorded periods in history and possibly in some of the earliest artworks too you will find people who have deliberately chosen to go for extended periods of time without clothes, outdoors and/or in public, driven by any one of a number of good, ethical, passionate and coherent reasons for doing so.
I am sure that a good number of these nudists actually enjoyed being naked in that primal and visceral way that we all feel, when kicking off our clothes and feeling the breeze all over, sliding naked into the water, or feeling the sun embrace every inch of our liberated skin.
Nudism is an enduring part of human culture. It always has been and it always will be. I think this is something we would do well to remember when we try to explain what we are to a skeptical society. I could give many more examples of nudists through the ages to supplement my short survey above, but we can take pride in the fact that nudism is an essential and long-standing part of the human story, and has found something positive to say about nakedness in so many contexts and cultures. The naturist movement is a modern and highly successful chapter in this long compendium of nudist ideals and practices.
Here’s the crux of the issue, why not call all of these earlier people 'naturists' too? Well, the answer becomes pretty obvious when looking at the very mixed reasons that have been given for nude living over the many different cycles of history.
Take the naked hermit, living in solitude on the flanks of Mount Sinai. Here was a man who considered nudity to be the very embodiment of rejecting society. His form of nudism presupposes that the naked body is anti-social, an idea which is entirely alien to modern-day naturism. If nudity is seen as a way of keeping other humans away, then it stems from a fundamentally different place to naturist communities. Clearly the naked hermit who lived without clothes on Mount Sinai was a nudist, self-evidently so. But he would surely never have agreed to live naked in the company of other men, let alone women. This because his nudity was an expression of the desire to be alone. Naturists on the other hand believe in a form of nudism that is essentially communal, one that is also absolutely open to men and women to socialise equally together in the nude.
This idea that nudity is essentially anti-social still lingers today, but it is not actually a part of what we naturists believe or practise. It is an idea encapsulated by the textile use of the disparaging term 'nudist colony'. This is not a phrase we use to describe ourselves, because it presupposes that nudity needs to be segregated from mainstream society. It is a mischaracterisation of us at the most basic level, and as far as I am aware no naturist club, resort or camp has ever self-identified as a 'nudist colony'.
A nudist such as the naked hermit speaks of a different form of nudity to naturism. We naturists use our shared nudity as a way to mingle socially in an equal and accepting way. This makes naturism a distinctive form of nudism, the latest iteration in that age-old nudist culture.
I would like to stress that the variety of nudism is huge, and there are some fundamental differences between its various forms, beliefs and practices. On the one hand in Late Antique times those nudist hermits chose to stay entirely out of the public eye, on the other hand the non-conformists of the Early Modern period would run through busy town streets without any clothes on shouting. Both entirely valid forms of nudism, but at odds with each other on the fundamental practice and expression of nudity.
Turning to the naked sages that Alexander met, they regarded themselves as a class apart, reserved for the elite only who met their strict intellectual, physical and dietary requirements. Naturism today doesn't have such strict entry criteria. It has many aspects that the Gymnosophists would have rejected. Nudity wasn’t remotely a leisure activity for them, but rather an austere discipline which was inseparable from other strict rules
These Gymnosophists, naked hermits, Ranters and skyclad devotees certainly have one very obvious thing in common with us modern-day naturists, and that is the active choice to be naked. But there are stark differences once we start to look beyond the bare skin and ask how that nudity was practised, and what it meant.
A modern-day naturist might well agree with and participate in some of the other expressions of nudism outlined above, but certainly not all of them because they are contradictory, mutually exclusive. I have never heard any naturist argue that nudity must only be practised in absolute isolation, or confined only to a brief moonlit ritual. I think we would do well to remember that nudism has a long and noble history, and has earned its place in human culture as an essential corrective to the mainstream insistence on covering up the body whenever possible.
Naturism is clearly a subset of the very large and long-standing culture of nudism, which has found expression in so many ways, places and times across a vast span of human history. Naturism emerged around the start of the 20th century and has proved to consist of a number of stable principles and practices which mark it out as a distinctive and clearly recognisable form of nudism. Naturism has and will no doubt continue to evolve over the coming years, adding on new ideas and expressions. Maybe one day a new movement of nudism will come along that offers something different again to naturism. It may have practices that contradict what we consider to be fundamental to the naturist way of life. What that might be we can only speculate. So far naturism has only advanced without losing sight of its fundamental principles of communal, mixed-sex and non-sexual nudity.
I enjoy my naturism endlessly, and I take huge pride and satisfaction in fitting it into this bigger vista of what the naked body has managed to represent over the passing millennia, connecting it to so many rich and varied expressions of that wonderful nudist impulse. When we compare our modern naturism to our nudist cousins of old we can see that there is so much more to nudity than simply getting undressed.
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