by Richard Sugg
Which dost brave men embalm, and them conserve
Longer than can Arabian gums or spice,
And of their memory dost mummy make,
More firm than that hot Lybia’s sands do cake.115
Although Henrietta-Maria is not herself compared to mummy, she is exalted because of her power to produce it (albeit at a rhetorical level). It is not quite clear whether Howell refers to Egyptian or to sand mummy (‘Lybia’s sands’ could imply sandstorm corpses, but it could also merely allude to the proverbially arid nature of the North African climate). But it is notable that he is not afraid to give a certain sensuous edge to his lines, via the phrase ‘more firm’ – here we have precise texture, rather than merely abstract metaphor.
Elsewhere, the rhetoric of mummy becomes unashamedly Protestant. In 1691 the Paracelsian Edward Taylor ponders that long-standing theological conundrum: just what are communicants eating and drinking during the Protestant ceremony of the Eucharist? As any good Protestant would know, this ritual was no longer held to produce, in real time, an actual metamorphosis into Christ’s body and blood. Good Protestants also knew, of course, that it was best to turn to the Scriptures themselves when in doubt. Taylor accordingly shifts the whole question back to Christ’s Last Supper. He then goes on to make a remarkable claim. When the disciples ate and drank Christ’s flesh and blood, he states, they consumed ‘not the palpable fleshly humanity, but the spiritual humanity’, namely, ‘the virtue and power of his body and blood, his own mumia in which was the divine and human power’.116
Mummy (or ‘mumia’) could hardly appear in a more reverent and sacred context than this. For a rough gloss of ‘Christ’s mumia’, one could do far worse than ‘Christ’s soul’. Extraordinary as the idea is, we might see Taylor as simply pushing the spiritual dimension of corpse medicine to its logical conclusion. And for a writer who wishes to do that, Christ’s body is a perfectly exact match for corpse medicine. The whole doctrine of the Incarnation, after all (Christ was, paradoxically, both divine and human) echoes the ability of any ordinary human body to yield ultimately divine powers. As well as effectively exalting mummy in this way, Taylor also adds a remarkable eulogy of ‘the virtue of … usnea’:
I compare the arabian odours, oriental gems, palms of Asia, wine of pomegranates, the American pine-apple, and what else is most desirable, in comparison of the paradisical productions, to the obscure vitality surviving in men’s dead bodies; generating some as it were fibres of gold amongst the decaying teeth, and the usnea on the skulls of persons strangled.117
At a general level, this strange passage, broadly resembling the tone of the Old Testament Song of Solomon, clearly asserts the ‘obscure vitality’ of the animate corpse. More precisely, it even seems to obliquely hint at the alchemical powers of this body, in its mysterious reference to ‘fibres of gold amongst the decaying teeth’.118
Did other Protestants secretly harbour such feelings about mummy? Certainly Taylor was by no means the only one to exalt corpse medicine in this way. On the surface, more ardent Protestants saw the rejection of the Catholic Mass as a liberation from superstitious darkness and error. But secretly, some must have felt the need to recreate that lost sensual communion. They could do this by effectively displacing such sensuality into other areas.119 We have already seen at some length how mummy was well-suited to this role. In particular, it combined the sensuous consumption of spiritual forces with a typically democratic redistribution of spiritual power. The hierarchical, and allegedly corrupt and superstitious Mass priest was replaced by the altruistic, industrious and rational experimenters in chemistry – men whose position could to a far greater extent depend on personal merit.
Similarly, this Protestant version of the Eucharist was democratic insofar as it insisted that these spiritual powers were to be found throughout the natural world, lodged within the most sinful flesh of any healthy criminal corpse. At one level, this idea stemmed from the allegedly north European attachment to the animate corpse. At the same time, nature as a whole was far more definitely animated in this era. And there is some reason to believe that this was more the case for Protestants than for Catholics. The reformed Church was particularly opposed to Catholic belief in miracles. When a seemingly inexplicable, extraordinary event occurred, Catholic believers would interpret it as not merely supernatural, but as miraculous – that is, as something which God had very precisely and deliberately performed, perhaps at that very moment. Regarding miracles as superstitious or fraudulent, Protestants would often see such events as the product of a more general animism – of diffused supernatural forces, rather than one overt act. In this sense, the Catholic Mass was a kind of routine miracle, while the Protestant one simply involved divine presences which were there already, rather than being effectively created at that moment by a priest. Equally, the bleeding of a murdered corpse was not a miracle, but the behaviour of the animate corpse under a certain natural stimulus.
To appreciate such contrasts more fully, it is helpful to look at some precise examples of how Catholicism tended to exalt the bodies of the most devout of believers. Here there is again a powerful element of mind (or soul) over matter. (Those readers whose minds or souls are less robust may want to read the following on an empty stomach.) The most directly relevant example from Catholic culture is that of those saints who were themselves mummified after death. In traditional Catholic belief, an undecayed corpse could be a strong indication of sanctity.120 Similarly, the ‘odour of sanctity’ referred to the allegedly sweet-smelling cadavers of especially pious, privileged Christians: a quite recent example is that of Padre Pio, the Franciscan friar canonised as St Pius in 2002. This figure was claimed by certain of his numerous followers to have possessed ‘“the odour of sanctity”, a fragrance like roses’.121 As Camporesi notes, the thirteenth-century saint, Beatrice II, of Este in Ferrara, exhibited both these traits. As we have seen, modern science suggests corpse preservation to be a natural, if uncommon occurrence: certain bodies develop a condition known as ‘adipocere’ and do not decay. From a religious viewpoint, this defiance of ordinary natural laws was perhaps the more impressive, in that it was so spontaneous and effortless. The saint’s unusual piety had pervaded their whole being so thoroughly that their soul’s preservative action (recall Mountford and his salt) carried over even into death.
Camporesi also introduces us to other ways in which the holiest Catholics might defy nature. Well into the seventeenth century such figures would mortify the flesh not simply by fasting, but by living on food and drink which relatively discerning beggars might have rejected. As Camporesi points out, Joseph Copertino (1603–63) ate a herb ‘so bitter and disgusting that if only touched with the tip of the tongue it caused nauseous feelings for several days’. Carlo Severoli (1641–1712), meanwhile, would eat his bread only after soaking it in ‘stagnant and verminous water’. Intriguingly, it seems as if these acts were an implicit gesture of faith in God’s ultimate power over all of Nature, including what would later be seen as inviolable laws of science. In the case of Copertino, for example, the triumph of spirit over matter involved more than just the ability to overcome revulsion or nausea. Unlike any ordinary beggar or lunatic, this saint did not slowly putrefy in the lowest ebbs of filth, but broke through into some purified realm beyond. For he could, Camporesi adds, levitate and even fly.122
In certain cases, the triumph of piety over disgust did indeed slide into outright cannibalism. The twelfth-century Bishop, Hugh of Lincoln (c. 1140–1200), was ‘accused of biting off a piece of the bone of Mary Magdalene while venerating it at Fecamp’ in northern France. Hugh was unabashed. He argued, quite unrepentantly, that ‘if he could touch Christ’s body in the Mass, he could certainly chew the Magdalene’s arm’.123 Here we find a mingling of sacred ideas and emotions producing behaviour which we might now associate with the world of Neanderthal man. (Some Protestants, we should bear in mind, would have said that the Catholic Mass was no less cannibalistic than the crunching of
Mary’s bones.124)
We saw in chapter five that Catherine of Siena was similarly able to stifle her disgust, when tending a cancerous nun whose odour overpowered all others in the order. Yet there is a little more to that story. Catherine seems to have outdone even Hugh’s crunching of hallowed bone. Not content with simply treating the sick woman, and consciously absorbing the smell of her tumour, Catherine ‘twice forced herself to overcome nausea by thrusting her mouth into the putrifying breast of a dying woman or by drinking pus’.125 Had we but world enough and time we might dwell on these remarkable acts at greater length. They clearly have strong elements of psychotic compulsion (much later, for example, we find the Marquis de Sade delighting in the eating of human excrement). More precisely, they are arguably egotistical, given that they could hardly help the suffering nun in any very tangible way.126 And for some Catherine’s act would indeed have counted as cannibalism. For some of us, her behaviour is surely more disgusting than cannibalism (especially if mere nail or finger chewing is seen as cannibalistic).127
Without attempting to do full justice to the evidently very dense and murky psychology of this tale, we can again view it as an exemplary case of the power of spirit over matter.128 Like the fairy-tale princess who kisses the frog, Catherine seems implicitly to make a daring magical bargain with the limits of disgust, and (at least in her own mind) to then break through this lowest strata of abjection into a transfigured world of matter redeemed. Nor was she alone. Catherine of Genoa, for example, ‘ate lice’. Angela of Foligno ‘drank water that came from washing the sores of lepers’. When one of the sores stuck in her throat, she remarked that it ‘tasted “as sweet as communion”’. Whatever we now think of such characters, we cannot deny that they and their peers felt them to be intensely holy. All of them – along with Donne and his effortlessly rarefied dead pigeons – might draw the same biblical motto: ‘to the pure, all things are pure’.129
Where does this leave the Paracelsian chemists or mummy-physicians? In 1628, musing on that distinctively Protestant issue of individual conscience, the outspoken and courageous Puritan minister Henry Burton exclaims: ‘blessed be God, who hath provided such treacle, made of the mummy of his dead saints, to cure his living ones of the serpent’s mortal sting’.130 Burton is clearly thinking of corpse medicine – hence the reference to ‘cure’, and to ‘treacle’, then often a medical term. Any Catholic readers who saw this line, by contrast, could not have avoided thinking of their mummified saint, Beatrice of Este. What is the difference? Obviously enough, Burton is being figurative. But what probably matters most in his image is this: whether figurative or literal, Protestant mummy is useful. In its medical form it can cure diseases. In its spiritual form (roughly, the examples of saintly lives) it can cure problems of sin or conscience.
Some Catholics may well have felt that they could make use of the examples of Catherine, or Severoli, or Copertino. Yet there was probably less active emphasis on the practical ‘usefulness’ of such figures. In the Catholic spiritual hierarchy, lowly believers were more likely to look up with wondering awe. They were unlikely to imagine that they themselves could attain such status. If we compare certain Catholic saints with the Protestant attitude to mummy, we find ourselves looking at something like the opposition between pre-modern religion and post-Enlightenment science. Saints are special, elitist even in their nominal humility. In such a sphere, humanity looks up with grateful passivity, perceiving divinely bestowed miracles in the case of the mummified Beatrice or the levitating Copertino. Protestant physicians and chemists, by contrast, believe that any young and healthy corpse (that of the most sinful murderer, perhaps) has an innate natural power, if it is properly tapped by the industrious chemist or doctor. And this power is practically useful. As time went on, moreover, science would grow increasingly co-operative, shifting it still further from the spiritual elitism and egocentricity of Catholic sainthood.
Having said this, we can conclude by looking at a spiritual rapture so unusual that it seems to finally defy easy categorisation into either ‘Protestant’ or ‘Catholic’. In 1628 the prophetic writer and ardent Republican George Wither wrote a long poem in which he meditated on the best way to fulfil his cherished religious vocation. Wither contrasts his possible membership of ‘some communion/Of Saints on earth’ with the benefits of pious isolation:
… I could bide
Shut up, until my flesh were mummy-fied;
And (though the world should woo me) would disdain
(For ever) to unclose my door again.
Just what can this mean? It is broadly clear that this mummification is essentially pious and desirable. We have seen that most literal cases of undecayed corpses as spiritually exalted occur in Catholic countries. Yet Wither believes that he will somehow be mummified while still alive. At a broad level this could be seen to echo those Catholic saints who defied the ordinary laws of the material world during life: Copertino, as we saw, represents a similar triumph of spirit over matter. At the same time, we must also consider that the lines typify a very Protestant conception of the devout individual, whose isolation is in some senses greater than that of Catholic mystics, given the high value placed on personal conscience by the reformed faith. This seems confirmed when Wither adds that
… when I come forth … I lose again
My raptures; and have thoughts like other men;
Because my natural frailties, and the fog
Of earthly vanities, my soul doth clog.
It is hard to convey the immensely powerful sense of spiritual interiority which the most deeply religious Protestants could feel in this era. In some cases it led negatively to bouts of self-harm and madness, in others to outpourings of prophecy which had pervasive influence in both religious and political spheres.131 In Wither’s case, its potency is attested by a strong edge of sensuality. For in the same passage he also imagines how
I might with Lot,
Upon the daughters of my brain begot,
Commit some spiritual incest, had I none
To spend the seed of my full soul upon.132
These brief lines are both dense and allusive. Where the biblical Lot committed incest with his daughters, Wither bizarrely imagines a kind of spiritual copulation, in which his soul spurts out semen (‘spend the seed’) and fertilises his own religious ideas (‘daughters of my brain’). To us this is so strange that we might be inclined to think of it as merely whimsical. But this would do a severe injustice to Wither’s well- attested religious passion. In one sense, the idea of his soul as emitting semen matches the distinctively tight fusion of human matter and spiritual power associated with Paracelsian corpse medicine. And these lines also suggest a still more fascinating possibility. Some believed that, ultimately, mummy derived its power from the human soul. In orthodox medical terms, the moral state of that soul clearly did not matter, given that the gallows was so common a source for this drug. But Wither may feel, consciously or unconsciously, that the sheer claustrophobic intensity of his very inward, Protestant soul causes it to spontaneously saturate his flesh with spirits to such a degree that he is indeed ‘mummy-fied’ in some obscurely holy way.
This is at once a mental, spiritual, and finally physical process. As with the body of the Ethiopian recipe, of the mythical sailor, of the suffocated corpses of sandstorms and gallows, flesh and spirits were being quite precisely conditioned by the pious physiological intensity of Wither’s spiritual withdrawal. And, as with certain hangings, that fiercely pious introspection catalyses a kind of overwhelming spiritual orgasm. Ironically, we cannot quite describe the condition as ‘ecstatic’. At this time ‘ec-stasy’ was an out-of-body experience, known especially to Catholic mystics such as Copertino. Is it perhaps significant that, as a typically introspective Protestant, Wither cannot escape his body, but rather seeks to flood his soul out through its minutest pores, precisely as someone might feel the effects of sexual climax vibrating out through their finest nerves, or to the tips of their toes?<
br />
It seems, then, that the most fervent Protestants could at times all but join hands, intentionally or not, with their Catholic counterparts. At least rhetorically, Wither can sublimate sexuality in the same way that Catherine or Angela could exalt the stinking pus and sores of the suffering human body. We have explored at some length the distinctive cosmology which helped corpse medicine survive for so long in Christian Europe. We now turn, at last, to its longer term decline. Even here, however, it was to prove almost as impressively stubborn and vital as the animate corpse itself.
7
Opposition and Ambivalence
Pre-Eighteenth Century
For well over 200 years European Christians ate or drank human flesh, bone, brains and blood. They rubbed the oil of human fat onto rheumatic or gouty joints, onto cancers, and into the facial scars left by smallpox. Some ate or drank human shit and urine. A shadowy network of suppliers, sea captains, grave robbers, executioners and anatomists oversaw the acquisition of bodies, blood, bones and fat. Whilst English soldiers and settlers seized Irish land, others discreetly foraged for moss-crowned skulls (prizes which, admittedly, may sometimes have been those of the invaders rather than the natives). Doctors and chemists and hangmen chopped, sawed, filed, dissected and pulverised human bones, skull, tissue, brains and nerves into the various forms required for practitioners and clients. How could the small-scale communal rituals of the Huron, the Tupinamba or the Wari’ ever begin to approach the systematic, quasi-scientific determination of these educated Christian man-eaters? By now we are surely in little doubt as to who, for some two and more centuries, were the real cannibals of the early modern world. They read and wrote in Latin, dressed in silks, debated theology, painted many of the greatest Western artworks, threw up some of Christendom’s most astonishing palaces and cathedrals and churches.