Evil Incarnate: Rumors of Demonic Conspiracy and Satanic Abuse in History by David Frankfurter

Author:David Frankfurter [Frankfurter, David]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780691186979
Google: Z_9ZDwAAQBAJ
Amazon: B07DMW6CG8
Barnesnoble: B07DMW6CG8
Published: 2018-05-03T02:22:03+00:00

148

C H A P T E R F I V E

Figure 8

Witches cooking children. Woodcut from Francesco Guazzo, Compendium Maleficarum (1608). From reprint by Dover Publications, New York, 1988. The horror of infant-cannibalism is juxtaposed to the fine clothes of the witches, their serene attention to cooking, and instruments (spit, cauldron) associated with more prosaic cuisine.

ears—as a source of supernatural power. Indeed, baby-parts became a kind of Satanic sacrament, a symbolic combination of the horrors of monstrous cannibalism and the horrors of an alternative, diabolical realm of practical power.53 In these particular tableaux, malign sorcery and parody of Catholic sacraments became the real context for witches’ preying on infants, not hunger for children’s flesh. But infant-cannibalism seems always to have remained the latent element in these elaborations, as we see in the famous 1613 engraving of the Sabbat accompanying De Lancre’s Tableau de l’inconstance: there on the table, among the finely dressed guests, sits a platter of baby-parts (see figure 5, locus D, p. 193).54

I M P U T A T I O N S O F P E R V E R S I O N

149

The craving for children’s blood imputed to Jews in medieval and early modern times also clearly had much to do with beliefs in the physical power of Catholic sacraments, the reality of their transub-stantiation to blood and flesh, and the magic of blood.55 All three ideas were continually worked out in medieval legends of Eucharist abuse, in which Jews would steal or buy illegally a sacramental wafer, ritually stab it, then discover that it would bleed, cry out, or even transform into a small child.56 But cannibalism—in this case, the sublimated cannibal impulses surrounding the Eucharist—again did not lie far behind this distorted projection of liturgical magic. The blood of the abducted child, like the blood of the Eucharist that the child represented, had to be incorporated orally. As the child’s murder took on the appearance of mock crucifixion in early modern times, meant to take place around Easter, so the blood had to connect to Jews’ ambiguous meal-rites at the same time of year, such that it was supposed to be drunk or spread on matzah or baked with it.57 (See figure 9.) The fact that these cannibalistic elements continue to emerge in ritual-murder rumors from the fourteenth through twentieth centuries suggests that these elements were always latent, even when learned experts turned the rumors into opportunities to press the power of the sacraments. Indeed, one can find ritual cannibalism imputed to Jews already in pre-Christian antiquity, as an indication of their cultural Otherness.58

Yet cannibalism as something imputed to the Other—we make a clear distinction from the unusual and highly circumscribed traditions of ritual anthropophagy documented in a few cultures—is never simply a means of articulating moral and natural difference. There is the form of the Other’s predatory hunger: Jews, witches, demons, monsters, and savages will eat our children if given the opportunity, but not their own.

Early Christians, heretics, and contemporary Satanists eat their own children.

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.