flagellist

plural flagellists

1. One who administers punishment by whipping.

   I sit with the doctor and his wife at dinner and tell them about my experience with the Indian flagellists.

   1967, Charles A. Perkins, Fiji: Many Flowering Islands, page 221

   2 more examples

   Keats, of the noted Eton school, was perhaps the best flagellist of this century, and it is said of him in Cooper's History of the Rod, that on one occasion, when a confirmation was to be held for the school, each master was requested to make out a list of candidates from his own form.

   1874, The Pennsylvania School Journal - Volume 23, page 74

   They hold the head of the defendant, he nowise resisting, upon the ground, and bare his thighs, while the falgellist administers the twenty strokes with a flat bamboo cricket-bat.

   1897 November, Edward A. Irving, “Tiger Majesty”, in Blackwoods Edinburgh Magazine, volume 162, number 985, page 704

2. One who whips him or herself as an act of religious penitence; flagellant.

   The Christian flagellist might, it is probable, draw as much blood from his back in a year, as did the frantic priest of Moloch from his sides and arms ; or perhaps more ; but yet it were better done with the Scourge than with the Knife.

   1853, Isaac Taylor, Fanaticism, page 95

   2 more examples

   A proud, a vain, an envious, a jealous, an uncharitable heart may beat as well under the hair shirt of the self-torturing flagellist as under the purple robes of the monarch ; and Antony in his dreary cell and Simon Stylites on his lonely pillar may have been as far from the kingdom of heaven as the sensual Belshazzar at his luxurious banquet, or the worldly-minded Pilate in his tesselated hall.

   1882, Robert Young, Anonymous personages

   Just as we see him assuring the Jesuit flagellist that he will be glad to try penance some other day, or telling us that he did not think it expedient to die for his faith, we see in his work that personal integrity is situational, a performance calculated to appeal to a particular audience.

   2009, Nora Johnson, The Actor as Playwright in Early Modern Drama, page 107

3. One who whips others or is whipped by others as a sexual fetish.

   Many people advocate the tightening of the law both to protect children from flagellists and to suppress flagellant pornography.

   1954, Selections from Freedom - Volume 3, page 6

   3 more examples

   Then comes the next and the next until the sadist, the flagellist, the criminally insane demand their places, and society ceases to exist.

   1950, James Barr, Quatrefoil: a novel, page 310

   She wore short, black boots with pointed toes and long, long spiked heels; it was like a costume, a flagellist's would be the closest description.

   1969, Ted Perry, The final amendment, page 77

   The analogy which Flossie sees among the image of the buttocks, the act of urination and her eventual flagellist fetish documents a representative course of associations for the fin de siècle perception of the sexual act.

   1986, Reinhold Grimm, Jost Hermand, Blacks and German Culture, page 43

4. One who is abusive or punishing.

   The new seven-strong cabinet with Mellish as the new flagellist, is consistent with the anti-democratic trend towards corporate rule.

   1969, Comment: Communist Fortnightly Review - Volume 7, page 307

   3 more examples

   No reasonable man dare gainsay that it is not the function of government to constitute itself as a flagellist for either side of the industrial problem.

   1961, Labor Law Journal - Volume 12, page 123

   There are some very puzzling aspects of the discussion : it is a puzzle, for example, how Gilmour (in his smart way) can say that he is not asking for much more money to be spent than Howe already overspends every year (or that is what it sounds like); because if that is so, how can it be that Howe is some sort of manic flagellist who enjoys bleeding the economy to death just for the sake of religion?

   1989, Thomas Edwin Utley, Charles Moore, Simon Heffer, A Tory Seer: The Selected Journalism of T. E. Utley, page 70

   Nor does he quite satisfy those flagellists who would see him as a stereotype of anti-colonialism, for he declines to be mindlessly abusive about European values or sentimental about Samoan ones.

   1993, Paul Sharrad, Readings in Pacific literature, page 162