practiced in portions of Russia, and known as "_korovya smertj_"
(cow-death) and "_opachivaniye_" (plowing roundabout). If pestilence
or murrain prevails in a village, an old woman of repute as a seeress
or fortune-teller enters the confines of the village at midnight and
beats a pan. Thereupon all the women of the place assemble in haste,
armed with divers domestic utensils--frying-pans, pokers, tongs,
shovels, scythes, and cudgels. After shutting the cattle in their
stalls, and warning the men not to leave their houses, a procession
is formed. The seeress takes off her dress and pronounces a curse
upon Death. She is then hitched to a plow, together with a bevy of
virgins and a misshapen woman, if such a one can be found, and a
continuous and closed furrow is drawn round the village three times.
When the procession starts, the image of some saint suitable to the
occasion, that of St. Blasius, for example, in the case of murrain,
is borne in front of it; this is followed by the seeress, clad only
in a shift, with disheveled hair and riding on a broomstick; after
her come women and maidens drawing the plow, and behind them the rest
of the crowd, shrieking and making a fearful din. They kill every
animal they meet, and if a man is so unfortunate as to fall in with
them he is mercilessly beaten, and usually put to death. In the eyes
of these raging women he is not a human being, but Death himself
in the form of a were-wolf, who seeks to cross their path and thus
break the charm and destroy the healing virtue of the furrow. The
ceremony varies in different places, and generally ends by burying
alive a cat, cock, or dog. In some districts the whole population of
the village, both men and women, take part in the procession, and
are often attended by the clergy with sacred images and consecrated
banners. During the prevalence of the pest in the province of
Podolia, in 1738, the inhabitants of the village of Gummenez, while
marching in procession through the fields, met Michael Matkovskij,
a nobleman of a neighboring village, who was looking for his stray
horses. The strange man, wandering about with an eager look and a
bridle in his hand, was regarded as the incarnate pestilence, and
was therefore seized and most brutally beaten and left lying half
naked and half dead on the ground. At length he recovered his senses
and succeeded with great difficulty in reaching his home. No sooner
was it known that he was still alive than the peasants rushed into
his house, dragged him to their village, subjected him to terrible
tortures, and finally burned him. A curious feature of these remedial
rites is the mixture of paganism and Christianity which characterizes
them; and it is an unquestionable though almost incredible fact that
their atoning efficacy is often quite as firmly believed in by the
village priests of the Russian Church as by the most ignorant members
of their flock. In the autumn of 1894 some Russian peasants in the
district of Kazan slew one of their own number as a sacrifice to the
gods of the Votiaks, a Finnish race dwelling on the Volga, Viatka,
and Kama Rivers. Even orthodox Christians of the Greek Church,
although regarding these gods as devils, fear and seek to propitiate
them, especially in times of public distress.
Still more widely diffused is the practice of infanticide as the
sequence of superstition. The belief that dwarfs or gnomes, dwelling
in the inner parts of the earth, carry off beautiful newborn babes
and leave their own deformed offspring in their stead is not confined
to any one people, but is current alike in Germanic, Celtic, Romanic,
and Slavic countries, and causes a misshapen child to be looked upon
with suspicion and subjected to cruel tortures and even killed. The
supposed changeling is often severely beaten with juniper rods and
the scourging attended with incantations, so as to compel the wicked
fairies to reclaim their deformed bantling and restore the stolen
child. If the castigation proves ineffective, more summary measures
are frequently taken, and the supposititious suckling is thrown out
of the window on a dunghill or immersed in boiling water. In 1877, in
the city of New York, an Irish immigrant and his wife burned their
child to death under the delusion that they were ridding themselves
of a changeling. Cases of this kind are quite common in Ireland,
where the victims are sometimes adults.[28] Not long since Magoney,
an Irish peasant, had a sickly child, which the most careful nurture
failed to restore to health and strength. The parents, therefore,
became convinced that a changeling had been imposed upon them, and
when the boy was four years old they resolved to have recourse to
boiling water, in which he was kept, notwithstanding his shrieks and
protestations that he was not an elf, but their own Johnny Magoney,
until death released him from his torments.
Wilhelm Mannhardt, the celebrated writer on folklore, states that
when, in 1850, he was in Löblau, a village of West Prussia, he saw a
man brutally maltreating a boy on the street. On inquiry he found
that the lad had done nothing worthy of blame, but that his only
fault was an exceptionally large head. This cranial peculiarity,
offensively conspicuous in what seems to have been a narrow-headed
family, was reason enough for the parents to disown their offspring,
and to treat him as the counterfeit of a child foisted in by the
fairies. At Hadersleben, a considerable market town of North Silesia,
the wife of a farmer, in 1883, gave birth to a puny infant, which the
parents at once assumed to be a changeling. In order to defeat the
evil designs of the elves and to compel the restoration of their own
child, they held the newborn over a bed of live coals on the hearth
until it was covered with blisters and died in intense agony. In East
Prussia, the Mazurs, a Polish race, whose only notable contribution
to modern civilization and the gayety of nations is the mazurka,
take precautionary measures by placing a book (usually the Bible,
although any book will do) under the head of the newborn babe, so as
to prevent the devil from spiriting it away and substituting for it
one of his own hellish brood, thus unwittingly furnishing a marvelous
illustration of the beneficent influence of the printing press and
the magic power of literature. The Estonian inhabitants of the island
of Oesel in Livonia refrain from kindling a fire in the house while
the rite of baptism is being celebrated, lest the light of the flames
should render it easier for Satan surreptitiously to exchange an imp
for the infant. After the sacred ceremony has been performed there is
supposed to be no danger of such a substitution.
One of the most incredible instances of this extremely silly and
surprisingly persistent superstition occurred in 1871 at Biskunizy,
a village of Prussian Posen, where a laborer, named Bekker, had by
industry and frugality gradually acquired a competence and been able
to buy a house of his own, in which he led a happy domestic life
with his wife and five children, of whom he was very fond. After
fourteen years of unbroken felicity the wife's elder sister, Marianne
Chernyak, came from Poland to pay them a visit. This woman was a
crackbrained devotee, who spent half her time in going to mass and
the other half in backbiting her neighbors. She also claimed that
she could detect at once whether a person is in league with Satan,
and could cast out devils. The villagers came to look upon her as
a witch, and avoided all association with her, especially as her
aberrations manifested themselves in exceedingly malevolent and
mischievous forms. Unfortunately, she acquired complete ascendency
over her younger sister, who accepted her absurd pretensions as real.
On November 19, 1871, Marianne, after returning from confession, went
to bed, but at midnight Mrs. Bekker, who slept with her youngest
child, a boy about a year old, was awakened by a fearful shriek and
lit the lamp. Thereupon the sister rushed into the room, crying:
"The demons have stolen your child and put a changeling in your bed:
beat him, beat him, if you wish to have your child again!" Under the
influence of this suggestion, which seemed to be almost hypnotic in
its character, the bewildered mother began to beat the boy. The aunt
now seized him and swung him to and fro, as if she would fling him
out of the window, at the same time calling out to Satan: "There!
you have him; take your brat!" She then gave him back to his mother
with the words: "Throw him to the ground, drub him, beat him to
death; otherwise you will never recover your child." This advice was
followed, and the boy severely strapped with a heavy girdle as he
lay on the floor. Meanwhile Bekker, hearing the noise, got up and
at first tried to intervene for the protection of his son, but was
easily convinced by his wife that she was doing the right thing,
and persuaded to aid her in discomfiting the devil by beating the
boy with a juniper stick. The process of exorcism, thus renewed
with increased vigor, soon proved fatal. At this juncture, as the
son of the aunt, a lad of five years, threw himself down with loud
lamentations beside the dead body of his little cousin, his mother
cried out: "Beat him; he is not my child! Why should we spare him?
We shall get other children!" Thereupon he, too, was maltreated in
the same manner until he expired. The aunt then declared that the
devil had crept into the stovepipe, and went to work to demolish
the stove, but, when she was prevented from doing so, fled into the
garden, where she was found the next morning by the school-teacher.
By this time Bekker and his wife seem to have come to their senses,
and were sitting by the corpses of the murdered children, weeping
and praying, as the neighbors entered the house. The trial, which
took place at Ostrov in January, 1872, led to the introduction of
conflicting expert testimony concerning the mental soundness of the
accused, and the matter was finally referred to a commission of
psychiaters in Berlin, who decided that Bekker and his wife were not
suffering from mental disease, and therefore not irresponsible, but
that the aunt was subject to periodical insanity to such a degree as
not to be accountable for her actions. Curiously enough, the jurors
remained uninfluenced by this testimony, and pronounced her guilty
of the crime laid to her charge, and in accordance with this verdict
the court sentenced her to three years' imprisonment with hard labor.
The jurors even went so far as to declare that she herself did not
believe in the existence of elf children or satanic changelings, but
made use of this popular superstition for her own selfish purposes,
and that she guilefully denounced her own boy as an imp in order to
get rid of him. In this verdict, or rather in the considerations
urged in support of it, it is easy to perceive the effects of strong
local prejudice against the accused, who had the reputation of being
a lazy, malicious, and crafty person, and was therefore denied the
extenuation of honest self-deception. Indeed, in such cases it is
always more or less difficult to determine where sincere delusion
ceases and conscious swindling begins. Just at this point the annals
of superstition present many puzzling problems, the solution of which
is of special interest as well as of great practical importance
not only to the psychologist and psychiater, but also to the
legislator and jurisprudent, who have to do with the enactment and
administration of criminal laws.
In the penal codes of the most civilized nations the agency of
superstition as a factor in the promotion of crime is almost wholly
ignored, and, as this was not the case in former times, the omission
would seem to assume that the general diffusion of knowledge in
our enlightened age had rendered all such specifications obsolete
and superfluous. Only in the Russian penal code, especially in the
sections _Ulosheniye_ and _Ustav_ on felonies and frauds, as cited
by Löwenstimm, do we find a distinct recognition and designation
of various forms of superstition as incentives to crime. Thus,
in paragraph 1469 of the first of these sections, the murder of
"monstrous births or misshapen sucklings" as changelings is expressly
mentioned, and the penalty prescribed; and in other clauses of the
code punishments are imposed for the desecration of graves and
mutilation of corpses, in order to procure talismans or to prevent
the dead from revisiting the earth as vampires, and for various
offenses emanating from the belief in sorcery and diabolical
possession. The practice of opening graves and mutilating dead
bodies is quite common, and arises in general from the notion that
persons who die impenitent and without extreme unction, including
suicides and victims to delirium tremens, apoplexy, and other forms
of sudden death, as well as schismatics, sorcerers, and witches,
come forth from their graves and wander about as vampires, sucking
the blood of individuals during sleep and inflicting misery upon
entire communities by producing drought, famine, and pestilence. The
means employed to prevent this dangerous metamorphosis, or at least
to compel the vampire to remain in the grave, differ in different
countries. In Russia the deceased is buried with his face downward,
and an ashen stake driven through his back, while in Poland and East
Prussia the corpse is wrapped up in a fish net and covered with
poppies, owing, doubtless, to the soporific qualities of this plant.
Preventive measures of this kind are often taken with the consent and
co-operation of the clergy and local authorities. Thus, in 1849, at
Mariensee, near Dantzig, in West Prussia, a peasant's wife came to
the Catholic priest of the parish and complained that an old woman
named Welm, recently deceased, appeared in her house and beat and
otherwise tormented her child. The priest seems to have accepted
the truth of her statement, since he ordered the corpse to be
disinterred, decapitated, reburied at a cross-road, and covered with
poppies. In 1851, during the prevalence of cholera in Ukraine, in the
governmental province of Kiev, the peasants of Possady attributed
the epidemic to a deceased sacristan and his wife, who were supposed
to roam about at night as vampires and kill people by sucking their
blood. In order to stay the ravages of the scourge the corpses of
this couple were exhumed, their heads cut off and burned, and ashen
stakes driven through their backs into the ground. In 1892 a peasant
woman in the Russian province of Kovno hanged herself in a wood near
the village of Somenishki. The priest refused her Christian burial
because she had committed suicide, and was therefore given over to
the devil. In order that she might rest quietly in her grave and
not be changed into a vampire, her sons severed her head from her
body and laid it at her feet. In thus refusing to perform religious
funeral rites the priest obeyed the canons of the church and also
the laws of the Russian Empire. Until quite recently a corner of
unconsecrated ground next to the wall of the Russian cemetery was
reserved as a sort of carrion pit for the corpses of self-murderers,
and it is expressly prescribed in the _Svod Sakonov_[29] that they
"shall be dragged to such place of infamy by the knacker, and
there covered with earth." This treatment of a _felo-de-se_ by
the ecclesiastical and civil authorities directly fosters popular
superstition by tending to confirm the notion that there is something
uncanny, eldritch, demoniacal, and preternaturally malignant inherent
in his mortal remains, a notion still further strengthened by a most
unjust paragraph (1472) in the Russian code, which declares the last
will and testament of a suicide to have no legal validity. Drought,
too, as well as pestilence, is ascribed to the evil agency of
vampires, which "milk the clouds," and hinder the falling of the dew.
In 1887 the South Russian province of Cherson began to suffer from
drought soon after a peasant had hanged himself in the village of
Ivanovka, the inhabitants of which, assuming a causative connection
between the aridity and the self-homicide, poured water on the grave
while uttering the following words: "I sprinkle, I pour; may God send
a shower, bring on a little rainfall, and relieve us from misery!" As
this invocation failed to produce the desired effect, the body was
taken up and inhumed again in a gorge outside of the village. In some
districts the corpse is disinterred, beaten on the head, and drenched
with water poured through a sieve; in others it is burned.
The records of the criminal courts in West Prussia during the last
half century contain numerous instances of the violation of graves
from superstitious motives. Thus in March, 1896, a peasant died in
the village of Penkuhl; soon afterward his son was taken ill of a
lingering disease, which the remedies prescribed by the country
doctor failed to relieve. It did not take long for the "wise women"
of the village to convince him that his father was a "nine-killer,"
and would soon draw after him into the grave nine of his next of
kin. The sole means of depriving him of this fatal power would be to
disinter him and sever his head from his body. In accordance with
this advice the young man dug up the corpse by night and decapitated
it with a spade. In this case the accused, if tried in court, might
honestly declare that he acted in self-defense; indeed, he might
plead in justification of his conduct that he thereby preserved
not only his own life, but also the lives of eight of his nearest
and dearest relations, and that he should be commended rather than
condemned for what he had done. It is the possibility and sincerity
of this plea that render it so difficult to deal with such offenses
judicially and justly. Here is needed what Tennyson calls
"The intuitive decision of a bright
And thorough-edged intellect, to part
Error from crime."
Quite different, however, from a moral point of view, is the opening
of graves in quest of medicaments, and especially of talismans, which
are supposed to bring good luck to the possessor or to enable him
to practice sorcery and to commit crime with impunity. In ancient
times, and even in the middle ages, physicians sometimes prescribed
parts of the human body as medicine, and in Franconia, North Bavaria,
a peasant now occasionally enters an apothecary's shop and asks for
"_Armensünderfett_," poor sinner's fat, obtained from the bodies of
executed malefactors and prized as a powerful specific. The culprit
was tried first for murder and then for lard, and thus made doubly
conducive to the safety and sanitation of the community. Formerly
many persons went diligently to public executions for the purpose
of procuring a piece of the criminal as a healing salve, but since
the hangman or headsman has generally ceased to perform his fearful
functions in the presence of a promiscuous crowd, such loathsome
remedies for disease are sought in churchyards.
In May, 1865, a Polish peasant in Wyssokopiz, near Warsaw, discovered
that the grave of his recently deceased wife had been opened and
the corpse mutilated. Information was given to the police, and a
shepherd's pipe, found in the churchyard, led to the detection of
the culprit in the person of the communal shepherd, a man twenty-six
years old, who on examination confessed that he, with the aid of two
accomplices, had committed the disgustful deed. His object, he said,
was to procure a tooth and the liver of a dead person. He intended
to pulverize the tooth and after mixing it with snuff to give it to
his brother-in-law in order to poison him. On perceiving, however,
that the body was that of a woman, he did not take the tooth, because
it would have no power to kill a man; but he cut out the liver for
the purpose of burying it in a field where the sheep were pastured,
and thus causing the death of the entire flock in case he should be
superseded by another shepherd, which he feared might happen. All
three were condemned to hard labor in Siberia.
It is a quite prevalent notion that if any part of a corpse is
concealed in a house, the inmates will have the corresponding bodily
organs affected by disease and gradually paralyzed. A drastic
example of this superstition occurred in May, 1875, at Schwetz,
a provincial town of West Prussia, where a woman named Albertine
Mayevski became the mother of a male child, which died soon after
its birth. The father, to whom she was betrothed, refused to marry
her, and to punish him for this breach of promise she disinterred
the body of her babe, cut off its right hand at the wrist and the
genitals, and hid them in the chimney of the house of her faithless
lover, hoping thereby to cause the hand, with which he had pledged
his vow, to wither away, and to render him impotent. All this she
freely confessed when brought to trial, and was sentenced to two
months' imprisonment. But such relics of the tomb are used, on the
principle of _similia similibus_, not only for inflicting injury, but
also for bringing luck. Thus members of the "light-fingered craft"
carry with them the finger of a corpse in order to enhance their
skill, success, and safety in thievery; if the finger belonged to an
adroit thief or a condemned criminal its talismanic virtue is all the
greater. It is also believed that a purse in which a finger joint is
kept will contain an inexhaustible supply of money. The finger of a
murdered man is greatly prized by burglars because it is supposed
to possess a magic power in opening locks. The records of criminal
courts prove that these absurd notions are generally entertained by
common malefactors in East Prussia, Thuringia, Silesia, Bohemia,
and Poland. A candle made of fat obtained from the human body is
very frequently used by thieves on account of its supposed soporific
power, since with such a taper, known in Germany as _Diebslicht_
or _Schlummerlicht_ (sloom-light in provincial English), they are
confident of being able to throw all the inmates of the house
into a deep sleep, and thus rummage the rooms at will and with
perfect impunity. The danger of detection is also forestalled by
laying a dead man's hand on a window sill; and in order to make
assurance doubly sure, both preservatives are usually employed.
Hence the proverbial saying, "He sleeps as though a dead hand had
been carried round him." The desire to procure material for such
candles often leads to the commission of crime. An Austrian jurist,
Dr. Gross, in his manual for inquisitorial judges (_Handbuch für
Untersuchungsrichter_), and the folklorists Mannhardt and Jakushkin,
give numerous instances of this kind, and there is no doubt that
the many mysterious murders and ghastly mutilations, especially of
women and children, so horrifying to the public and puzzling to the
police, are due to the same cause. In most cases the prosecuting
attorneys and judges are unable to discover the real motives of such
bloody and brutal deeds because they are ignorant of the popular
superstitions in which they have their origin, and, for lack of any
better explanation, attribute them to mere brutishness, wantonness,
homicidal mania, and other vague and unintelligible impulses, whereas
in reality they spring from a supremely selfish but exceedingly
definite purpose, are perpetrated deliberately, and with the normal
exercise of the mental faculties, and can not be mitigated even by
the extenuating plea of sudden passion. Crimes of this sort are
of common occurrence not only in the semi-barbarous provinces of
Russia, but also in Austria and Germany, justly reckoned among the
most civilized countries of Christendom. On January 1, 1865, the
house of a man named Peck, near Elbing in West Prussia, was entered
during the absence of the family by a burglar, Gottfried Dallian,
who killed the maid-servant, Catharina Zernickel, and ransacked
the premises in search of money and other objects of value. Before
carrying off his spoils he cut a large piece of flesh out of the body
of the murdered girl in order to make candles for his protection on
future occasions of this sort. The talismanic light, which he kept
in a tin tube, did not prevent him from being caught in the act of
committing another burglary about six weeks later. During the trial,
which resulted in his condemnation to death, he confessed that he
had eaten some of the maid-servant's flesh in order to appease his
conscience. This disgusting method of alleviating the "compunctious
visitings of Nature" would seem to confirm the suggestion of a
writer in the _Russkiya Wjedomosti_ (Russian News, 1888, No. 359)
that the thieves' candle is a survival of primitive cannibalism,
distinct traces of which he also discovers in a Russian folk song
which runs as follows: "I bake a cake out of the hands and feet, out
of the silly head I form a goblet, out of the eyes I cast drinking
glasses, out of the blood I brew an intoxicating beer, and out of
the fat I mold a candle." It is certainly very queer to find such
stuff constituting the theme of popular song within the confines
of Christian civilization at the present day, a grewsome stuff more
suitable as the staple of Othello's tales
"--of the cannibals that each other eat,
The anthropophagi, and men whose heads
Do grow beneath their shoulders."
In the burglary just mentioned the murder and mutilation of the
maid were incidental to the robbery, and probably an afterthought,
but there are on record numerous instances of persons being waylaid
and killed for the sole purpose of making candles out of their
adipose tissue. No longer ago than November 15, 1896, two peasants
were convicted of this crime in Korotoyak, a city on the Don in
South Russia. Their victim was a boy twelve years of age, whom they
strangled and eviscerated in order to make candles from the fat of
the caul and entrails. It would be superfluous and tedious to cite
additional examples of this outrageous offense against humanity and
common sense, for, like the devils that entered into the Gadarene
swine, their name is Legion.