Can you guess what figging is?

Take a piece of peeled ginger and shove it up your butt. Congratulations, you've just figged yourself! Now wait for the burn.

Figging is a real thing that's been around much longer than you might think. It was known as feaguing back in the early 19th century.

[T]o feague a horse is to put ginger up a horse's fundament, and formerly, as it is said, a live eel, to make him lively and carry his tail well. It is said, a forfeit is incurred by any horse-dealer's servant, who shall show a horse without first feaguing him.

--The 1811 Dictionary of the Vulgar Tongue

See, when you cram a piece of cut ginger up your ass fundament, it makes you behave oddly. A horse that's been given the old ginger finger will hold its head and tail high and move in a way characteristic of younger horses. This would allow horse-dealers to obscure the true age and condition of their horses and thus deceive buyers.

No one's really sure how it went from being a horse-dealer's con to a sex toy. (Let's just be glad the live eel thing never caught on.) I've read that during the Victorian era, ginger was inserted into the anuses of caning victims to keep them from clenching their butt cheeks, but that just sounds too Ann Rice-y. However it happened, it's not terribly surprising. Humans are curious animals; we're always shoving strange things into our orifices to see what happens. Fig on, crazy humans!