by Richard Sugg
Just how did the soul and body interact? In the time of Shakespeare or Harvey, there was a crucial third level between body and soul. This intermediate zone was occupied by the spirits of the body. Imagine cutting your finger outside on a cold day. As well as blood, you would also see steam. If Shakespeare had cut his finger out at the Globe Theatre in January, he would not have seen steam, but spirits. Similarly, when he and his peers watched Dr Faustus writing that diabolic contract in his own blood, they would have realised that Faustus was using his soul to sign away his soul – which may have been precisely why the blood then congealed and temporarily denied him any more ink.8 Spirits were a mixture of air and blood. As blood in its most rarefied state, spirits were at once material, yet sufficiently refined to actually join body and soul. Because they were at once fine and hot (as vapour naturally is) they were able to flash like lightning through the body, doing all that the pumping blood or electrical impulses would later do. If you wanted to raise your arm, spirits flitted from the brain and accomplished this. If you were stabbed, spirits flitted from the wound into the brain, transmitting the sense of pain.
Modern scientific medicine has so successfully rewritten the body that it is remarkably hard for us to believe that Donne and Milton and others really believed in this now outdated system. A few further details may help persuade us. Take, first, the realm of anatomy. Until some way into the seventeenth century, it was generally agreed that the human brain had a distinct organ, ‘the wonderful net’, dedicated to the zone between body and soul. A specially twisted labyrinth of veins and arteries at the base of the brain was believed to help refine the coarser spirits of the body into those of the soul itself.9 This idea was no airy fantasy, but something linked to basic notions of physiology. When you ate or drank, food or liquid was processed into blood by the liver. ‘Meat digested’, explained the preacher Thomas Adams, ‘turns to juice in the stomach, to blood in the liver, to spirits in the heart’.10 Following the traditional ‘rule of threes’, blood or spirits rose to greater levels of refinement in the three key organs, liver, heart, and brain. In the net and in the brain itself, the spirits were ‘boiled and laboured’ with a quasi-alchemical vigour.11
Like the occasional steam of blood, spirits were not necessarily always invisible. Notoriously, the pioneering anatomist Andreas Vesalius (1514–60) had been accused of vivisecting live criminals, precisely so that he could watch the spirits fleeting off their bodies. More mundanely, Francis Bacon thought that the discolouring of a bruise was chiefly due to congealed spirits, rather than congealed blood.12 And numerous writers make it quite clear that they were continually feeling the movement of spirits, just as we now feel chemical changes within our bodies. In Sonnet 129, Shakespeare describes male ejaculation as ‘th’expense of spirits in a waste of shame’. At one level, this captures a familiar feeling of male sexual experience: after orgasm, you have lost something, and you feel emphatically different. As this implies, spirits were the active agent in semen (they needed, after all, to transmit a soul to an embryo). They were also the active force behind the erection of the penis, and so were felt in that familiar hydraulic mechanism too. And, as in love, so in war. If you were angry, spirits could flood dangerously from heart to head: hence the danger of the ‘hot-headed’ losing their reason and lashing out violently at the source of their rage.
But there were far greater dangers than this. The eyes have often been described as ‘the windows of the soul’. In Shakespeare’s time this phrase was as much literal as figurative. When Hamlet sees his father’s ghost in act three scene four, the spectre remains invisible to Hamlet’s mother, Gertrude. Yet she is terrified by Hamlet’s own terror. She states that not only does his hair stand on end, but that ‘forth at your eyes your spirits wildly peep’. Again, this is not figurative. When Hamlet’s eyes flash, Gertrude sees his over-agitated spirits flashing out of them. Spirits could also leave the eyes quite naturally. Vision itself was understood in terms of spirits entering or leaving the optic nerves to transmit objects to the brain. In such a climate, catching someone’s eye could mean catching their disease. In times of plague the spirits of the diseased might be shot out of their eyes. Their spirits could pass the infection into your pupils, and from there into the rest of your body. Similarly, spirit-based optics explained the dangers of a witch’s gaze, or the perilous ‘sideways glance’ of an envious person. In the former case, dangerous spirits entered the victim’s eyes, fused with their blood, and on reaching their heart could kill them.13 In the latter, a sideways glance was not merely a sign of covert malice, but a way of actively transmitting it. Bacon, again, took this idea seriously, explaining that ‘envy … emitteth some malign and poison spirit, which taketh hold of the spirit of another; and is likewise of the greatest force, when the cast of the eye is oblique’.14
We have already glimpsed similar notions in Irvine’s theories of disease transfer, and in van Helmont’s claims about the inspirited chair. Similar notions of the transfer of spirits underpinned belief in the wound salve, with its occult sympathy between the besmeared weapon and the injured body. Around 1652, Alexander Ross went so far as to claim that, when he was standing by his father’s deathbed, the sympathy between their spirits was so great that those of the younger man kept those of the older one agitated and mobile, and therefore alive. Ross senior, staring intently at his son, ‘could not die till I went aside’, and only then ‘he departed’.15
In all areas of mind–body unity, from ordinary movement through to extreme states of fear, anger, sadness or love, spirits were busily leaping and sparking through nerves and organs. It was spirits which explained gooseflesh, and hair standing on end – even the rarer event of hair turned white by extreme terror.16 As Bacon rightly insisted, sometime before 1626, the spirits did indeed ‘do all’ the physiological work of the body.17
In this light, medicinal cannibalism begins to look rather different. Medical vampires, for example, were trying to swallow not just blood, but those vital spirits nestled within the blood. They were trying, at times, to gulp down the very force of life itself. For spirits had a distinctive, highly ambiguous relationship with the soul – something which was not only powerful, but finally indestructible. As the minister Thomas Walkington put it in 1607, ‘in the body the blood, in the blood the spirits, in the spirits soul’. In theory, this formula implied a hierarchy. In practice, it was not always easy to clearly separate spirits and soul. Around 1580, one influential French author, Pierre de La Primaudaye, felt it necessary to attack those thinkers who had claimed ‘the soul of man’ to be ‘nothing else but natural heat, or else the vital spirit that is in the blood’. While La Primaudaye himself is emphatic that the spirits ‘are only instruments of the soul, and not the soul it self, his need to reassert this is telling.18
Meanwhile, over in England, Donne pondered that popular Christian notion of the soul as ‘everywhere and nowhere in the body’. For Donne, this was a physical reality as much as an abstract idea. Accordingly, while ‘our souls are truly said to be in every part of our bodies’, yet ‘if any part of the body be cut off, no part of the soul perishes, but is sucked into that soul that remains’.19 Here as elsewhere, your soul was a matter of precise physical concern. For all we know, Donne may have even imagined the extra scrap of soul leaping the gap (like a kind of precious electrical current) between a severed arm and hand. Whatever the case, it is hard not to notice how this picture of the soul looks especially like that of the spirits – agents which were subtle yet real, which pervaded the whole body, and which were known at times to pass out of it.
We should by now have a better sense of how vigorously and exactly the soul was felt and perceived within the body, whether in sickness or in health. But of course much of corpse medicine was based on the use of dead bodies. How, then, could the soul or spirits be tapped from these spent shells of humanity? Having just effortfully adjusted our minds to grasp the oddities of the living Renaissance body, we must now twist the imaginative
screw yet harder and tighter. For some Christians of this era, it seems that even the corpse itself continued to be ‘animated’ by the lingering presence of the soul.
The Animate Corpse
We have seen that Germany was a specially keen importer of human skulls. And Moise Charas also states, in 1676, that a powder containing ‘shavings of a man’s skull that died a violent death’ is ‘very much used in the north-parts, especially in Germany, where it is used in malignant fevers, and all epidemic distempers, and against all sorts of poisons’.20 It appears that human skull, the moss of the skull, and mummy obtained from recently dead corpses were all particularly popular in northern Europe. Why was this? The intriguing research of the American scholar Katharine Park has shown that ‘while Italians envisaged physical death as a quick and radical separation of body and soul, northern Europeans saw it as an extended and gradual process, corresponding to the slow decomposition of the corpse and its reduction to the skeleton and hard tissues, which was thought to last about a year’.21 For the Italians, life cut off absolutely, as if at the flick of a switch. For the French, the Germans and the English (and probably also for the Danes) it smouldered into extinction gradually, like the coals of a dying fire. Accordingly, the Italians (Park points out) preferred mummy ‘to come from embalmed and long-dead corpses’, rather than the relatively fresh ones used by the Paracelsians.22
The recently dead were somehow not fully dead. What can this mean? Park offers several pieces of evidence in support of this extraordinary theory. One is the widely credited idea that a homicide victim would bleed spontaneously in the presence of their killer. ‘Well into the seventeenth century … northern European law admitted the Germanic principle of “bier-right”, which held that the body of a recent murder victim would bleed or exhibit other physical changes in the presence of its murderer’.23 In the mid-century English translation of van Helmont’s work that notion is firmly asserted in a way which even seems to invest the corpse’s blood with memory or will.24 In 1654 Thomas Fuller, though apparently not inclined to give the phenomenon secure legal status, does also admit that ‘this sometimes happeneth’.25 In 1673 the preacher and poet Nathaniel Wanley cites an instance which occurred in Denmark, and goes on to explain that ‘hereupon arose that practice (which is now ordinary in many places) of finding out unknown murders, which by the admirable power of God, are for the most part revealed, either by the bleeding of the corpse, or the opening of its eye, or some other extraordinary sign, as daily experience teaches’.26 But in Italy, Park emphasises, this notion was treated with scepticism.27
For northern Europeans, a corpse could even possess some degree of personality. Accordingly, northern tomb monuments often featured something known as a ‘transi’. This was a sculpted replica, not of the dead person, or of the skeleton, but of the partially decayed body. The transi depicted the deceased as they looked ‘during the crucial liminal period of decomposition when the corpse was most sensitive and vital, and when the person was still in the corpse’.28 Moreover, it was believed that ‘the person … was continuing in some sense to suffer as the body itself decayed’.29 From slightly different angles, we find the same idea surfacing in English attitudes to dissection. Well into the eighteenth century, fierce popular riots displayed protest at this treatment of the most lowly criminal corpse.30 Hence we might even wonder just how literally we should take the physician Edward May when, in 1639, he accuses the common people of seeing anatomy as a kind of ‘murder after death’.31
We have seen that tribal cannibals sometimes sought to consume the strength or spiritual force of those they devoured. And this, it seems, was in part the logic behind medicinal cannibalism. One has to say ‘in part’, because Europeans ate the soul for reasons of health or (more indirectly) of profit. Whatever one’s exact personal motivation, however, the underlying religious theory was essentially the same.
Eating the Soul
There seems to have been some general awareness that certain chemists were actively probing the basic core of human vitality. In 1643 the zealous Protestant John Spencer talks with some precision of that ‘fat aerial oily substance inplanted, inbred and inherent in the body from the conformation thereof’, known as ‘radical moisture, or natural balsam’. Synonymous with this is ‘an inbred and innate heat’ – which is ‘the instrument of the soul and is likened to the flame wasting the candle’. Adding that ‘the coexistence of these two in the heart chiefly is the beginning and continuation of life’, Spencer further emphasises that ‘this perpetual fire’ of the human body is something ‘which hitherto the chemics have in vain laboured to imitate and blow up or kindle’.32 Spencer here implies that chemists were attempting to somehow synthesise the vital spirits of the human organism. They had, he also states, failed in their attempts thus far. But, if the basic essence of human life could not be reproduced, could it instead be harvested?
On the surface, of course, no one admitted that patients were actually eating another person’s soul. Both Protestants and Catholics were united in the unshakeable belief that this, the property of God, was unalterably bound for heaven or hell.33 But, as even the intensely pious Donne was forced to admit, theology itself was ultimately far from clear or consistent on the details of the human soul.34 And, as I have already implied, a central reason for using human organic matter was precisely that it had that spiritual virtue which animals lacked. As van Helmont put it, ‘truly from animals there is not drawn the quint essence’, as in beasts ‘the principal, and paramount essence perisheth, together with the influent spirit, and life’ at death.35 Finally, we are obliged to take a deep breath and confront this remarkable, long-forgotten secret, neatly filed away in the dusty archives of European religious and medical history. Until perhaps as late as the mid-eighteenth century, Christians were effectively seeking to consume the powers of the immortal soul.
Egyptian Mummy
Such attempts usually involved the body parts of those who were alive or recently dead. But the same kind of ideas may also have underpinned the use of the most ancient, Egyptian mummy. Although we do not have explicit Christian statements on the presence of the soul in these entities, the Egyptians themselves were held to have believed this. Where Christians repeated time and again that the soul was joyously liberated from the prison of its material shell at death, the Egyptians seem to have felt that the dissolution of the body either caused, or signalled, the destruction of the soul. It was for this reason that embalming was so vital to Egyptian conceptions of the afterlife.36 As the seventeenth-century Egyptologist John Greaves explains, they ‘believed that as long as the body endured, so long the soul continued with it’. For this reason they would ‘keep their dead embalmed so much the longer, to the end that the soul may for a long while continue’ there, rather than escaping to be reincarnated in some other body.37 Similarly, the French traveller Leblanc stated: ‘if any [mummy], through fatness, which causes humidity, and by consequence putrefaction’ might ‘chance to be consumed by worms, they hold the soul that left this body lost, and condemned to darkness amongst the devils’.38
The Life Forces of Early Modern Corpse Medicine
In the time of Marlowe or Dryden, various non-medical writers acknowledge the availability of biological life forces after legal death. In 1669 one John Reynolds referred to the ‘potential heat more or less in all human bodies’ as something also ‘remaining when we are dead and key-cold’. With quasi-scientific precision he compared this to ‘the heat of sulphur, arsenic, etc’ and cited as evidence the kind of ‘chemical operations on man’s blood’ which Boyle and Locke were performing around that time. And, he added, ‘it must be granted, that there is an actual heat abiding in us whilst we live, and somewhile after death’.39 Just over twenty years later, the author Whitelocke Bulstrode talked of how ‘bodies, after the sensitive spirit has left them, and before their resolution into dust, have a sort of vegetable life remaining in them; as appears by the growth of hair and nails, that may be perceived in dead bod
ies’. Along with these traditional marks of the central European vampire corpse, one could detect, also, ‘a weak animal [life] that lurks in the moisture; whence in putrefaction, worms and divers sorts of insects may be generated’.40 Bulstrode went on to claim that ‘the radical moisture of bodies, that lies in the bones’ strongly implied the ‘eternal duration’ of such life forces – citing ‘bones that are found entire after a thousand years burial’, as well as ‘the bodies of Egyptian mummies, preserved whole for several thousand years’. Hence, he concluded, ‘there is in the bones a radical moisture, that is fixed and permanent’.41