Gods and Monsters on Disease

I caught up with Tony Robinson's Gods and Monsters on Disease.

The idea that illness could be spread by elfs with tiny arrows (elf-shot) was new to me but illustrated how our ancestors struggled to make sense of their own distant past. In this case, it was tiny Neolithic arrowheads, perhaps half an inch across, which formed the basis of the legend. Being stone in an age of metal as well, they must have seemed very strange indeed, and like the Iron Age Hill Camps, which became understood as "fairy forts", they were incorporated into the world view in such a way as to change them from anomaly to example.

There is, of course, a modern analogue, whereby strange phenomena in the sky in an age of science are incorporated into a system whereby far from being UFOs - unidentified flying objects - they become instead identified as alien incursions, "flying saucers" after Kenneth Arnold's description in June 1947. The skeptical reaction is to attribute these to atmospheric phenomena, or to misplaced identifications of real objects like weather balloons. But what is interesting in both cases, is that world views seem to abhor anything that can be labeled "unknown"; there is always an attempt to reduce it to the understandable, whether by incorporating it into an alien life scenario, or into a scientific reductionism that places it within the boundaries of known science. In that respect, we are philosophically very similar to our ancestors, only we regard our own explanations for the inexplicable - and our desire to have an explanation - as entirely rational!

It was good to see Owen Davies pop up on screen. I'd read his excellent studies of Cunning Folk, Charms and Charmers and witchcraft magic and culture from 1736-1951, so it was nice to put a face to the printed page. He was explaining to Tony Robinson about the notion that in the Middle Ages that disease is like a game of tag that leaves one person, then is caught by another, so as you get well, they get sick. In fact, on the surface, this is quite a rational explanation from observation - in our office, for example, with coughs and colds, you can see it all the time because the duration of the illness means that as another person gets the infection, the person who gave it to them is recovering. Indeed, last week several people were coughing, now I've caught their cough, but they will probably be getting better. For repetitive winter illnesses like that, the cycle of the disease strongly suggests a game of tag, rather than a person transmitting the illness and still retaining it.

But apply logic to that principle, and you end up with all kind of bizarre notions. Rather than just by accident, means can be taken to ensure than an infection can be taken away from someone by deliberately giving it to someone else, which is not a particularly good idea if it was plague rather than coughs and colds. Yet even there, those who survived would be recovering while others were being afflicted, suggesting that game of tag transmission of disease.

A stall was set up to demonstrate in a busy street the treatment of warts by snails. The idea was that you would rub the snail on the wart, and if left where someone would pick it up unsuspectingly, they would take on the wart, while it would leave you. Here is another odd notion by applying rigorous logic to the game of tag idea of disease - for it to leave you, you must give it to someone else.

It was interesting that the the young volunteers demonstrated non-medieval magical thinking by their way of trying to treat warts they had - a knife, the sharp end of a pen, and sandpaper! So much for medical knowledge and the age of science!

Hippocrates approach to disease, which Robinson explained was still current in the Middle Ages, was that disease was spread by "foul air", by a "miasma", usually caused by rotting bodies, or the smell resulting from the effects of disease like typhoid, or from cesspits. The germ notion of disease was, of course, completely unknown.

What he didn't mention was that it was also thought that astrological phenomena such as an alignment of humid Mars and fiery Jupiter could also cause vile, disease producing vapours in the atmosphere. One of the most significant pandemics was thought to have been caused by the orbits of Mars, Jupiter and Saturn lining up in the 40th degree of Aquarius. According to the Compendium de Epidemia, this was on March 20th 1345, and marked the beginning of the plague.

But in 1981, Astronomers Sir Fred Hoyle and Dr. N. Chandra Wickramasinghe wrote "Diseases from Space" in which they made a serious suggestion that interstellar transmission of virus or bacteria forms could in fact come from outer space:

"We noticed that epidemics and pandemics of fresh diseases, both in historical times as well as more recently, have almost without exception appeared suddenly and spread with phenomenal swiftness. The influenza pandemics of 1889-1890 and 1918-1919 both swept over vast areas of the globe in a matter of weeks. Such swiftness of spread, particularly in days prior to air travel, is difficult to understand if infection can pass only from person to person. Rather it is strongly suggestive of an extraterrestrial invasion over a global scale. We argued now that it is the primary cometary dust infection that is the most lethal, and that secondary person-to-person transmissions have a progressively reduced virulence, so resulting in a diminishing incidence of disease over a limited timescale."

This theory was provocative, and was initially treated with skepticism, because bacteria would be heated to about 500 degrees Centigrade on their way through the Earth's atmosphere. But Dr. Shirwan Al-Mufti, an astronomer at the University of Wales conducted an experiment in which he stuck tubes of bacteria into hot ovens (between 300 and 700 degrees). He noted that:

"After withdrawal from the furnace, each tube was broken open and its contents transferred to a nutrient broth...In all cases up to the highest temperatures for which the furnace was accurately calibrated, growth occurred, eventually back to normality."

So there may be something in the idea of cometary debris, for example, as a portent of disasters and plagues after all, and while the notions themselves were enfolded in an astrological world view, the initial ideas may have come from observation.

Regarding the miasma theory of disease, I'm also not totally convinced. While it is true that disease is not transmitted by bad smells, particulate matter is (because that's how smells travel) and I think that could lead to respiratory problems like allergy and asthma which might weaken the bodies immune system. Several recent papers have stressed this kind of link. For example, "Particulate matter and heart disease: evidence from epidemiological studies" (2007) tells us that "evidence is suggesting not only a short-term exacerbation of cardiovascular disease by ambient particle concentrations but also a potential role of particles in defining patients' vulnerability to acute coronary events. While this concept is consistent with the current understanding of the factors defining patients' vulnerability, the mechanisms and the time-scales on which the particle-induced vulnerability might operate are unknown." So while plague may not be transmitted by "bad smells", they may still have long term effects on the human body.

An experimental study saw Tony Robinson's body immersed in a bath of blood and entrails to recreate the story of an Irish warrior who was wounded in battle, and whose followers slaughtered cattle to give him the life giving properties from the blood. In fact, while this idea was present in paganism, it was also present in Judaism, where the Bible has such texts which prohibited the custom of eating blood.

But flesh with the life thereof, which is the blood thereof, shall ye not eat. And surely your blood of your lives will I require; at the hand of every beast will I require it, and at the hand of man; at the hand of every man's brother will I require the life of man. Whoso sheddeth man's blood, by man shall his blood be shed: for in the image of God made he man.

And whatsoever man there be of the house of Israel, or of the strangers that sojourn among you, that eateth any manner of blood; I will even set my face against that soul that eateth blood, and will cut him off from among his people. For the life of the flesh is in the blood: and I have given it to you upon the altar to make an atonement for your souls: for it is the blood that maketh an atonement for the soul.

One would expect that the failure of blood letting to magically transfer life energy in most cases (except where by accident the victim survived) would lead to skepticism, but magical thinking does not always work like that. In the case of sacrifices, the general rule has often been that the sacrifice was simply not enough to ensure the efficacy of the cure, and more would have worked.

The placebo effect was also mentioned as one of the main drivers behind the success of Medieval medicine. What Robinson didn't mention was recent studies which suggest that placebos not just cause the person to think pain is less, for example, but also alter the neurochemistry of the brain.

An example is where you control the pain with morphine until the final day of the experiment, when you replace the morphine with saline solution. The saline - as a placebo - takes the pain away. Fabrizio Benedetti of the University of Turin in Italy carried out the same experiment, but added a final twist by adding naltrexone, a drug that blocks the effects of morphine, to the saline. As New Scientist reported, the result was that the pain-relieving power of saline solution disappeared, indicating that it is not just suggestion that is at work, but possibly some deeper neurochemical changes.

The last section was on trepanning and its connection with modern brain surgery. The idea is to cut a hole in the brain to release the cause of epilepsy or mental illness etc. I was a little concerned about Tony Robinson saying that the idea was to "let out the evil spirit", because of course with Neolithic examples, no written records exist, and any consideration as to the ideas behind the practice must be speculative, and not firm. Trepanning could also be used in cases of brain injury which again might release pressures inside the skull. It is also interesting to note that prehistoric and premodern patients had signs of their skull structure healing, so perhaps they survived.

This was, of necessity, a brief excursion into diseases, and Tony Robinson didn't have time to mention the very prominent notion of the four humours, derived via Galen - "sanguine", "choleric", "melancholic" and "phlegmatic" and practices derived from that like the use of leeches, which survived until well into the 18th century. The notion of temperaments which derived from the four humours actually surfaces in modern psychology in personality profiling - for example in the work of Hans Eysenck who noted how his results were similar to the four ancient temperaments.

Links
http://www.semp.us/publications/biot_reader.php?BiotID=456

Fortitude (Strength)

Fortitude

Life shines over her, gives hidden strength

That although the days increase in length

She bears them in fortitude with virtue

Subdues the roaring lion beneath anew

Bring flowers from her gardening days

Union with mystery, that she prays

To take upon herself a sweet yoke

Let justice rule, emotions choke

This is Divine Law higher still

Emerging strength in all its will.

Funny Old World 3

Health Warning: what follows is not news, any more than the middle section of Private Eye is news, or The Impressionist is news, or Spitting Image was news. It is a light hearted spin on the real news, which can be found on genuine news sites, such as BBC Jersey. Other news sites are available. This is not one of them. None of the individuals mentioned have ever said anything quite like the words attributed to them. Which is perhaps a pity.

New study shows endangered birds in Jersey. The birds in danger of dying out in Jersey are the subject of a new study. For the first time a study has assessed the threat each breed faces. Species including the suntanned bikini wearing holiday maker and swim-suited Parish candidates for Miss Battle, both of whom are in real danger of extinction in Jersey and it is hoped this project will reverse their decline.
 
Jersey's White House will be painted white again before Christmas. The building, Le Jackie Hilton, on the St Ouen seafront was controversially painted green at the beginning of the year. It was re-elected to the States in October this year.

Jersey's census shows the population is up to 97,857. People were asked to base all census answers on who was in their household on 27 March. Jersey's population has grown by nearly 10,000 in the last decade and is now 97,857 according to the 2011 census.

Chief Minister Senator Ian Gorst said he was cautious about trying to read too much into the figures at this stage. He said: "There are many reasons why people come to our community not least of which might be retired people with Jersey qualifications moving back to Jersey because of what's happening in the economy elsewhere around the world. Or there might be Nazi war criminals deciding to relocate from South America, or people like Lord Lucan seeking a quiet hideaway".

And Jersey is hauling itself into the 21st Century with the appointment of its first female rector; Reverend Gerry Baudains was officially appointed head of St Martin's Parish Church at a special service. Afterwards she said, "The congregation may not notice such a change, as a lot of the more elderly rectors often have come across like a bunch of old women."

After years of being covered up, the scaffolding around St James' Church in Jersey could finally be coming down. The plan is for renovation work to be completed next year. Keeping the scaffolding on has cost the States tens of thousands of pounds. Now the States are promising the scaffolding will come down next year, but not every politician is convinced. Deputy Trevor Pitman said, "The scaffolding has been on for ages, and I'm almost certain that it was there when the church was given the status of Grade II listed building. Under the Planning (Listing Building Amendment) No 34, also popularly known as the Cohen clause, this means that any scaffolding attached at the time is regarded as a fixture and also given the same status."

And finally, sales on Jersey's Highstreet are down 5% on last year. Shoppers could be waiting for the big price slashing to start on the high street, which is expected to come just before Christmas. One shop you are sure to get some true bargains is at a special vintage political charity shop which is opening tomorrow for two weeks.

Items on sale include:

A Penny Whistle
Ozouf's Salts (guaranteed to remove blockages)
A phonograph record of Terry Le Main snoring
A historic ring binder which can park on your desk (one not too careful owner)
An Enigma Machine (courtesy of the Planning Department)
The Sad and Dreadful Saga of the Nurse's Pay by Jo March (a Victorian penny dreadful)
An unwanted old Jersey bean crock (courtesy of the former Chief Minister)
The Wimberley Manuscripts (fifty bound volumes of 300 pages each, enough for even the most extreme insomniac)
Old States Members (a job lot at bargain prices)

Death and Burial, Part 5

Another an extract today from Gypsies of Britain by Brian Vesey-Fitgerald (1900-1981). His book on gypsies is especially interesting because it is based on both research and first hand knowledge, and also was written in 1944, reflecting a good deal of the pre-war culture.

Around 2005, I was talking to various Romany folk on MSN Groups sites. Those are now gone; Microsoft decided to shut them down, but in their time, they were very popular. I'd heard about the book from discussions in the MSN chat rooms, and got my copy secondhand. Frank, a Romany who now works as a London cab driver (or did in 2005!), told me this:

"I'm glad you got the book . I remember telling you about it in the chat room . I hope you enjoyed it .This book is the most accurate book about English Romany's I have ever read . It gives , I feel a balanced view . It accurately represents the traditions I learnt as a child"

When I open a book depicting the past, the accuracy of it is always something to consider, and this kind of encounter, when I came across a Romany who had lived part of his life and grown up hearing these traditions - not from the book - but from his own experience, was a welcome confirmation. It is always good when oral and written sources dovetail and corroborate one another, and clearly this is the case with Gypsies of Britain.  

This section deals with how the dead are buried, with clothes and possessions, and the kind of possessions. It's interesting to see how some of this seems to suggest preparation for the afterlife. Grave goods, as archeology terms this, is a very ancient custom indeed, and I wonder if it came with the Romanies or was something they came across on their travels. It's also notable that some of the customs with clothing was also reflected in the non-Romany rural culture of that time.

Certainly the food placed in the coffin, the "dear God's bread", would seem to indicate some Christian influence, but whether this is a transformation of existing custom is unknown. Cunning folk used Christian prayers as charms, as a kind of folk-magic to ward off evil, and of course, Bram Stoker adopts the use of Holy Wafers as a form of talisman to keep away the Vampire in his novel Dracula.

There were a lot of folk practices with a Christian form on what was in fact a mixture of faith and talismanic magic, where the talisman had magic properties. L'Amy's Jersey Folklore mentions numerous examples from anecdotes told by people still living, and I've heard tell of Portuguese people in Jersey doing something similar with bags of grain or flour. Perhaps the phrase in the nursery rhyme "a pocket full of rye" is a distant echo of these beliefs.

There is no clear distinction between faith and folk-magic, and the boundaries are blurred - the Celtic Carmina Gaedelica, for example, has what could be regarded as prayers, or charms, or incantations. Some people would like to tidy up matters and make those kind of distinctions, but the past is more untidy than they realise. In a way, it is the last remnant of the Medieval worldview, in which the world was full of signs and wonders, and what remains today are tattered fragments, torn loose.

DEATH AND BURIAL, Part 5
from Brian Vesey-Fitgerald's "Gypsies of Britain" (1944)

If dressing-up for death was at one time a fairly common practice among English Gypsies, the burying of possessions including clothes with the dead was very much more common and is not yet extinct, nor, in fact, does it show any signs of becoming extinct.  And this is the reason why many Gypsies' coffins are so exceptionally large. There is nothing else out of the way about Gypsy coffins.   In my experience they are always very good and solidly made and the inscriptions short, plain and neat. 

Clothes are the most usual possessions buried with the dead.  Thompson gives a fairly full list of well-known burials of this type. Her entire wardrobe was buried with Ethelenda Heron, the greater part of Santinia Smith's with her:  Isaac Heron was buried with a suit and an overcoat, Savaina Lovell with one or two dresses, a silk shawl, and other " bits o' finery."  All these Gypsies were buried only in undergarments and a shroud. It was probably less usual to bury additional clothes with a fully-dressed corpse, but it undoubtedly did occur, and Thompson, who gives two examples, thinks that it would be easy to obtain many more and that it may once have been customary to do so. On the other hand, the East Anglian Smiths, who normally buried their dead fully dressed, regarded any loose enclosures in the coffin with disfavour, though one of this family, Elizabeth, was buried with two Brussels carpets, one a " large one " as well as the strip upon which she was laid out.  The clothes very rarely include boots or shoes. Boots were placed in the coffins of Thomas Penfold and Supplista Smith, but this is most unusual, and I think the inclusion of a pair of new boots in Job Cooper's coffin, as mentioned by Leland, must be a mistake on the part of that great rai.  There is no other record of a similar occurrence among English Gypsies, and it is absolutely contrary to accepted English Gypsy practice, though it has occurred among foreign Gypsies in England as recently as 1936.

Indeed there is a strong aversion to unworn clothes belonging to the dead, and Thompson mentions that when Theophilus Boswell was buried his large coffin was almost filled up with clothes, but a new suit which had just come for him from the tailor was left out, and subsequently cut up and sent to a rag-shop.

The clothes buried with a corpse are sometimes turned inside out. There are not many recorded instances of this among English Gypsies, but for all that I think this custom was once fairly widespread, and it is not dead even to-day. The three best known examples are all for members of the Heron family who died within a year or so of each other- Isaac Heron, his niece Amelia Heron, the wife of Elias Gray, and her niece Ethelenda Heron.  Isaac and Amelia died in the midlands, Ethelenda in South Wales, and in each case the clothes were folded inside out and laid beneath the body. According to Thompson, these are the only three records of this practice in England, but he mentioned related practices in the coat of a fully dressed corpse being turned inside out and of bodies being buried clad in underclothes  turned inside out,  both being practices regarded as normal by his informants.  I can add one further example of clothes being folded inside out and the corpse laid upon them-Caroline Penfold was buried thus. I know of no case of a fully dressed corpse having any of its clothes turned inside out, but I do know of two, and perhaps more, cases in which underclothes have been turned inside out.  This at least seems to have been a widespread custom, for James Arigho maintains that the true tinkers were always buried so.  The reversal of garments, so Thompson was informed, is a practice in Bulgarian mourning. I do not know about that, and cannot find confirmation anywhere, but the reversal of clothes is a well-known safeguard against ill-luck among many peoples.

Thompson gives one or two examples, including one from a Gypsy tale.  Among peasant peoples in England it is uncommon now, perhaps it was never common, but it does still occur and the remnants of it still linger among the educated classes.  I have been told by highly educated people that it is good luck to put a sock on inside out, I have even been told that it is good luck to put on a jumper or pullover inside out.  I have known a Hampshire farm labourer turn his jacket inside out before taking part in a ploughing match, and I have known Irish peasantry reverse their hats before any big event in which they particularly desire to be lucky.  I think it not
improbable that this reversal of clothing as a burial custom is no more than a desire to ensure that the corpse has a lucky journey to the next world, though it would be easy to produce much more complex reasons for it.

I think consideration of the journey that must be taken after death plays a large part in deciding the other articles that are frequently buried with a corpse.  All sorts of things are buried, but jewellery and trinkets seem to be the most usual.  Occasionally a vast amount of material is buried with the deceased.   Rodney Smith, the Evangelist, in his autobiography, Gipsy Smith, his Lift and Work, says :  " When an uncle of mine died my aunt bought a coffin large enough for all his possessions-including his fiddle, cup and saucer, plate, knife, etc.-except, of course, his waggon.  My wife and my sister pleaded hard for the cup and saucer as a keepsake, but she was resolute.  Nobody should ever use them again."  Such wholesale methods are unusual, and, as a general rule, Gypsies destroy a dead person's crockery and table cutlery.  There have been few exceptions to this rule, though a Constance Smith had a knife, fork and plate buried with her, and Mordecai Boswell a cup, plate, knife, fork and spoon, all carefully wrapped up in a" crumb cloth."  His daughter Ambrozina, as Thompson records, remarking that " he'd likely have need of 'em."

These are, however, exceptions : jewellery and personal trinkets are not. Most Gypsy women wear rings, necklaces and ear-rings or ear-pendants, and these are often- probably even to-day more often than not-buried with them. Leland heard of Stanleys buried with rings on their fingers, and Thompson says that the Derby Boswells regard stripping a dead woman of her jewellery as both wicked and dangerous. In this family it was usual to place in the coffin with the body any trinkets that the deceased was not wearing at the time of her death, but in most families Thompson thinks it is probably more usual to break them up and either drop them into water or bury them in a hole.

It is recorded that at Alice Barney's funeral, at Otterbourne in Hampshire in 1911, her jewellery was interred underneath the coffin, a practice intermediate between those commonly favoured. Actually the heavy gold ring
that she was wearing at the time of her death was removed and is still being worn by a descendant.   Alice Barney was buried, except for this, in the jewellery she was wearing, and all the rest, a considerable collection, was dropped into the grave just before the coffin was lowered.  A point I have not seen mentioned is that a golden sovereign was thrown on to the coffin before the grave was filled in.

Watches are sometimes buried with the men, and so are all sorts of oddments that might conceivably be thought useful in after-life or on the journey, for example pocket-knives, walking-sticks, tankards (many old Gypsies carried drinking mugs in their tail pockets), tobacco boxes, and so forth. There is one record, at least, of a fiddle being buried and one of a whip. They were the things that the deceased used most frequently or was fondest of, but, curiously, I can find no record of a snuff-box being buried, and as I have seen some very old and exquisite snuff-boxes in the possession of Gypsies it would seem that these were always kept as mementoes.

Food, curiously enough, seems to have been buried with the dead only by Hampshire Gypsies.  Thompson quotes a very curious record which he says was originally published by the Hampshire Field Club in 1922 of a Gypsy burial at Blackwater in 1912.  (I cannot find any record of this in the Club's publications.)  At this funeral there was placed in the coffin the deceased's best set of harness, some grain and some bread.  The reason for this is evident enough. Harness and corn would be needed for his horse in the next world or en route to it, and bread would be needed for his own sustenance.  Thompson very rightly casts doubt on this record. For one thing it is supposed to have taken place in Blackwater churchyard, but there is no church at either of the Blackwaters in Hampshire nor is there one at the Blackwater in the Isle of Wight.  Again, the man is described as " a Gypsy king," and Thompson has no knowledge of anyone who could possibly be described as such dying at any of the three Blackwaters in or about 1912.

The last objection is easily disposed of-all Gypsy men who die and achieve print in so doing are " kings," all Gypsy women who achieve print at their death are " queens " (even poor Caroline Penfold was " a Gypsy queen ").  It means no more than that.  The objection about the churchyard is more serious, at first sight indeed insurmountable.  Since there are no churchyards at any of the Blackwaters the man could not possibly have been buried in one.  But he might, I think, have been buried at Blackwater.  As I have already said, I have wondered once or twice about one of the Blackwaters as a possible burial ground analogous to Mousehold Heath.  The late date, 1912, makes an unsanctified burial very unlikely I admit, but-. I do not know anything more definite about this mysterious burial than this-that early in 1912 one Job Churen, almost the last of that mysterious and respected family, died, and that at his funeral his favourite horse (Thompson wondered about the horse and if one was slaughtered at the Blackwater funeral) was slaughtered. So much I have heard, but I do not know where Job Churen was buried.

One more point : bread and grain are believed by many Gypsies to afford protection against ghosts, witches, evil luck generally, and even against the devil.  Gypsies have been known to sew bread inside their horses' collars to safeguard the animals against " witching." Thompson states that Sandi Lovell used to clutch a loaf of bread to his naked breast whenever he was assailed by wandering spirits, and that Tom Lee crumbled a whole loaf around his tent when his son, Bendigo, was born. Furthermore, tales are not in frequently told by Gypsies of men and women who habitually carried wheat or other grain in their pockets as a measure of safety, or ran into cornfields when followed by the beng or a mulo.  " The dear God's bread " and " the dear God's grain " are common expressions among old-fashioned Romanies.  Amos Churen always carried some bread in his pocket.  He set very great store by it.  It was something much more than a talisman to him.

Waterfront Follies

It is intriguing to see the way the new States is starting to shape up on Simon Crowcroft's proposition on the Waterfront.

Part A, on the halting the Hopkins Masterplan (refined, distilled by 25%) site, failed, as well it might now the sunken road has vanished from the equation. I wouldn't have supported that part of the proposition. As long as the Masterplan included a sunken road - maintenance of 1/2 million per annum by the States, don't forget, I would have been 100% against what seemed an act of political and economic suicide. Now that's not there, what remains, which retains car parking as well, is far more palatable.

Part B, on pausing the La Folie Inn Development, was passed, but by 26 to 21. Clearly there's some of the old "Web" spirit there. It will be interesting to see the debate and what was actually said. These were the votes

Senator Paul Francis Routier M.B.E. Contre
Senator Philip Francis Cyril Ozouf Contre
Senator Alan John Henry Maclean Contre
Senator Bryan Ian Le Marquand Contre
Senator Ian Joseph Gorst Contre
*Senator Lyndon John Farnham Contre

Connétable John Le Sueur Gallichan Contre
Connétable Daniel Joseph Murphy Contre
Connétable Leonard Norman Contre
Connétable John Martin Refault Contre
*Connétable Stephen William Pallett Contre

Deputy James Gordon Reed Contre
Deputy Anne Enid Pryke Contre
Deputy Kevin Charles Lewis Contre
Deputy Edward James Noel Contre
Deputy Andrew Kenneth Francis Green M.B.E. Contre
*Deputy Patrick John Dennis Ryan Contre
*Deputy James Patrick Gorton Baker Contre
*Deputy John Michael Le Bailly Contre
*Deputy Stephen George Luce Contre
*Deputy Kristina Louise Moore Contre

Gods and Monsters 2: A Review

I saw the second part of Tony Robinson's Gods and Monsters on Demons, Exorcisms, Fairies and Changelings.

The first part was on exorcisms, and it was clear how neurological problems like epilepsy, or psychological problems like psychosis or schizophrenia could easily have been attributed to demons. The mindset of the Middle Ages was one steeped in angels and demons, and within that framework, the attribution of strange and alarming behaviour to demons was a rational explanation.

We have replaced the religious model with a medical one, but that itself is not without flaws. Looking at that was perhaps beyond Tony Robinson's scope, but while I am sure the scientific explanations are far better than the religious ones, it would be hubris to believe that they are not without flaws.

To speak of "mental illness" is to suggest that psychological problems are very similar to any other illnesses,
and can be treated by medical means. The history of the 20th century was a happy hunting ground for bogus medical interventions such as lobotomy, leucotomy or electro-convulsive therapy. Homosexuality was treated as a kind of mental illness, and drugs were used, as notable in the case of Alan Turing, to chemically castrate the individual. While drugs may be needed to help control psychosis and schizophrenia, they often have debilitating side effects, which are often not appreciated enough by those cheerfully prescribing them, who cannot understand why the people concerned often deliberately fail to take their medication. And in a final triumph of bogus scientism, Richard Dawkins speaks of religion as a "virus of the mind", thus creating a new scientific demonology.

Robinson also covered sympathetic magic, of using like effect for like. The idea is that the magician, can influence something based on its relationship or resemblance to another thing.

Many popular beliefs regarding properties of plants, fruits and vegetables have evolved in the folk-medicine of different societies owing to sympathetic magic. This include beliefs that certain herbs with yellow sap can cure jaundice, that walnuts could strengthen the brain because of the nuts' resemblance to brain, that red beet-juice is good for the blood, that phallic-shaped roots will cure male impotence (Wikipedia)

Sympathetic magic is however alive and well in two places today, one is obviously homeopathy, which is built around a very similar structure:

practitioners claim to treat patients using highly diluted preparations that are believed to cause healthy people to exhibit symptoms that are similar to those exhibited by the patient. [Wikipedia]

But the other area is Neopaganism, itself enjoying a resurgence in Western society. Spellworking in Neopaganism still uses forms of sympathetic magic, although often in a more sophisticated way that that described above, and is still used by some individuals for evil intent, to deliberately (as they believe) cause harm, in the same way as voodoo does.

Regarding demons, a number of fundamentalist Christians still believe in demons. The American religious landscape is perhaps a richer soil for this kind of belief than Britain, although there are believers here. Deliverance ministries are big business in America, along with the "Rapture ready" mythology of the Left Behind books, with their ideas that the Antichrist will return with demonic powers.

In 1941, theologian Rudolf Bultman made this statement:

We cannot use electric lights and radios and, in the event of illness, avail ourselves of modern medical and clinical means and at the same time believe in the spirit and wonder world of the New Testament. And if we suppose that we can do so ourselves, we must be clear that we can represent this as the attitude of Christian faith only by making the Christian proclamation unintelligible and impossible for our contemporaries.

In fact his idea that you cannot believe in miracles and the electric light bulb is too dismissive of the way in which people can departmentalise their beliefs; it is perfectly possible for people to believe in such things.

But I think the mindset of "the evil eye" or demons have largely gone from our urban, secular society in Britain; it's been relegated to fantasy films and books, Buffy, Twilight etc, outside of Neopaganism and Fundamentalism. It's still present though in Africa, and that has led to deaths in London as a result of beliefs in witchcraft and demon possession.

But Tony Robinson's last section is something that has definitely gone. That is the notion of the fairy folk, mysterious beings that inhabited a world almost next door to ours, and would work mischief (as in A Midsummer Night's Dream); these are amoral beings that would steal away children or adults and replace them with changelings, fairies in a simulacra of human form.

The notion of the fairy changeling has pretty well completely gone from our society, even among people who believe in magic. Parents, especially mothers, would resort to desperate measures to get the child returned to them, like placing them in a fire, or leaving them in the woods. It seems clear that much of that related to desperate parents, especially mothers, faced with what to do with children that we'd now see as autistic, or mentally handicapped in some way.

Yet the same desperation is still there though, and parents now chase after supposedly scientific cures for their children. As science is the new magic, so the apparent cures take that form as well. The main difference is that any snake oil salesmen selling cures dress them up in scientific jargon. But I've seen parents with autistic children clutching at any straw for a miracle cure. We don't believe in changelings, but we do believe that there can be medical experts who can provide cures. A medical mythology has replaced a folk mythology.

The Victorian images of tweeness - the faked Cottingley Fairies, small sprites with gossamer wings - and cute Edwardian Tinkerbelle, taken up by Disney as an asexual being, have relegated fairies to the nursery. Only PJ Hammond had a very good attempt to revive older darker ideas in his Torchwood story a few years ago about fairies.

It was shocking, however, to hear the 1890s tale of a murder in Ireland by a husband of his wife; convinced she was a changeling, and his conviction only of manslaughter. That is not that long ago.

As always, there was a good assembly of historians, psychiatrists and medical experts to hand, and it was nice to actually see Diane Purkiss, having read several of her books on witches and fairies.

What Price Accreditation?

This was the story run by the JEP this week:

NATIONAL newspapers knowingly ran misleading stories about children being killed and buried at Haut de la Garenne to sell more copies, the Leveson inquiry into phone hacking heard this week. Journalists sent to the Island could have told editors across Fleet Street that the reports were 'crap', but they would have run them anyway, it was alleged. The evidence was given by leading Guardian investigative journalist Nick Davies, who said that his employers were not exempt from letting 'commercial considerations' influence news judgment. It was Mr Davies, a veteran critic of the way journalists ride roughshod over the truth in the feeding frenzy over big stories, who revealed that murder victim Milly Dowler's mobile phone had been hacked by the News of the World.

And yet the editor of the JEP, Mr Chris Bright in a submission to a Scrutiny Panel, argued that "accredited media" could be trusted because they adhered to certain standards and a code of conduct:

"The public needs and wants information it can trust. That can come neither directly from the government nor from the mixture of partial pamphleteering, gossip and hearsay which typifies many blogs in both the U.K. and C.I., particularly those with politics and government as primary interests."

Now if the press has standards which non-accredited media does not then Mr Bright's argument is a valid one. Journalist, he says, sign up to a code of professional practice. And yet this week, the same JEP which is edited by Mr Bright is telling us that, after all, journalists cannot be trusted, because they make up and exaggerate stories. Where does that leave Mr Bright's argument?

He could, of course, argue that the difference is that the JEP does adhere to those standards, even if the National Press does not. But how are we to know that this is the case? I have had emails from former Senator Terry le Sueur and Senator Ian le Marquand claiming they have been misrepresented in stories. Former Senator Freddie Cohen writes in "to put the record straight" about Portelet. Senator Philip Ozouf writes in to correct misleading stories. And those are the more establishment figures in the States! If they think that the JEP presents from time to time, sloppy and misleading journalism, then where does the uniquely perfection that the JEP aspires to stand? And there are also the mistakes which are caused by reliance on hearsay, like that on Montfort Tadier spoiling an election paper, which in fact he did not do.

As for partial pamphleteering, what on earth does one call editorials which blatantly tell the public to support Sir Philip Bailhache, and tell States Members that he must be the best man for Chief Minister? Now I'm not commenting on the merits of Sir Philip, which may be substantial; all I'm saying is that as far as "partial pamphleteering" goes, the JEP certainly does that as well as reporting on news.

And for partiality, where in the Hustings reports was the question raised by former Constable Bob le Brocq at a St Helier hustings? It was available courtesy of non-accredited media, but was missing from the JEP report. Now it could be argued that there is a lot to take in a hustings, and any reporting must be selective, but any selection is a matter of judgement, or to put in another way, partiality.

So while the JEP may not make up stories on quite the scale of the National Press, I'm not wholly convinced that it is immune from partial pamphleteering or hearsay. It provides information, but sometimes the information can be selected or presented in particular ways. The election coverage had an awful lot of coverage of Sir Philip, both in photographs and snippets of speech, beginning with front page coverage of the hustings devoted to him at the start of the election campaign; other candidates were relegated to inside pages.

And of course, there are the lurid headlines, of massive rises in the percentage of burglaries over last year, when a moments thought shows that the percentage per building in Jersey has gone up fractions of a percent; it is only the small numbers that mean comparisons of one year with the last can be manipulated to give a reader grabbing headline - Darrell Huff exposed all this long ago, in How to lie with Statistics. Information we can trust? Certainly not headlines that are trustworthy. But it sells papers - commercial considerations' influence news judgment perhaps?

Finally, of course, it's not much use pointing to national journalistic standards, because, as the JEP has shown us, national journalists just ignore them, and there is therefore no way of knowing whether the local journalists do likewise when the need arises for a good story. They may say they adhere to standards, and deserve their press card, but so did the National journalists in the UK. Mistrust, unfortunately, has a corrosive effect and devalues more reliable news sources - with the possible exception of Private Eye.

Numbers

Do the numbers matter?

I've been watching "The Burning Times" on You Tube; it's a film which is part of a trilogy, and this particular film looks at "The Burning Times", which is the time of the witch craze in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The film presents the witch trials as a kind of "gendercide", an attack by the church, which is hierarchical, patriarchal, celibate, against women, during which they were disempowered.

It's a moot point in which way they were wholly empowered before that anyway in a modern sense, in an age when women certainly didn't have the vote, and indeed few men did. It's worth remembering perhaps that the empowerment of women, in terms of having an input into political discourse and action, only came about at the start of the 20th century. Before that, some women might have power or any control over their rulers, but the majority did not. It is all to easy, perhaps, to present a somewhat idyllic picture of the past, which when it comes down to it, doesn't match up to the increases in women's power over their lives in the 20th century. That's not to say that the present situation is perfect; it certainly is not - women are still discriminated against in the boardroom, but there is certainly more freedom for most women in England, for example, than before the time of the witch craze.

The film is not rigorously researched, and shows the bias in the estimates of the burnings. Early estimates were widely over the top e.g. 9 million burnings, and not all countries had burnings (e.g. England had hangings).  Modern historians such as Lyndal Roper, Robin Briggs, and Brian Levack have put the record straight by painstaking documentary research of the main witch craze period - because there had to be a judicial process, there had to be records kept.

The numbers are important because when they were miscalculated to 9 million, all kinds of comparisons were made with the Jewish Holocaust. The film terms the burning times, "the women's holocaust". In fact, "most reasonable modern estimates suggest perhaps 100,000 trials between 1450 and 1750, with something between 40,000 and 50,000 executions, of which 20 to 25 per cent were men"(Briggs). That's still a lot of people, but not nearly as much. Moreover, it was the secular courts which condemned and killed; the Church courts did not. In Spain, an Inquisitor stepped in to stop the killing because the proof of witchcraft obtained by the secular authorities was deemed to be worthless, relying as it did on torture.

That's not to say the church stopped the witch hunts, but mostly it was the civil court judges who had the well-thumbed copy of the Maliffeus, the early manual used as a guide - more on that later.
.
Understanding what was happening is important, but the false picture of a kind of conflation with Nazi Germany is mistaken; in Germany, it was from the top down that the instructions for genocide were coming; in the Witch craze, it was the break down of the chain of command, where local communities were able to take the law into their own hands (lynch mob justice) that this happened - which is why it happened when the Circuit Judges could not ride out in the English Civil War.

Alan Macfarlane found that as many women as men informed against witches in the 291 Essex cases he studied; about 55 percent of those who believed they had been bewitched were female... Other studies support a figure in the range of 60 percent. In Peter Rushton's examination of slander cases in the Durham church courts, women took action against other women who had labeled them witches in 61 percent of the cases... J.A. Sharpe also noted the prevalence of women as accusers in seventeenth-century Yorkshire cases, concluding that "on a village level witchcraft seems to have been something peculiarly enmeshed in women's quarrels."

None of this is hidden, there are archives of the trials available. In fact, a correspondent has told me that the archives of Scottish trials are all records are available to the public in Edinburgh, and new information is added as it is found. Most accusations were made by neighbours. The files show several of the accused were attacked by mobs before they could go to trial, or after they were freed if found innocent. This was more to do with mass hysteria than government or church control, which agrees with Levack's assessment that it was the breakdown of the normal process of law that lead to hysteria and lynch mobs.

The Malleus Maleficarum, contrary to how it is portrayed in the film,  was treated as rubbish in its lifetime by the church. Almost all of the Malleus was written by one man: Heinrich Kramer. A German inquisitor of the late 15th century, Kramer was not a well-respected man. His views on Witchcraft were considered weird and extreme by most of his fellow clergymen, who continually opposed and hindered his trials. For instance, Kramer ran a large trial in Innsbruck in 1485, where 57 people were investigated. Yet nobody was killed. Eventually the bishop of Innsbruck became so irritated with Kramer's fascination with the Witches' sexual behavior that he shut down the trials, claiming that the devil was in the inquisitor, not the Witches. It was only later, in the 16th and 17th centuries that the secular authorities, looking for a guidebook in witch trials, came (unhappily) across the book. Jenny Gibbons notes that: "the Inquisition in the 15th century resoundingly condemned the book. It said that the legal procedures it recommended were unethical and illegal, and that its demonology was not consistent with Catholic doctrine. Undaunted, Kramer forged an enthusiastic endorsement."

Later, the Compendium Maleficarum (1608) overtook it in use - it had mention of covens, sabbats, witches marks - none of which appear in the Malleus.

Lyndal Roper in particular has done a lot of ground-breaking work in Germany, which reveals much the same as Sharpe, that women were making accusations against women (Witch Craze, 2004). This in fact confounded much of her expectations, which is a sure sign that the evidence was strong. It does not surprise me - when looking for scapegoats for infant mortality, about breastmilk that dried up, about babies who sickened and died, it was likely to be women who would seek scapegoats of other women, especially when older women (over 40) acted as midwives, helped the mothers with the infants, and could also milk cows.

The film uses exaggerations and disinformation to make an agenda about how the church disenfranchised women by using witch trials. That simply is not accurate.

Margot Adler, who took part in the film, has since mentioned this inaccuracy. She said this:

"We now know that most persecutions of witches occurred during a 100-year period, between 1550 and 1650, and the total number hanged or burned probably did not exceed 40,000. For years, many Wiccans understood that the figure of 9 million, so casually bandied about by many of us, was hyperbole, yet this number continued to find its way into countless books, films, and news articles. I confess that only last year, I told a reporter that the figure was close to 1 million. Recently, a German historian, Wolfgang Behringer, discovered the source of the 9 million figure. It was first used by a German historian in the late 18th century. He took the number of people killed in a witch hunt in his own German state and multiplied it by the number of years various penal statutes existed, and then reconfigured the number to correspond to the population of Europe. "Nine million" still gets repeated every time "The Burning Times," a searingly powerful film, is screened or shown on public television. The film's heartrending and appalling descriptions of some of the trials, tortures, and deaths that did occur is not nullified by this new and more accurate research. But it serves no end to perpetuate the miscalculation; it's time to put away the exaggerated numbers forever."

Why is it important to focus on the numbers, and also on the research which shows that the thesis of the film is flawed? Some people don't like this kind of focus, but I think it is important. If women are to become more enfranchised in today's society, it must not be dependent upon bad scholarship, which can all too easily be exposed by misogynists.

We must build on sure foundations, and not on sand.

Links:
For a survey of good reliable historians re-assessing the period, Jenny Gibbons has an excellent article at:

http://draeconin.com/database/witchhunt.htm
Recent Developments in the Study of The Great European Witch Hunt

http://webdb.ucs.ed.ac.uk/witches/index.cfm?fuseaction=home.search
Survey Database, Survey of Scottish Witchcraft, Scottish History, School of History and Classics, Th

The Chariot

The Chariot

The conquering hero returning from the wars

In all victorious as conquistadors

Two Sphinxes draw his chariot on

White and black give riddles upon

Which he replies with rational mind

But to that mystery, he is blind

Cannot see beyond the visible light

To realm of invisible, much more bright

But hidden from conquest of logic

Not reducible to algebraic.

Funny Old World 2

Health Warning: what follows is not news, any more than the middle section of Private Eye is news, or The Impressionist is news, or Spitting Image was news. It is a light hearted spin on the real news, which can be found on genuine news sites, such as BBC Jersey. Other news sites are available. This is not one of them. None of the individuals mentioned have ever said anything quite like the words attributed to them. Which is a pity.

Special Christmas Note: there is no pantomime with a cast of States members as listed, although the Jersey Green Room club are doing Beauty and the Beast, which I am sure will be an excellent production.

It is official - there is a lot of hot air escaping from Jersey's States! A new infrared website map shows which properties in the island are the best and worst insulated. The Jersey Heat Loss map allows you to look up your house and see how much heat it is giving off. Among the worst offenders is the States Chambers building.

Deputy Rob Duhamel, the Environmental Minister said "The plane made two passes over the Island with the infra-red scanner, and on one run, the States Chamber stood out as orange, giving off a substantial level of heat. We discounted the second scan, which showed the States Chamber as red, giving off the most hot air, as we later checked and realised there was a States sitting."

Environmental campaigner, Dr Mark Forskitt said, "The photography was all taken when the old States was in residence. It will be interesting to go back in a year or so, to see if the new Chamber is still generating as much hot air, or whether there is a climate of change."

THE price of air travel to and from Jersey is to increase next year. The current Jersey Airport passenger charge is £4.78 for a one-way ticket and £9.56 for a return flight. This will go up on 25 March by 19 pence. At the same time, security charges will also be increased by 13p per leg. This move means that people with 2 legs will be charged 26p. It is unclear what these charges may amount to for below the knee amputees who only have half a leg or anyone on crutches who technically may have up to three.

QUEEN'S Valley Reservoir could be closed to the public if people continue to ignore warnings to keep off the deep mud, according to Jersey Water. Security guards have begun patrolling the reservoir to stop people from climbing down onto the muddy reservoir floor. Howard Snowden, of Jersey Water, says, "We also have reports of dogs in the mud, and rumours of one sinister dog creeping along a safe passage through the mire in the dead of night, and howling at the moon." It is now understood that local security guard manager, Mr S. Holmes, and his sidekick, Dr J. Watson, of have said they will deploy enough guards to catch the Hound of Queen's Valley.

Saturday saw an 'immense rise' in St Helier shoppers over last year. Cameras to monitor people shopping in King Street were installed about three years ago. Since then cameras were installed in Beresford Street and Conway Street.

Town centre manager Richard Mackenzie said it was an "immense increase", and that shoppers did seem to have put on weight over last year, but he also noted that the snowy conditions last year meant many had to stay home and lose weight as they couldn't get to the shops to buy food.

A branch of Liberal Democrats Abroad is to be set up in Jersey by a group of local residents including two former senatorial candidates. A member of the branch, Ed Le Quesne, said "The Jersey branch will be set up in the Town Park, and painted with the Liberal democrat colours. It should arrive by Christmas, in which case the branch - which will be ten feet long, and made of English oak - can be decorated with electric lights."

News reaches us that the Jersey customs are linking up with France to try to reduce smuggling cases. Ian le Marquand, the Home Affairs Minister said "It took us a while before we realised that there was a highly lucrative and profitable trade smuggling high quality suitcases over to Jersey, under the very noses of the custom's officials." In future suitcases may have to be opened at borders to demonstrate that they are full, and not empty cases just being taken into the Island. "This will be an open and shut case," said Senator Le Marquand.

And finally, December is upon us and that means islanders can really begin to get into the spirit of Christmas. While the shops are bracing themselves for a festive rush, theatres across the Bailiwicks are also hoping to pull in the crowds.

Pantomime: Beauty and the Beastly Financial Crisis

Cast
Deputy Carolyn Labey - Belle (Beauty)
Senator Ian Gorst - Prince Charming
Senator Ian Le Marquand - Mr Bean
Senator Sarah Ferguson - Widow Twanky
Senator Philip Ozouf - A Sorcerer
Senator Alan Maclean - The Sorcerer's Apprentice
Deputy Rob Duhamel - a bearded birdwatcher [Bill Oddie look-a-like]
Deputy Montfort Tadier - Citizen Media
Deputy Trevor Pitman, Deputy Shona Pitman - the Chorus
Deputy Geoff Southern - A southern gentleman

Backstage Scenery:
Senator Philip Bailhache - provision of an art gallery
Deputy Roy Le Hérissier - provision of a fence
Deputy Andrew Green - provision of a green

Music: Sadie Renard accompanied by the Lyndon Farnham Quartet

The Gardener's Calendar - December 1863

Another extract below from Whitnash Parish Magazine, in 1863, with the section that begins December and also lists the gardening tasks.

It is interesting that the identification of the passage in Isaiah is quoted in the Whitchurch as the reason for the custom of decking "our Churches and our houses with branches of evergreens".  This is not to be confused with the Christmas which was introduced in England by  George III's Queen Charlotte of Mecklenburg-Strelitz in early 19th century, but which only became popular among the non-German population in the 1840s.

In fact, I have managed to trace a very similar mention of this verse in the sermon "The Beauty of Holiness in the Common-prayer: As Set Forth in Four Sermons Preached at the Rolls Chapel, in the Year 1716."
 
Philip Bisse (1667-1721) was an English bishop, and was Bishop of St David's from 1710 to 1713. In 1713 he became the Bishop of Hereford, a post he held until his death in 1721, and it was then that he composed this sermon. In a footnote to one sermon about Christmas, he mentions William Stukeley (1687 - 1765), who was an English antiquary and one of the founders of field archaeology, who pioneered the investigation of Stonehenge (although he mistakenly attributed that and Avebury to the Druids). Here is the footnote:

The practice of embellishing and ornamenting churches at this great Festival is explained by Dr. Stukely ; in which he observes, that the ancients expected our Saviour was to be born at the winter solstice, and that the great Advent was to happen when ever-greens flourish. "The glory of Lebanon (the cedar) shall come unto thee, the fir tree, the pine tree, and the box tree together, to beautify the place of my sanctuary" (Isaiah). Many passages, to the same purport, occur in the Old Testament.

While the winter customs may well have developed from pagan sources, it is interesting to see that the custom was legitimised within a Christian framework by these verses from Isaiah. Modern Christmas cards with their depictions of greenery and Christmas decorations may seem far removed from Bethlehem, but a verse from Isaiah acted as a bridge between the two. Although I suspect that most people did not really need much of an excuse to decorate churches and houses.

When I was younger, I remember collecting pine cones, holly and ivy to decorate our house; those were the days before glittering ornaments were available in the shops. We used to glue them onto a base, and spray them with silver and gold. I wonder how many of today's children have such fun.

The Gardener's Calendar - December 1863

 The damp and cold of November prepare us for the leafless winter, and December is frequently greeted as a more welcome visitor than his gloomy predecessor. Especially are we glad to see him when he comes with frosty face and a clearer, brighter hue than damp, dull, foggy November.
 
Besides, does not December warn us that Christmas is coming, and with it family joys and festivities, and greetings of friends, and forgiveness of real or fancied injuries. Even in the dark and frosty night the sound of the Church bells reminds us of this great Christian festival, and we are carried back in thought to the first Christmastide when angels from heaven came down to proclaim the glad tidings-the "good spell " of Christ's birth in Bethlehem; and we deck our Churches and our houses with branches of evergreens even as we are reminded by the first lesson for service on Christmas Eve (Isaiah 60:13):
 
"The fir tree, the pine tree, and the box tree shall come together to beautify the place of my sanctuary, and make the place my feet glorious."
 
And thus while the weather without may be harsh and inclement, we love to look upon signs of life and beauty which remind us of the summer foliage. It will be well for us if, after the close of the month and of the year, our hearts and lives, are in unison with the Angel message of peace and goodwill to all.
 
THE GARDEN
 
Take up broccoli, and replant them with their heads sloping towards the north, in order that their leaves, when frozen, may drop over the hearts, and may not be thawed by the rays of the sun. Protect celery with dead leaves. Give as much air as possible to all plants under hand-glasses and frames; remembering that the effects of cold are much aggravated by damp; so, clear away all dead leaves, and try to keep plants alive rather than to make them grow. Frequently examine stored fruits, throw away all that are rotten, and keep the rest dry. Delicate fruits should be so placed as not to touch one another. Clean paths. In hard weather wheel out manure, and attend to those operations for which time cannot be spared in summer. Dig borders; remove dead leaves, and if the garden cannot be gay, at least let it not be unsightly.
 
DECEMBER.
 
Surely Winter now is king,
Reigning o'er the fettered earth;
Buried lie the charms of Spring;
Summer's joys are little worth.
 
One huge pall of whitest snow
Covers all that once was fair;
While biting north winds fiercely blow,
And clouds broods heavy in the air.
 
Wrapt in sleep profound as death
Nature lies; but she shall wake,
Fann'd again by Spring's warm breath,
And her icy stillness break.
 
In pledge, the varnish'd holly see,
Scarlet berried, ever-green;
Or plant of Druid mystery,
Hanging the leafless boughs between!
 
Twine, oh twine them in a crown,
Such as Christmas-time may grace,
Choose the hair of glossiest brown,
Choose the rosiest happiest face!
 
Spring of nature, spring of youth-
Both a wintry hour must meet:
Sigh not at the solemn truth,
Wintry hours may yet be sweet.
 
So let Spring of Winter learn,
What its fate must one day be;
So let Winter, censor stern!
Point us to eternity.

Death and Burial, Part 4

Another an extract today from Gypsies of Britain by Brian Vesey-Fitgerald (1900-1981). His book on gypsies is especially interesting because it is based on both research and first hand knowledge, and also was written in 1944, reflecting a good deal of the pre-war culture.

After the last post, I received a lot of rather angry and fierce words from one single Romany (who lives in Jersey) on Facebook which suggested made two assertions: (1) that I should not be writing or posting anything about Romany culture anyway as I was not a Romany, and I would not like it if she wrote about Jersey history; (2) that I was posting information that was not accurate.

Taking the first point, I have to say that I find this nonsensical. Much good work done on Jersey history has been done by archeologists and historians who came from outside Jersey, and it would be, I think, totally absurd to say they couldn't write about Jersey history, language and customs because they came from outside the Island. To name a few names - Doug Ford, Tony Scott-Warren, Charles Cruickshank, Paul Sanders, Freddie Cohen, Mark Patton, Colin Platt, David Frazer, Warwick Rodwell - all of these are outsiders, not Jersey born, even if some of them have settled to live in the Island. That argument simply does not stand up.

On the other second matter, I have written to various Romany peoples in the USA and UK, and they have told me that probably the best Romany historian who is himself a Romany, is Professor Ian Hancock. I have in fact a copy of Hancock's book "We Are the Romani People" at home. He is the director of the Program of Romani Studies and the Romani Archives and Documentation Center at The University of Texas at Austin, where he has been a professor of English, linguistics and Asian studies since 1972. He has also has published more than 300 books and articles concerning the Romani people and language. These works analyze the Romani people not only through Romani linguistics but also through culture, history, anthropology, and genetics.

He is clearly of the opinion that misinformation is best stopped by putting out correct information, and has "Gypsies of Britian" on his suggested reading list.

I also contacted another Romany, who had no problems with me asking questions, or posting material, as long as it was accurate. On "Gypsies of Britain", they told me that "several well respected elders refer to it often. Ian also has it listed in suggesting reading. I tend to trust everything Ian has to say because his research is thorough and he tends to seek out and expose misinformation very quickly."

Another correspondent wrote saying that her daughter in law in the U.K. participated in the Romany burial rituals in Worcester, as her brother lived with them at the time, and the article from Vesey-Fitgerald was accurate.

And a reviewer in Nature, in 1945, noted that: "Now he has given us a most interesting book on the gipsies of Britain. For the accuracy of this book I can vouch, because in the course of a medical experience of more than fifty years I, too, have studied gipsies and doctored all who came my way, in all sorts of conditions, from the heaths of West Cornwall to the open fairs of East London."

The book is also listed in the bibliography of reliable sources in historian Angus Frazer's The Gypsies.

I am therefore, inclined to disregard the opinion of the local Romany, who it appears, from my correspondence with U.K. and U.S.A. Romanies, may be not entirely accurate herself in what she says about Romany culture, and in particular the way in which Romanies are supposed to practice Wiccan style esbats and sabbats, for which I can find no independent sources, and I have looked far and wide. Perhaps the outburst was because there might be a certain romanticism in how she describes her own background, and conflation of that with Wicca (which she practices), which other sources might expose as rather more singular than commonplace among the Romany peoples.

DEATH AND BURIAL, Part 4
from Brian Vesey-Fitgerald's "Gypsies of Britain" (1944)

I have said that Gypsies have a strong aversion to handling a corpse and that the laying out is almost invariably done by gorgios. One might as well say " invariably," for Thompson, in all the long and careful research he has
done into Gypsy death and burial customs, has come across only one instance of a Gypsy assisting at the laying out of a corpse. This aversion to handling the body is sometimes accompanied by a strong objection to anyone else doing so. Sometimes on these occasions the normal preparations are very much curtailed. Thompson cites as examples two comparatively recent deaths at Birkenhead. Both were youngish men and both died fully, even carefully, dressed, though both had been ill for a considerable period. The only attention either received subsequently was to have his eyes and mouth closed, and his face sponged over very lightly and rapidly by his mother. " On each occasion the body was then laid on a strip of carpet at the back of
the tent, and covered with a white sheet. The undertakers were not allowed to make any measurements, and when they brought the coffin their instructions were to lift the corpse into it by taking hold of the carpet only." A similar procedure is said to have been followed in the case of earlier deaths at Birkenhead, notably in the case of Ambrose Smith's sister, Elizabeth, in 1883.

This custom of the Ambrose Smith family may be regarded as rather extreme, but the practice of dressing up for death was formerly quite common and I have known it to occur as recently as low or thereabouts.

When Louis Boswell was buried on January 26th, 1839, he was fully dressed and shod in buckle shoes. In his pockets were his watch, his pocket-knife and some money, beside him lay his walking-stick, his silver tankard and, perhaps, his fiddle. When his daughter Vashti was buried later in the same year she, too, was fully dressed and had on her buckle shoes. Round her waist was a broad belt ornamented with silver, and having concealed pockets in which money had been placed. There are other records of Gypsies being buried in shoes, notably Absolom Smith, who was buried at Twyford in Leicestershire in 1826 wearing shoes adorned with silver buckles each of which weighed half-a-pound. But the custom of being buried in shoes seems to
have been confined in the main to the midlands. Thompson only gives two examples outside the midlands, and says some Gypsies, including a Gray, a Heron and a Lee, have informed him that it is contrary to Gypsy custom.

Dressing up, however, is certainly not. It has been a common practice not only in England, but in Germany and throughout Eastern Europe. In England and Germany best clothes are worn, but they are always clothes that have been worn before. In Eastern Europe there seems to be a preference for new clothes. Covering the head does not seem ever to have been a common practice among English Gypsies. Eliza Heron was buried in Norfolk about 1887 in a scarlet bonnet, and this seems to be a unique record. There are two records of midland Gypsy women being buried with kerchiefs arranged in the usual manner on their heads. There is one similar record for a Norfolk Gypsy, Tom Brown, and Eliza Boss was buried with the hood of her cloak turned up. The practice seems to have been more prevalent among Scottish Gypsies, who were otherwise buried naked more often than not. Simson says that a paper cap was used and that paper was also put round the feet of the body. Otherwise the body was naked except that on the breast, opposite the heart, a small circle of red and blue ribbons was placed.

Burying a corpse naked is unknown among English Gypsies, and so is the use of paper or of ribbons of any colour to adorn the body. But the circle on the breast idea is not unknown, for instead of ribbons some English Gypsies have used, and perhaps still do, a round sod of turf. The exact purpose of this custom is not known. I find it impossible to take seriously the Smiths' explanation (the custom was commonest among Smiths), as quoted by Thompson, that it was to prevent swelling. It is, in any case, not entirely a Gypsy custom. It was formerly common among the peasantry of the lakeland counties, in Staffordshire, in Cornwall, and even occurred occasionally in Hampshire. It was known and practised by the northern potters. And related customs-the use of a few tufts of grass (which would certainly do nothing to prevent swelling) by midland Gypsies, of grasses or flowers by southern Gypsies, and of a pebble by Irish tinkers-are many. It
is curious to find no explanation in all the pages of Folk-Lore (if there is one I have missed it) and even Fraser is unhelpful. The same reason-prevention of swelling-has often been given for the placing of a saucer of salt on the breast. This is a generally accepted survival of saining ; so it looks, as Thompson points out, as if the motives that once prompted the adoption of these rites had been forgotten or had become confused.

The Medicine Cabinet and What I Found There

Time once more to go through the medicine cabinet. It is the time of year for colds and coughs, and my son has already had a very nasty hacking cough, no doubt obtained from school; as school headmaster Seymour Utterthwaite said (in "Last of the Summer Wine"), a veritable breeding ground for germs.

At work, various people cough their way around the office, and germs are spreading, invisible to all, in the air. Isn't it a shame there isn't a kind of spray which would make them glow, or show up, so that you could avoid patches of "infected air"?

And so time to get some cough pastilles in the house, stock up with Night Nurse, and so on. Night Nurse sounds so promising, like one of those dream sequences in Dennis Potter's Singing Detective, where all the nurses in the hospital do a can-can. Instead, however, it is an evil green liquid, which doesn't taste quite as bad as fairy liquid, but almost as bad. I always think that after drinking such a horrible concoction, one should fall to the ground, making groaning noises, and rise up again as Mr Hyde. Regarding cough sweets, I'd recommend the Buttercup ones; sucked slowly, they act like an intravenous drip of the syrup down the throat.

If you don't want the Night Nurse, a warm Lemsip or Beacham's Powder (which sounds like a Victorian remedy) will do; if you haven't time, it's in a handy pill or capsule form. So there's more to stock up on.

And of course, along with the Night Nurse is Buttercup syrup, which actually does taste quite nice, in a kind of organic environmentally friendly way. Then there are the sore throat sweets, now almost always with an "anesthetic" action. In fact, if you have a sore throat almost any kind of boiled sweet or fruit pastille will help; it is the sucking and swallowing that does most of the work. But just in case the specialist sweet has "ingredient X", I buy these things. The old cough sweets become stickier over time, and are almost impossible to prize off the paper they are wrapped in. At school, of course, they were handy because you could have sweets in the classroom quite legitimately. I used to munch my way through packets of Zubes every winter term.

What happens is that as the winter goes on, colds and coughs hit everyone, and there is always something left over. A dreg of cough syrup, a cup of Night Nurse, a few cough sweets, and one or two strips with powders and tablets remaining.

On top of that will go all the summer medication, the allergy pills to remedy hay-fever, the antihistamine cream to soothe insect bites, and the pungent roll on or spray on "jungle" formula to keep away the mosquitoes. It is really so repulsive and strong that, alas, it will keep anything else at bay as well.

Then there are the Rennies, and the Gaviscon, and Settler's Tums, all inclined to be helpful when one has overindulged over the festive season, or any other time, for that matter. We each have our own favourite, which works well for us, so all three are in evidence. I myself tend to favour Gaviscon; I tried Rennies for many years, but a side-effect was incessant burping and a rumbling stomach. Annie always used to comment on that, and complain that it could keep her awake, and anyway, it was not nice to kiss someone who was burping in your face. I think she had a point.

The headache pills come in handy when you haven't got a cold, just a headache, or backache, or toothache, or indeed any number of aches and pains, including joints in the fingers. I'm sure those result from standing as "left back" on the football pitch as a boy, in freezing winter winds, clad in only a white shirt which became icy cold, and shorts. Could I sue the school? The warmer shirt was the brown one, but that was also prickly. Why do they make these things? Is it in inherent sadism in the clothing manufacturers, or is it part of the hearty Tom Brown's Schooldays masochism?

There is TCP. Indeed, there is always TCP, for dabbing on cuts, and giving a distinct odour that almost is as effective as the Jungle juice for keeping other people away. For milder treatments, and less anti-social ones, the well-stocked hypochondriac should also have Tea Tree Lotion and Savlon.

And now it is Winter again, and some of the stuff deep buried in the perma-layer of the medicine cabinet has been there for a few years; I've been lazy, and just stocked up with new stuff on top or in front of the summer stuff. So after a few years, it is time to go through the medicines, and also get rid of those odd antibiotics that you should have completed the course on, but didn't. Please don't tell my Doctor.

Spring cleaning is sprucing around the house to make it fresh for the summer; winter cleaning is removing ancient medication from the medicine cabinet to make that fresh for the winter.

BDO in the News

There are not three Jarndyces left upon the earth perhaps since old Tom Jarndyce in despair blew his brains out at a coffee-house in Chancery Lane; but Jarndyce and Jarndyce still drags its dreary length before the court, perennially hopeless. (Bleak House)

In Dicken's Bleak House, the case in the Court of Chancery, Jarndyce and Jarndyce, about inheritance of an estate, rumbles on unceasingly, until finally it comes to an end - when the lawyers run out of money, and there is nothing left in the pot to pay them.

Reading the story about Farepak, I am inclined to see some similarities. Farepak had run a Christmas club and hamper business since 1968, and collapsed in 2006. Like a Thrift Club, it allowed people to spread the cost of Christmas food and presents over the cost of the year. When it when bust, about 116,000 people lost almost £37m in total. They were told in October 2011 that they will get back just 15p in the pound.

The latest report in the saga is that the cost to date of the winding up of the company stands at £8.2m.

The fees for dealing with the administration of Christmas hamper firm Farepak have exceeded any potential compensation for its victims. The potential money back comes to around £5.53m. But the cost to date of winding up the company now stands at £8.2m. As the Telegraph notes, the £8.2m has been

earned by lawyers, administrators, insurers and media relation executives during both the administration and liquidation of the company, according to fresh documents filed at Companies House. BDO, as administrator and now liquidator, has already earned fees equating to £3.8m, excluding VAT. (1)

On the local scene, it should be noted that the local branch of BDO Alto, when participating in a Scrutiny review, initially attempted to ask for money before being interviewed. As the Chairman, Trevor Pitman, noted:

I also feel that I must comment upon the company's unprecedented attempt (as far as I am aware) to bill Scrutiny for its participation in the review to the sum of approximately £14000 (discounted from £26000!). That included in this huge sum was a charge for attending a meeting set up by Scrutiny as a courtesy to the company to try and talk through and alleviate their initial concerns about the review only further compounds this feeling of disbelief.

BDO appear to have have what is termed, in the jargon, "a track record" for record fees. I wonder how much their review in the Jersey case of the financial management of the Historic Child Abuse enquiry represented "value for money"?

In the case of Dickens, it was the legal profession which remorselessly swallowed up money; in today's world, it seems it is just as likely to be a large accountancy practice.

Links
(1) http://www.telegraph.co.uk/finance/newsbysector/retailandconsumer/8919297/Farepak-fees-reach-8.2m.html

Gods and Monsters: A Review

Dr. Pretorius: To a new world of gods and monsters! (The Movie Bride of Frankenstein (1935) )

Life and death appeared to me ideal bounds, which I should first break through, and pour a torrent of light into our dark world. A new species would bless me as its creator and source; many happy and excellent natures would owe their being to me. . . . Pursuing these reflections, I thought, that if I could bestow animation upon lifeless matter, I might in process of time . . . renew life where death had apparently devoted the body to corruption. (Frankenstein, Mary Shelley, 1812)

Tony Robinson's Gods and Monsters on TV was the first on what might be called folk belief and folk customs. These are beliefs that may grow from a religious background, but are not part of that background, and may persist even after the soil in which they were planted has long gone. Of course, some of these persist to this day, for instance, in the belief that it is unlucky to walk under a ladder, or have thirteen at dinner, or to see only one magpie. But others were less related to individualistic notions of luck, and more linked to communal beliefs, and actually have their basis more in rational than magical thinking. And these are, as he notes, "Ideas that today seem unbelievable, but were seen as uncontroversial and hugely influential, with some having shaped our history as much as mainstream religion."

Robinson will be looking at three different kinds of belief over three episodes:

- The Undead
- Evil Spirits
- Disease

In this first episode, he conducted a very gruesome but effective investigation on dead, with both dramatic reconstructions and actual experiments - a pig that had been killed was buried in a shroud and later dug up.

People in the past believed that even in death a body retained some vital force, and that the dead could rise from the grave to cause havoc among the living. Why did they believe this? What powers did they believe the dead had? And what did they do about it?

I was amazed to discover that corpse mutilation persisted (and was abetted by local authorities) until the mid-1800s when it was legally outlawed - the archives contain a law which tells coroners that the dead body must never never be mutilated by a stake driven in it. Murderers and suicides would be ritually buried at crossroads, with a stake driven through the dead body.

This belief may be very ancient - Robinson took us to see some skeletons from Celtic times in which the head has been detached after death from the body before the body was buried. Ancient Rome also had concerns about dead bodies

The dead were separated from the living by a series of rituals which fulfilled emotional, spiritual and practical considerations. It was important to do the right thing by the deceased in order to send the soul on its journey to the next world, to placate restless spirits, to remove a potential source of infection and to reintegrate the survivors into the world of the living. (1)

Information from an inscription from Sarsina, probably dating to the first century BC, in which a Horatius Balbus donated burial plots for the town's inhabitant also shows similar preoccupations:

The inscription of Horatius Balbus also denied burial in the donated land to those who hanged themselves or who followed some immoral trade for profit.... For others it was not the activities and crimes of life that earned them non-burial but the means of death itself. Horatius Balbus singled out those who hanged themselves. The exclusion of suicides from the cemetery and normative rites would fit with other times and places. Although fundamental changes in belief, especially due to Christianity, need to be gauged, suicides have often been regarded as transgressing accepted boundaries. In Tudor and Stuart England, for example, suicide was a crime, and suicides were tried as self-murderers, their property was confiscated and their bodies were denied Christian burial. Until the early nineteenth century English suicides could be buried at a crossroads with a stake driven through their hearts (Macdonald and Murphy1990:15) (1)

But it is in the Middle Ages that this becomes recorded history. In the 12th century, William of Newburgh describes how a tale of a man of "evil conduct" who gets married in York, and - jealous of his bride - catches her in a passionate act of adultery by spying from the rafters. He accidentally falls in his rage, and is mortally wounded, dying a few days later. Newburgh, who was an early proto-historian recording these tales, notes that:

A Christian burial, indeed, he received, though unworthy of it; but it did not much benefit him: for issuing, by the handiwork of Satan, from his grave at night-time, and pursued by a pack of dogs with horrible barkings, he wandered through the courts and around the houses while all men made fast their doors, and did not dare to go abroad on any errand whatever from the beginning of the night until the sunrise, for fear of meeting and being beaten black and blue by this vagrant monster.

The plague had come to the town, and it was assumed because of the coincidence, that it was related to the dead body, animated, and poisoning the air. A number of the townspeople died, assumed to have been killed by the monster and so two brothers conducted an unofficial exhumation of the body:

Thereupon snatching up a spade of but indifferent sharpness of edge, and hastening to the cemetery, they began to dig; and whilst they were thinking that they would have to dig to a greater depth, they suddenly, before much of the earth had been removed, laid bare the corpse, swollen to an enormous corpulence, with its countenance beyond measure turgid and suffused with blood; while the napkin in which it had been wrapped appeared nearly torn to pieces. The young men, however, spurred on by wrath, feared not, and inflicted a wound upon the senseless carcass, out of which incontinently flowed such a stream of blood, that it might have been taken for a leech filled with the blood of many persons. Then, dragging it beyond the village, they speedily constructed a funeral pile; and upon one of them saying that the pestilential body would not burn unless its heart were torn out, the other laid open its side by repeated blows of the blunted spade, and, thrusting in his hand, dragged out the accursed heart. This being torn piecemeal, and the body now consigned to the flames....

What would they have seen, and how did it confirm their belief? Robinson places the notion of a dead body coming back to life in the Christianity of the Middle Ages, with the day of judgment seeing the dead bodies rising. In fact, there has long been a tradition against cremation for this very reason. He shows a fresco illustrating this. These seem to have been widespread in the culture of the day - The Fisherman's Chapel in Jersey has a wall painting showing the dead rising from coffins as the angel blows the last trump. So there was good reason to assume that the dead would rise up some day. Resurrection of the dead mean resurrection of the body, but in an extremely literal way, like the reanimation of a corpse.

The burial and exhumation of a pig showed other factors at work. The decay of a dead pig is close to that of human beings - in fact the closeness in physiology is why the ancient Greek Galen experimented on the anatomy using pigs. Full of gas from decomposition, the dead body might exhale, and it was alive with maggots, and air bubbled through blood at the nostrils. Hair would remain, but the shrinking of the skin against the body would give the impression that hair and finger nails had grown.

So it was a very rational belief, based not just upon religion, but also upon observation, that a dead body could come back. The English death customs, like those which persisted in Romany culture (described in the 1950s by Brian Vesey-Fitzgerald), were geared to prevent the corpse being reanimation.

All Roma tribes have customs and rituals regarding death. The belief in the supernatural is fundamental, common to all Roma, and the extent to which they believe varies slightly from tribe to tribe. Spirits surround us all of the time. These must all be carefully guarded against, or combated by the use of spells and charms. For Roma, death is a senseless, unnatural occurrence that should anger those who die. At the approach of death, Roma are concerned not only with the pain and heartbreak of the final separation from a loved one. They are also worried about the possible revenge the dead, or muló, might seek against those who remain in the world of the living.

The Roma believe that the soul of the dead might be reincarnated in another man or animal. Most feared of all is the possible reappearance of the dead as a muló or "living dead." Unless strict precautions are taken, this muló might escape from the body and seek revenge on those who had harmed him when living or had caused his death. The mere sight of a muló, who can appear as a wolf, terrorizes Roma. It is a certain sign of bad luck.(3)

It was not stupid to believe this; he shows how with the best knowledge they had available, it was a perfectly rational belief given the way the corpse decomposed. The science of the time - observation of the dead body - all tended to confirm that the body remained alive in some fashion after the spirit had departed. In fact the notion that the hair and fingernails continue to grow persists to this day, again because observation suggests that this is happening.

A "good death", with confession, extreme unction, and a final Eucharist would ensure the body would not rise; a "bad death" such as a suicide, or a criminal's death, would not have this seal placed upon it, and the body might be reanimated by the dead spirit, to come back and wreak vengeance on the living. This idea of the "bad death" of a suicide or criminal persisted long after Catholicism was the dominant belief, surviving the English reformation.

It might be noted in passing as an aside that although the notion of taking one's own life is ancient, the word "suicide" to describe this is comparatively recent in origin, being first mentioned in Sir Thomas Browne's Religio Medici in 1642. In fact the word

suicidium was actually derived by combining the Latin pronoun for "self" and the verb "to kill." The word sounds deceptively Latin, but Henry Romilly Fedden, in his 1938 book Suicide, stated that the Romans described the act using Latin phrases, such as vim sibi inferre (to cause violence to oneself), sibi mortem consciscere (to procure one's own death), and sua manu cadere (to fall by one's own hand). Early English also used phrases, such as self-murder, self-destruction, and self-killer, all of which reflect the early association of the act with murder. (2)

But there was more to that. Blood was seen as holding "the life force" and we find this in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein.

To examine the causes of life, we must first have recourse to death. I became acquainted with the science of anatomy: but this was not sufficient; I must also observe the natural decay and corruption of the human body. . . . I paused, examining and analysing all the minutiae of causation, as exemplified in the change from life to death, and death to life. . . .

Later films drew on ideas of galvanism, of using electrical currents to stimulate muscles, as shown by Galvani with a battery and the leg of a dead frog, but there is nothing explicit in the book, which speaks that "I collected the instruments of life around me, that I might infuse a spark of being into the lifeless thing that lay at my feet".

The book was written in 1818, but by the 1831 edition, Mary Shelley was acquainted with galvanism, as seen by the introduction where she notes that "Perhaps a corpse would be re-animated... galvanism had given token of such things: perhaps the component parts of a creature might be manufactured, brought together, and endued with vital warmth"

Tony Robinson then explores how the idea was also prevalent of consuming parts of the dead body. hadn't realised how prevalent (and among Royalty as well), the digestion of distilled parts of the corpse had been. The Key to Solomon, of course, is a Grimoire which uses parts of dead bodies, or material associated with them.

It is, of course, quite possible to secure the brain of a cock, and dissection with that object may perhaps be performed by deputy; the kitchen-maid or the poulterer's assistant would be easily secured. The dust from the grave of a dead man is the second ingredient of the process; but a visit to the nearest cemetery will not be sufficient, because it is useless to collect it on the surface; that which is next to the coffin will alone serve the purpose

But I'd assumed that this book - which probably dates from the 16th or 17th century (although as A.E. Waite notes, "is quite consistent with a literature which has done nothing but ascribe falsely") was a Hermetic tradition apart from popular culture.

But apparently the consumption of blood and brain, distilled into a fluid - this was, after all the age of the science and the Royal Society - and ingested was quite widespread, and would have medicinal and healing properties. Again, as Mary Shelley's Frankenstein shows, this was not in contradiction to early modern science, which seemed to support the ideas of a life force within the body. And Galvani had demonstrated that electricity could make an isolated frog leg twitch and cause the muscles of a recently dead corpse to jerk as if alive.

It was the secrets of heaven and earth that I desired to learn; and whether it was the outward substance of things, or the inner spirit of nature and the mysterious soul of man that occupied me, still my inquires were directed to the metaphysical, or, in its highest sense, the physical secrets of the world.

I succeeded in discovering the cause of generation and life; nay, more, I became myself capable of bestowing animation up on lifeless matter.

A rational picture of the world, supported by early modern science, the "modern Prometheus", appeared to confirm ancient beliefs in the life force, and again we can see that this is not simply irrational superstition, but backed by observation which appeared to support the theories concerning "the life force". And again, even today, death appears mysterious, the loss of the animation of the body, some spark being missing and left.

The enlightenment notion that science swept away superstition is a misguided myth and a false history, because, on the contrary, early modern science seemed to support and confirm ancient notions about dead bodies. It was only much later that more accurate observation provided a better and more accurate picture of how a dead body decays, and deep down, primal fears about death still surface in popular culture with vampires and zombies.

Links
(1) Death and Disease in the Ancient City, Valerie M.Hope and Eireann Marshall, 2000
(2) http://www.deathreference.com/Sh-Sy/Suicide-Basics.html
(3) http://reocities.com/Paris/5121/death.htm