by Bill Schutt
As pronounced by Innocent III, from that moment on, the faithful would be required to believe that the consecrated elements in the Eucharist (i.e., the bread and wine) were literally changed into the actual body and blood of Jesus Christ. “His body and blood are truly contained in the sacrament of the altar under the forms of bread and wine, the bread and wine having been changed in substance, by God’s power, into his body and blood.”
If the council attendees had any gripes about these new decrees they apparently kept them to themselves. During the 16th century, however, the interpretation of biblical passages like those describing the Last Supper became pivot points for the controversies that arose between the Catholics and Protestants. In that regard, Martin Luther (leader of the Protestant Reformation) seemed to have more than a little problem with the whole idea of transubstantiation, beginning with the fact that the term did not appear in any biblical scriptures. Apparently, Hildebert of Lavardin, Archbishop of Tours, had coined the term, from the Latin transsubstantiatio, around 1079 CE. In 1520, though, Martin Luther referred to it as “an absurd and unheard-of juggling with words” and stated, “the Church had the true faith for more than twelve hundred years, during which time the holy Fathers never once mentioned this transubstantiation—certainly, a monstrous word for a monstrous idea.”
A decade later, the Incan king Atahualpa took issue with the concept of transubstantiation. In their entertaining book Eat Thy Neighbor, authors Daniel Diehl and Mark Donnelly recount the story of what took place after the capture of Atahualpa by conquistador Francisco Pizarro in 1533. Threatened with execution unless he converted to Christianity,
Atahualpa said he bowed to no man and told the Spanish exactly what he thought of their religion. His people, he said, only sacrificed their enemies to their gods and certainly did not eat people. The Spanish, on the other hand, killed their own God, drank his blood and baked his body into little biscuits which they sacrificed to themselves. He found the entire practice unspeakable. The Spanish were outraged and had Atahualpa publicly executed.
Unfortunately, other accounts of this incident offer a somewhat less cinematically heroic end to Atahualpa’s story. In an alternate version, the captured Incan king converted to Catholicism and was given the name Juan Santos Atahualpa. His fellow Catholics then celebrated Juan’s baptism by having him strangled with a garrote.
Back on the other side of the wafer, Roman Catholic leaders not only adopted the concept of transubstantiation but during the Eastern Orthodox Synod of Jerusalem (a famous get-together in 1672), they took a moment to thumb their collective noses at the upstart Protestants:
In the celebration of [the Eucharist] we believe the Lord Jesus Christ to be present. He is not present typically, nor figuratively, nor by superabundant grace, as in the other Mysteries, nor by a bare presence . . . as the followers of Luther most ignorantly and wretchedly suppose. But truly and really, so that after the consecration of the bread and of the wine, the bread is transmuted, transubstantiated, converted and transformed into the true body itself of the Lord . . . and the wine is converted and transubstantiated into the true blood itself of the Lord.”
Even as recently as 1965, Pope Paul VI made it clear that as far as he and the Roman Catholic Church were concerned, with regard to transubstantiation, their stance had not changed in the 400 years since the Council of Trent, one of the Church’s most important ecumenical councils.
But how many of the modern faithful ever think about the concept of transubstantiation when they’re taking communion? And similarly, how many Catholics are worried about being labeled heretics if they don’t really believe that they’re performing an act of theophagy as they consume the wine and wafer? Apparently not many. In fact they seem to take the same kind of “nod-nod, wink-wink” approach to transubstantiation as they do toward not eating meat on Fridays or, in the case of my relatives under the age of 85, the church’s ban on any form of birth control beyond the rhythm method—which several of them refer to as Vatican Roulette.
This laid-back attitude, however, was definitely not present in the years that followed the Fourth Lateran Council of 1215. Backed by a pope who decreed that their communion bread was the actual body of Jesus, church officials began persecuting those whom they suspected of abusing it. Beginning some 30 years after Pope Innocent’s decree concerning transubstantiation, faithful Catholics started rounding up and executing Jews for the crime of “torturing the host.”
How, you might ask, did the accusers know that their hosts were being desecrated? Apparently, unimpeachable witnesses came forward, claiming to have seen the communion bread bleeding. I’ll get back to that one, but first up is the question of why the Jews were being blamed for these awful crimes. The answer appears to be that while there wasn’t a shred of evidence that they were involved in unspeakable, host-related acts, at the time everyone did seem to agree that the Jews hated Jesus—in fact they had been responsible for his death, hadn’t they? Maybe, the accusers reasoned, the Jews were reenacting the Messiah’s crucifixion or using the host as part of their own nefarious rituals. Rumors had begun circulating that Jews were applying the blood that flowed from the host to their faces, to give their cheeks a rosy appearance. Other host-conspiracy buffs suggested that the villains were using the Savior’s blood to rid themselves of the foetor Judaicus (“Jewish stink”).
Adapted from a 15th-century German woodcut depicting host desecration by the Jews of the Bavarian town ofPassau in 1477. The hosts are stolen and brought to a temple where they are pierced with a dagger during some unspecified Jewish ritual carried out in the presence of a Torah. Eventually, the hosts are rescued in a commando-like raid and the communion wafers are shown to be holy. The guilty Jews are arrested. Some are beheaded, others tortured with hot pincers. Next, the entire Jewish community has their feet put to the fire before being driven out of town (or to their death). In the end, the good Christians kneel and pray.
And so it came to pass that, in the complete absence of anything resembling evidence, Jews were rounded up, coerced, and tortured—after which many of them fessed up to the crimes they hadn’t really committed. But whether they confessed or not, those found guilty of defiling the sacrament were subjected to additional torture before being burnt at the stake, beheaded, or dispatched in some equally gruesome manner. Additionally, their families, as well as any neighbors brazen enough to have committed the crime of “living nearby” often accompanied them to their deaths. These ghastly practices continued for nearly 400 years in Jewish communities all across Europe, with massacres taking place in Germany, France, Austria, Poland, Spain, and Romania.
At some point the execution of Jews for crimes against baked goods ended. Unfortunately, the reason for the cessation of these pogroms had nothing to do with Christians coming to their senses about just how badly they had been acting. Instead, it had everything to do with finding a new group—witches—to persecute for similar crimes. So before you could say, “Got a match?” witches were being burned alive for having a weird mole, or trying to procure red hosts for their Black Mass, or associating with communists. (All right, that last one didn’t happen until the 1950s.)
But what about those bleeding hosts? Were medieval witnesses just making that stuff up as an excuse to get rid of a group they despised? Or maybe these folks had simply imagined the ruby-stained bread? There is, however, an intriguing alternative hypothesis. In 1994, Dr. Johanna Cullen, at George Mason University in Virginia, came up with an explanation for bleeding hosts that was neither mystical nor mental. It was instead, microbiological. Serratia marcescens is a rod-shaped bacterium and common human pathogen frequently linked to both urinary tract and catheter-associated infections. The ubiquitous microbe can also be found growing on food like stale bread that has been stored in warm, damp environments. For this story, the key characteristic of S. marcescens is that it produces and exudes a reddish-orange pigment called prodigiosin, a substance that can cause the bacterial colonies to resemble drops
of blood. Clinically, prodigiosin has been shown to be an immunosuppressant with antimicrobial and anti-cancer properties and it’s likely that these germ-killing properties protect Serratia colonies from attack by bacteria, protozoa, and fungi, in much the same way that the Penicillium mold produces an antibacterial agent that has been co-opted for use by humans. In the 15th century, though, Serratia colonies growing on the host may very well have been mistaken for blood.
The work of another researcher, Dr. Luigi Garlaschelli, backed up Dr. Cullen’s findings. The renowned organic chemist and part-time debunker of reputed miracles like weeping or bleeding statues examined various food items that were said to have bled spontaneously. To determine whether the “blood” was real or not, Garlaschelli tested the items for the presence of hemoglobin, the oxygen-carrying pigment that gives vertebrate blood its red color. In the end, the tests revealed no hemoglobin but plenty of contamination by S. marcescens, and the Italian chemist further demonstrated the likely origin of the bleeding hosts by culturing the bacterium on slices of ordinary white bread.
Quite possibly, then, a common microbe contaminated the bleeding hosts of the Middle Ages, which is actually kind of amusing until you realize how many thousands of innocent people were murdered because of this tragic bit of ignorance and misinterpretation.
A final word on the relationship between transubstantiation and cannibalism concerns the Uruguayan survivors of the Old Christians Rugby Club, who employed what became known as the “communion defense” to justify the incidents of cannibalism that took place after their 1972 plane crash in the Andes. Soon after the 16 survivors returned to civilization, positive public opinion over their plight took a nosedive after it was revealed that the men had remained alive for 72 days by consuming the bodies of the dead. Not long after their rescue, and with their hero status now on shaky footing, a press conference was held. Survivor Pablo Delgado (who was studying to become a lawyer) told reporters that Christ’s Last Supper had inspired him and the other survivors. Basically, Delgado explained, since Jesus had shared his own body with his disciples, it was okay that they had done the same with their deceased comrades. After hearing this explanation, even the skeptics were won over, and soon after, the Archbishop of Montevideo made it official by absolving the young men of their cannibalism-related sins.
Years later, some of the Andes survivors admitted that relating their cannibalistic acts to the sacrament was actually more of a public relations exercise than a religious experience. According to survivor Carlos Paez, “We were hungry, we were cold and we needed to live—these were the most important factors in our decision.”
With this in mind, it is now time to examine the phenomenon of survival cannibalism.
12: The Worst Party Ever
It is a long road and those who follow it must meet certain risks; exhaustion and disease, alkali water, and Indian arrows will take a toll. But the greatest problem is a simple one, and the chief opponent is Time. If August sees them on the Humboldt and September at the Sierra—good! Even if they are a month delayed, all may yet go well. But let it come late October, or November, and the snow-storms block the heights, when wagons are light of provisions and the oxen lean, then will come a story.
— George R. Stewart, Ordeal by Hunger, 1936
It was late June, and by the time we arrived at Alder Creek, the air at snout level (which was currently about an inch off the ground) had risen to an uncomfortable 105 degrees Fahrenheit. Kayle, a five-year-old black-and-white border collie, raised her head, searching in vain for a breeze. There was a rustling in the brush nearby and something (probably a chipmunk) provided a welcome distraction to the task at hand. Kayle took a step toward the commotion.
“No,” came a calm voice. It was Kayle’s owner and handler, John Grebenkemper. “Go to work.” Work, in this case, referred to Kayle’s training as a HHRD dog, which was an abbreviation for Historical Human Remains Detection. In short, Kayle was searching for bodies—old ones.
The dog responded instantly, reversing direction while lowering her nose to the ground. I hitched my backpack higher and followed, taking a moment to survey the meadow where Kayle slowly sniffed her way in the direction of a large pine tree. At an elevation of 5,800 feet, we were in the foothills of the Sierra Nevada Mountains, just across the Nevada border and into California. It had been a dry spring throughout the American West, and the fist-sized clumps of grass that had sprouted from the rocky soil were already turning brown. We’d passed several creek beds and I remembered reading about the muddy conditions that had led to the construction of a low boardwalk for the tourists visiting the incongruously named Donner Camp and Picnic Area.
No need for a boardwalk today, I thought.
We headed farther and farther away from the trail and into a mountain meadow strewn with wildflowers: orange-colored Indian paintbrush, yellow cinquefoils, purple penstemon. I’d come to the Alder Creek historic site to learn about the Donner Party, a subject I had initially planned to explore only in passing. I mean, who would be interested in yet another rehashing of what was probably the most infamous example of cannibalism in U.S. history?16
But as I began to investigate the Donners, I realized that research into the tragedy was alive and well, and that there were many important aspects of the story that were still unfolding.
In the summer of 1846, 87 pioneers, many of them children accompanying their parents, set out from Independence, Missouri, for the California coast, eventually taking what might qualify as the most ill-advised shortcut in the history of human travel. Dreamed up by a promoter who had never taken the route himself, the Hastings Cutoff turned out to be 125 miles longer than the established route to the West Coast. It was also a far more treacherous trek, forcing the travelers to blaze a fresh trail through the Wasatch Range before sending them on an 80-mile hike across arid lowlands that transitioned into Utah’s Great Salt Desert. Tempers flared as wagons broke down and livestock were lost, or stolen, or died from exhaustion. People also died. Some from natural causes (like tuberculosis), while others were shot (by accident) and stabbed (not by accident). As the heat of summer transitioned into the dread of fall, the travelers found themselves in a desperate race to cross the Sierra Nevada Mountains before winter conditions turned the high mountain passes into impenetrable barriers. Along the way, 60-year-old businessman George Donner had been elected leader of the group, though he had no trail experience.
On September 26, 1846, the wagon train finally rejoined the traditional westward route. Lansford Hastings’s shortcut had delayed the Donner Party an entire month—with potentially catastrophic consequences. Disheartened, the pioneers followed the well-worn Emigrants’ Trail along the Humboldt River, which by that time of year had been reduced to a series of stagnant pools. As they traveled along the Humboldt, raids by Paiute Indians further depleted their weary and emaciated livestock.
By October, any ideas of maintaining the wagon train as a cohesive unit had been abandoned. Instead, bickering, stress, exhaustion, and desperation split the group along class, ethnic, and family lines. Those travelers who could not keep up fell farther and farther behind. Afraid to overburden their oxen or slow down his own family’s progress, pioneer Louis Keseberg had informed one of the older men, a Mr. Hardcoop (none of the survivors could remember his first name), that he would have to walk. Hardcoop was having an increasingly difficult time with his forced march and eventually he was left behind on the trail. Another elderly bachelor was murdered by two of the teamsters (men tasked with driving the draft animals) accompanying the group.
By the end of October, it still appeared that most of the Donner Party had overcome terrible advice, challenging terrain, short rations, injuries, and death. With the group now split in two and separated by a distance of nearly ten miles, those accompanying the lead wagons stood before the final mountain pass, three miles from the summit and a mere 50 miles from civilization. They decided to rest until the following day. But on the night before they were to
make their final push, and weeks before the first winter storms usually arrived, something awful occurred.
It began to snow.
On the morning of November 1, the 59 members of the Donner Party in the lead group awoke to discover that five-foot snowdrifts had obliterated the trail ahead of them, transforming what they had expected to be a final dash through a breach in the mountains into an impossible task. It soon became apparent that there would be no crossing over the Sierras until the following spring. And so the dejected pioneers were forced to turn back, leaving behind the boulder-strewn gap that would become known as the Donner Pass.
A day before our trek across Alder Creek meadow, I had stood with Kristin Johnson and two of her colleagues in the Donner Pass, at the very same spot where the cross-country journey of the Donner Party had come to a halt. Looking down from the mountain, I was suddenly impressed by how resourceful and tough these pioneers had been to have made it even this far.
“I’d have never gotten up here,” I said, before gesturing toward the lake that stretched to the far horizon, far below. “I would have died way down there somewhere.”
Johnson, who I’d only met the day before, thought I was joking, but then the look on my face told her I wasn’t.
The two of us had been corresponding about the famous pioneers for several years, and we’d finally flown into Reno; Johnson from her home in Salt Lake City and me on the Sardine Express out of JFK. After renting a car, we headed into the Sierras to meet up with Johnson’s friends, former private investigator Ken Dunn and Kayle’s human partner, John Grebenkemper. I’d found Johnson to be friendly, funny, and gregarious. She was also a walking, talking encyclopedia regarding anything remotely related to the Donner Party, which was mostly fascinating but could be exasperating as well.