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Whereas Mary's attractive maternal qualities were easily adapted to the pieties of the Christian faithful, her exemption from the bodily processes that enable maternity contravened ordinary experience. [...]Mary's sacred body, seemingly accessible in a wholly familiar avatar, was, at the same time, an unsettling conundrum. Psychoanalysis argues that sexual renunciation is an attempt to deny death, that the desire to conquer the sex drive, to turn off the body, is at bottom a desire to escape the body's mutability-its immanent corruption and ultimate decomposition.31 In the Cult of the Virgin, Mary's virginity became almost fetishistically central to the concept of Christian transcendence, an impossible ideal of purity that both embraced and rejected ordinary bodily processes. [...]it is noteworthy that virginal creatures in the bestiaries such as the viper and the vulture have a nether side associated with excrement, rotting flesh, exploding wombs, and bloody guts; and that the hydrus, an overt symbol of Christ, is smeared with reptilian viscera when exiting the body/womb of the crocodile.