by Colin Dickey
·twelve·
Legends of Sudden Explosions: Barbara
It is easy enough to say one believes, or doesn't believe, in the saints. It is harder to say how one believes, or how one comes to no longer believe, in a saint. Depending on who's doing the counting, there are upward of ten thousand named saints; must one believe in them all to believe in one? The lives of some saints are so unreported that there is hardly more than a name, while others touched thousands, were photographed, walked among us. What does one do with the more distant saints, the ones who seem to spring from nothing more than legend passed down?
Among the many accounts of Saint Barbara's martyrdom is this one, written near the end of the twentieth century: According to legend, our patron saint was the beautiful daughter of Dioscorus, a nobleman of the Roman Empire, believed to have lived in Nicomedia in Asia Minor in the third or fourth century, A.D. Because of her singular beauty and fearful that she be demanded in marriage and taken away from him, and also to limit Barbara's exposure to Christianity and encourage her development as a zealous pagan, her father kept her shut up in a tower. But even such incarceration could not keep the young woman from becoming a Christian.
When her father finally discovered Barbara's hidden faith, he flew into a rage, and then "the evil Dioscorus tortured his daughter Barbara, then took her to a high mountain, where he beheaded her. Afterward, as he descended the mountain, he was caught in a sudden violent storm, struck down and consumed by lightning. Only his scorched sword remained as a reminder of God's vengeance."
This account comes not from any Catholic source but from the United States Artillery Association and can be found in the manual How to Conduct a Saint Barbara's Celebration. The Saint Barbara's celebration "is recognized as an occasion where ceremony, tradition and good fellowship play an important part in the life of the Army officer. It provides an occasion for officers to meet socially, enjoy a ritual military meal, hear speakers of distinction, discuss subjects of military or national importance and honor those in their midst who have achieved notable accomplishments." The only limits to a Saint Barbara celebration, we're advised, "are the imaginations of the planners and good taste," though planners "should never forget that each of these activities ought to retain the dignity essential to achieving the common objectives of all Saint Barbara's Day celebrations."
Why does the United States Artillery Association, of all organizations, take Saint Barbara as its patron? After Dioscorus's sudden immolation, the manual explains, "Barbara came to be regarded as the sainted patroness of those in danger from thunderstorms, fire, explosions— that is to say, sudden death. Given the questionable reliability of early cannon misfires, muzzle bursts and exploding weapons were not uncommon— it is easy to see why our predecessors sought the protection of Saint Barbara. She has protected us well ever since."
Nor is the USAA alone in this tradition; in French and Spanish naval terminology, the archaic word saint-barbe was used to designate the powder magazine on battleships. The British poet G. K. Chesterton commemorated the Battle of the Marne in his
1922 poem, "The Ballad of Saint Barbara," with verses like this:
The touch and the tornado; all our guns give tongue together,
St. Barbara for the gunnery and God defend the right, and
She is risen for all the humble, she has heard the conquered calling,
St. Barbara of the Gunners, with her hand upon the gun.
For Chesterton, it is "Barbara of the batteries" who can be relied upon in times of war, whose explosive force keeps the free world free. She is not the only military saint, but she is the saint of the cannon, of the powder, of the sudden and convulsive explosion. Saint Barbara, who blows things up for justice.
The odd cultural history of Barbara reveals that, often, what is far more important than the saint is the story of the saint. Jacobus de Voragine's thirteenth-century collection of hagiographies, The Golden Legend, brought the saints into the public's imagination like nothing before it. It became the standard reference work for saints throughout the Middle Ages and the Renaissance; when the martyrs and confessors were depicted in Renaissance art, or when Elizabethan writers like Shakespeare and Milton referenced them in allusion and metaphor, it was Jacobus they followed.
Despite The Golden Legend 's popularity at the time, reading it now can be a dreary experience. The stories start to bleed together: Jacobus frequently omits or ignores all particularities of a saint's life so that after a while, they seem generic. We assume this is deliberate, an attempt to make each saint universal. As part of a series of mostly indistinguishable lives, then, each saint became most associated with whatever single attribute might differentiate him or her from the rest— Catherine's wheel, Lawrence's gridiron, and so on.
Barbara had been venerated as a saint and martyr for centuries before Jacobus, but it was The Golden Legend that made her real, put her story on paper definitively and gave her a body. Even so, the details of Barbara's life are sparse, and what little Jacobus gives us is mostly forgettable: She was a great beauty, her father was a pagan, and she was martyred for her faith. Unlike Catherine or Lawrence, she suffered no grand, idiosyncratic torture, beheading being a fairly common mode of death in The Golden Legend.
What was to become most iconically associated with her happened after her death, when her father, Dioscorus, was killed by lightning on his way back down the mountain. Sudden death, freak explosions— these are what start to cling to Barbara.
And then, two hundred years after publication of The Golden Legend, a house caught fire and burned to the ground. Its owner, Henry Kock, was horribly burned in the fire and, by all accounts, shouldn't have been able to make it out. According to the Catholic Encyclopedia, Kock "was nearly burned to death in a fire at Gorkum. He called upon Saint Barbara who aided him to escape from the burning house and kept him alive until he could receive the last sacraments." Because of Kock's story, Barbara became someone you could call on to prevent sudden death, who would intercede to keep you alive until you received last rites. She be came one of the Fourteen Holy Helpers, the key medieval saints who were most efficacious in day-to-day affairs (including Denis, invoked against headaches; Elmo, for abdominal problems; Christopher, for plague; and so on).
I wanted to know more about Henry Kock, so I went looking for additional information. I wanted some snippet of biography, some small specificity that could make him come alive. He appears repeatedly in descriptions of the miracles of Saint Barbara, particularly to explain how her name became associated with deliverance from sudden death, but it's always the same line, over and over—"A man named Henry Kock was nearly burnt to death in fire at Gorkum; he called on St. Barbara, to whom he had always shown great devotion. She aided him escape from the burning house and kept him alive until he could receive the last sacraments." Occasionally this brief passage appears with slight variations, but nowhere did I find more than this.
Perhaps Henry Kock exists only in reference to Saint Barbara, like a phantasm that haunts her story. Perhaps not. I can't say with confidence that Henry Kock was a real person who was burned horribly in a fire; nor can I say that he wasn't. If he was real, all that remains of him, like the burned frame of a house after a fire, is this one statement.
Three hundred years after Henry Kock's reported death, on the evening of June 20, 1745, the Veronese countess Corne lia Zangari de Bandi of Cesena burned to death. As recorded by the prebend of Verona, Reverend Joseph Bianchini, the countess was sixty-two years old on the night of her death. The evening was not unusual: She retired at a normal time, spent some time talking to her maid, then said her prayers and went to sleep. When the maid went to wake her the next morning, she found the countess's "corpse on the floor in the most dreadful condition. At the distance of four feet from the bed there was a heap of ashes. Her legs with the stockings on remained untouched and the head half-burned lay between them. Nearly all the rest of the body was reduced to ashes." The scene was noteworthy in that many d
etails defied conventional understandings of pyrotechnics: "A small oil lamp on the floor was covered with ashes, but had no oil in it, and, in two candlesticks which stood upright upon a table, the cotton wick of both the candles was left, and the tallow of both had disappeared." The bed was disturbed as if she had just risen, but neither it nor any other item in the room showed any trace of fire.
Stories of spontaneous human combustion date back at least as far as 1613, to a carpenter named John Hitchell of Hampshire, England. Still lying beside him in bed, his wife awoke one morning to find him smoldering. An inextinguishable "smoke of mist" rose from his body for three whole days until his body was consumed. In 1725, in Rheims, a man named Millet was initially accused of murdering his wife but was acquitted through expert testimony from some local physicians who argued that the wife had died from spontaneous combustion.
But in the nineteenth century, this particular mode of death truly caught the imagination of the public and came to be seen as an especially terrible way to die. The Countess de Bandi's case was reported widely and was held up most often as proof that spontaneous human combustion was a real and prevalent threat. Charles Brockden Brown's 1798 gothic novel, Wieland, features a death by spontaneous combustion, and the essayist Thomas De Quincey confessed a terror that his addictions might lead to "anomalous symptoms," including spontaneous combustion. " Might I not myself take leave of the literary world in that fashion?" he wondered. Then the specter of spontaneous combustion captured an even brighter literary star.
Charles Dickens had already established himself as a master of realism and social commentary when he began serializing his masterpiece Bleak House in 1852. A scathing indictment of the Chancery legal system in England, the ill-treatment of the poor, and the degradation of Britain's class-based society, the novel is notable for the thirtieth chapter, in which a minor character— the alcoholic landlord Mr. Krook— spontaneously bursts into flames.
For a writer so thoroughly committed to realism, the introduction of such a bizarre manner of death struck many as an unforgivable blemish on the novel. Dickens's friend and fellow writer George Lewes was aghast at the scene and used his weekly column in The Leader to savage Dickens: "The death of Krook by Spontaneous Combustion is certainly not an agreeable incident, but it has a graver fault than that of 'shocking' people with 'sensitive nerves;' it is a fault of Art, and a fault in Literature, overstepping the limits of Fiction, and giving currency to a vulgar error." Lewes was careful to distinguish the supernatural (the ghosts in A Christmas Carol ) from the improbable: "In the one case, Imagination and our mysterious sympathy with the Unknown are appealed to, without pretence of claiming more than imaginative credence; in the other case, the Understanding is called upon to ratify as a truth what it rejects as falsehood." Lewes's problem was that spontaneous combustion appears in the novel not as a fantastical device but as realistic: "Even supposing Clairvoyance and Spontaneous Combustion to be scientific truths, and not the errors of imperfect science, still the simple fact that they belong to the extremely questionable opinions held by a very small minority, is enough to render their introduction into Fiction a mistake. They are questions to be argued, not to be treated as ascertained truths."
Dickens shot back immediately, appending a preface to the next installment of Bleak House claiming that among "men of science and philosophy," there was much "learned talk about inflammable gasses and phosphuretted hydrogen." Dickens cited the case of the Countess de Bandi as well as a few others, hoping that would end the matter. It did not.
"What you write is read wherever the English language is read," began Lewes's response in his next column. "This magnificent popularity in turn carries with it a serious responsibility. A vulgar error countenanced by you becomes, thereby, formidable." Lewes then responded to Dickens's proof with a battery of medical experts who dismissed Dickens's sources as "humorous, but not convincing!" Dickens had relied on his own expert— Dr. John Elliotson, educated at Cambridge and former professor at University College, London— who had provided him with a number of facts and evidence for spontaneous human combustion. But Elliotson also believed in the similarly disputed science of phrenology, and he had left the University College Hospital in order to found something called the Mesmeric Infirmary. Despite this, Dickens sent another private letter to Lewes heavily quoting Elliotson, detailing more spurious evidence and cases of more women who'd caught fire and died.
Lewes gave up shortly thereafter, unconvinced but exhausted, but Dickens did not relent. When Bleak House appeared as a novel in September 1853, he included a preface that argued once more for the truth of the spontaneous combustion phenomenon, adding, "I have no need to observe that I do not willfully or negligently mislead my readers and that before I wrote that description I took pains to investigate the subject." He claimed that there were at least thirty cases on record, though he named only the Bandi story and the same few others Lewes had already dismissed. Dickens ended by observing, "I shall not abandon the facts until there shall have been a considerable spontaneous combustion of the testimony on which human occurrences are usually received."
As with any spurious medical condition, belief in spontane
ous human combustion persisted because it tapped into deeper, psychological fears: fears of being alone, getting older, becoming useless to society. When Pierre Lair, in the Journal du Physique, made a catalog of common attributes of victims of spontaneous human combustion, certain trends emerged: Victims were usually women; they were usually over the age of sixty and often overweight. Most important, nearly all of them were alcoholics. In Dickens's letter to Lewes, he repeatedly pointed to alcoholism as a cause of combustion when it came to "women in the decline of life." " Refer to the Annual Register for 1773 for the case of Mary Clues— a woman of fifty, and a drunkard," he wrote. "To the Transactions of the Royal Society of London for the case of Grace Pitt— a woman of sixty; not stated to be a drunkard, but not likely to have been a lady of very temperate habits, as she got out of bed every night to smoke a pipe, and had drunk an immense quantity of spirits within a few hours of her death. Refer to Le Cat for the case of Madame Millet who got drunk every day"—indeed, it was evidence of Madame Millet's alcoholism that helped get her husband acquitted of murder.
Though the scientific evidence clearly held spontaneous human combustion to be impossible, the connection with alcoholism seemed to make intuitive sense, and people clung to it. As the temperance movement gained steam, spontaneous combustion found new life as a dangerous consequence of imbibing too much alcohol; in February 1863, the Pennsylvania Temperance Recorder reported that the blood from an alcoholic could be set on fire, and similar reports continued to circulate well into the twentieth century. The importance of excessive drinking became the central component in reports of spontaneous combustion. Just as masturbation could cause a physical, violent death among children who practiced it wantonly, so, too, could alcoholism cause a violent, fiery death in an era in which social and ethical lapses often had immediate, physical consequences.
As late as 1928, Dr. W. A. Brend's well-respected Handbook of Medical Jurisprudence and Toxicology contained this entry for spontaneous combustion:
Spontaneous combustion of the body, in the sense that the layman attaches to the words, never occurs; but, very rarely, a state of the tissues exists for which Dixon Mann suggests the term preternatural combustibility. The condition has been most frequently noticed in the bodies of fat, bloated individuals who have been excessive drinkers. Probably, in such cases, inflammable gases are generated in the body after death, and, if a light is near, become ignited, leading to a partial consumption of the soft tissues.
Only with the repeal of Prohibition in America and the death of the temperance movement worldwide did spontaneous human combustion finally fade from medical discussions. Writing in the British Medical Journal in 1938, Dr. Gavin Thurston noted, "One can picture the temperance fanatics making much of the phenom enon of spontaneous combustion and pointing ou
t the foretaste in this world of the fate which awaits the drunkard in the next." But like John Hitchell's long-smoldering body, belief in spontaneous combustion lingered on. In 1945, the Transactions of the Medical Society of London confessed that "we are entirely in the dark as to the real nature of the chemical changes which give rise to this state, but it seems reasonable to infer that they are in some way or other connected with the long use of alcohol."
And then, on January 6, 1980, another strange event in the annals of spontaneous human combustion occurred. Constable John E. Heymer of Ebbw Vale, South Wales, was summoned to the apartment of one Henry Thomas, whose remains had recently been discovered. "As I gazed at the surprisingly small pile of ashes and the disembodied feet," Heymer later wrote, "I was reminded of the scene of Krook's death by Spontaneous Human Combustion in Dickens' classic Bleak House. I was certain that I was looking at such a scene."
Heymer has spent much of the last thirty years arguing that spontaneous human combustion is a real phenomenon, on television and in magazines devoted to conspiracy theories and wherever else anyone will listen. Despite his fervor, he does not refer to himself as an outright believer; rather, he calls himself an "askeptic."
Dickens, after all, revealed the dangers of being a true believer in spontaneous human combustion. With all of Bleak House's penetrating social commentary, memorable characterizations, and skillful plotting, Krook's death remains to modern critics (as it was to Lewes) an embarrassing misstep, a blight on what might otherwise be a perfect novel. Whether or not Dickens ever changed his mind about spontaneous human combustion, contemporary readers are left with this rather awkward detail. Literature ages differently than nonfiction, and even if no one believes in spontaneous human combustion any longer, we are stuck with Dickens's belief in it.