A Very Historically Blind Christmas III: The Epiphany of the Magi

In 1158, amid sieges by the Holy Roman Emperor Frederick Barbarossa, the embalmed corpses of three men were discovered beneath a church in Milan. One appeared to be that of a young man, another a middle-aged man, and the third, an old man, representing, as it were, the different stages of manhood. Because of their ages and how the idea corresponded with certain legends, these preserved remains were presumed to be the bodies of the Three Wise Men of the Christmas Nativity story and were thereafter hidden in a moat to prevent Frederick I from taking them, but take them he did, and gifted the relics to the Archbishop of Cologne, where they were purported to perform miracles and became the chief relics of the three most revered saints in Western Christianity, housed in the grand Shrine of the Three Kings. According to the 14th-century History of the Three Kings, the Three Wise Men of the Nativity story, also called the Three Kings and the Magi, agreed to be buried together at a certain hill on the border of India where their ways parted on their journey home after presenting their gifts to the Christ child, a place they called the Hill of Victory. How their remains ended up at Milan is another interesting tale, this one involving Flavia Julia Helena, later Saint Helena, the beautiful daughter of the fabled King Cole, or Coel the Old, in Roman Britain. Helena married Constantius and gave him a son, Constantine, who in 312 CE converted her to Christianity. In 325, she was said to have gone on pilgrimage to the Holy Land, where she discovered numerous important relics, including the hay from Christ’s manger, the nails used in his crucifixion, and even the True Cross itself. It was said that, after her pilgrimage to the Holy Land, she traveled to India, discovered the Hill of Victory, and brought the remains of the Three Wise Men back to Constantinople, where they remained until a bishop transported them to Milan sometime during a mid–4th-century period of Christian persecution in Constantinople. But there is much to doubt about this story, which was written centuries after the relics’ discovery in Milan. For example, it attributes their discovery to a much mythologized figure in St. Helena. First, her origin is suspect, with most scholars maintaining that she came from Asia Minor rather than from Britain, and that the figure of Old King Cole identified as her father may be entirely fictitious. Second, the idea that she discovered all the relics it is claimed she found in the Holy Land is hard enough to believe without her also mounting an expedition to India and finding a long-lost tomb like some ancient Indiana Jones. But also, the ages of the relics don’t make logical sense. They do indeed appear to be the remains of men aged around 15, 30, and 60 years, as modern science has confirmed by examination of skull sutures, but this would not make sense unless these Three Wise Men had died almost immediately after presenting their gifts, and all at the same time. The different sources comprising the legendarium that tells us their names—Melchior, Balthasar, and Caspar—do not agree on who came from which country: was Melchior or Balthasar a king of Arabia who presented a gift of gold? Was Caspar king of the Hindus or king of Tarsus? Was Balthasar actually king of Ethiopia and thus dark-skinned as he is often portrayed? Inconsistencies abound, but the legendarium is clear that all three lived past 100 years old, making the relics at Cologne problematic. But there are far more problems than these associated with this major element of the biblical Christmas story.

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Before continuing to read, may I suggest you read my posts “Zoroaster, the First Magus” and “Gnostic Genesis” before listening to this episode. The former is perhaps the most important, as I discuss the historical magi, their beliefs and what was commonly believed about them, which provides essential background for much of this Christmas Special. The latter, while less essential, provides some useful background on what apocryphal writings are, which will come up along the way on our journey of the Magi. But to begin, rather than delving into the apocrypha from which much of the legend of the Three Kings derives, we must look to canon, and the only canonical scriptures that mention the visit of the Wise Men is the Gospel of Matthew, Chapter 2: “Now when Jesus was born in Bethlehem of Judaea in the days of Herod the king, behold, there came wise men from the east to Jerusalem, / Saying, Where is he that is born King of the Jews? for we have seen his star in the east, and are come to worship him.” Here in two verses, out of a passage of 12 verses only, we have the origin of a vast legendarium. Strange, then, that the other gospel featuring the Nativity, that of Luke, makes no mention of these visitors from the East. Moreover, the inclusion of the Wise Men in the actual nativity scene appears not to be supported by scriptures. I talked a great deal in my first Christmas special about confusion over the actual time of Christ’s birth, owing to Luke’s description of shepherds watching their flocks by night, and here we have a similar confusion. When Matthew’s wise men visit Herod, the king asks them “what time the star appeared” and after the wise men depart, he orders the Massacre of the Innocents, demanding the slaughter of all children “two years old and under,” which seems to indicate that the Wise Men first saw the star two years earlier. Yet the star that had signaled the birth of the King of the Jews appears to still remain overhead—another odd detail, for if this magnificent celestial sign had glared in the heavens above for so long, why was Herod so curiously unaware of it?—and it led the Three Kings not to a barn or a cave, as some versions have it, but to a “house” where they presented their gifts to a “young child” rather than an infant. So it seems some artistic license was taken to include the Wise Men at the actual nativity, and it seems further license has been taken all along the way as their legend grew. For example, how do we know they were kings, or that there were only three of them? This appears to have grown out of the mention of three gifts: gold, frankincense, and myrrh, and the fact that these were treasures befit for a king, which only other kings could afford to give. Then there is the connection to a prophecy in Isaiah that predicts “Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising” and that “they shall bring gold and incense.” But how much of this was speculation, how much folklore, how much a purposeful attempt to fulfill prophecy and further some other religious or political agenda?

A detail of the Three Wise Kings from the Atlas Catalan, 1375. Public Domain.

Certainly the visit of these Wise Men has become a touchstone in Western culture, its mythic standing resulting in its appearance in all kinds of art. Numerous masters have paintings that depict the adoration of the Magi, including Botticelli, Bruegel, and Hieronymus Bosch. They have been the subject of much poetry as well, with both William Butler Yeats and T.S. Eliot having penned memorable verses about them. And the Christmas carol, We Three Kings of Orient Are is not the only song to immortalize their legend. But their legendarium really begins in apocryphal texts, such as the protoevangelion, or infancy gospels, from the 2nd century CE. These dubious texts, which have been called “mythological trash” by some scholars, offer more details on the birth and early years of Christ. The gospel of pseudo-Matthew doesn’t have them adoring the Christ Child at birth, replacing the Wise Men with an ox and an ass that worship him instead, and this account seems to indicate even more clearly than the canonical Gospel of Matthew that the Magi had seen the star rising in the east two years before making their trip and thus found Jesus as a small child in a house. However, the Infancy Gospel of James places the Wise Men more specifically at the scene of the Nativity, describing how the Wise Men were led by the star to a cave, rather than a barn. An Armenian Infancy Gospel, some centuries later during the late 6th century CE would number them three, give them their names, and make of them kings from specific places. After that, much of their mythology first appeared in medieval romances, which themselves tied the Wise Men to already dubious apocryphal legends, such as the detail that they were baptized in India by Thomas the Apostle during his travels on the Indian subcontinent, even though the only work to describe these travels, the apocryphal Acts of Thomas, makes no mention of them. Further, it was alleged that one of the Three Kings was a forefather of Prester John, a legendary Christian king in India that most scholars believe was a fabricated character of medieval fantasy. And perhaps one final legend shall suffice to demonstrate how entangled the story of the Three Wise Men is with myth and folklore: that of La Befana, the Christmas Witch. In Italian folklore, Befana was an old woman whom the Wise Men passed by on their journey. She asked the travelers where they were headed, and the Wise Men told her about the star they followed and the newborn king to whom it would lead them, and they invited her to join them. However, La Befana was far too busy sweeping and declined to accompany the Wise Men. Later, when she realized that she had lost an opportunity to worship the redeemer that the world had been waiting for, her bitter regret kept her alive to wander around Italy, rewarding the good children by leaving gifts and candy in the socks they hung to dry by their hearths, and leaving only garlic, onions, and coal in the socks of children who had been less than well-behaved. Clearly this legend is all twisted up with other Christmas folklore that I have discussed previously, but La Befana visits children after Christmas, during Epiphany, the Christian holiday celebrating the Three Wise Men and the revelation of Christ as the incarnation of God. Indeed, the witch’s name, La Befana, is even derived from the word Epiphany.

So enmeshed in myth and legend is the story of the Wise Men that in order to find some solid ground from which to start an investigation into their identities, many have looked not to them but to the object their fascination, the Star of Bethlehem, which as a celestial event at least seems approachable through science. Because of its description as an unusual sight which remained for so long, at least throughout the entire months-long journey of the Wise Men, if not for the implied 2 years, rather than a star per se, many interpret it to have been an astronomical event. A fireball or meteor would seem to fit the bill, but as that would disappear within moments, we must look for other phenomena. A supernova has been suggested as another likely candidate, as supernovas can be visible for years and in early records were mistaken for stars, even called a “guest star,” but the earliest record of a supernova was recorded by the Chinese in 185 CE. It seems unlikely that only the Gospel of Matthew, written some 75 to 100 years after the events described, would provide the only record in all cultures of such a bright and easily visible natural event. And this fact casts doubt on the entire notion that this astronomical event occurred for two years. As for events that might have lasted for months, a comet could provide an explanation. However, unlike supernovas, comets were more commonly observed in that era, and were typically seen as the finger of a god, a portent of calamity rather than as a sign of a coming king among a certain people or in a certain place. Then we have the description in Matthew, after the Wise Men meet with Herod, that the star “went before them, till it came and stood over where the young child was.” This certainly does not behave as one would expect a comet to behave, and so it makes sense that many Christians view the Star of Bethlehem more as a miracle than an astronomical event—something more like the pillar of fire illuminating the Israelites’ night journey out of Egypt in Exodus. To a modern reader, it may sound more like a UFO, and interestingly, there are many parallels between depictions of UFOs today and angels in the past, both appearing as lights in the sky.

The Adoration of the Magi by Bartholomäus Zeitblom, c. 1460. Public Domain.

Interestingly, at least one apocryphal text, the Infancy Gospel of James, seems to confirm the idea that the star was actually an angel, for after their visit with the Christ Child, it says they were “warned by the angel not to go into Judea,” according to the “Scholars Version” translation using the definite article “the angel,” when the Wise Men had not earlier been shown to be in contact with an angel but rather being led by the star, giving the impression that the star had been an angel all along. However, The Infancy Gospel of James also employs different wording, making it seem like the star did not move before them and stand over the place where Christ was: “Then, the star which they had seen in the east led them until they came to the cave and stood over the head of the child.” Here we see that it was the Wise men themselves who stood over the child’s head… and one cannot help but wonder if that is what the Canonical Gospel meant to say, a slight distinction, a confusion of subject and verb, lost in awkward phrasing and translation, that makes an important difference. But then again, as mentioned, the Infancy Gospels are not the most reliable of sources. Among the novel embroideries of the Infancy Gospel of James, we see Mary being fed by angels as a child, and rather than delivering the Christ Child by any normal means, there is a flash of light and Jesus simply appears at her breast. Then there is the strange cameo of Salome, granddaughter of Herod, who appears in the Nativity scene here despite her being described in Mark as being youthful when Jesus was an adult. Intrigued by the story of a virgin birth, Salome wants to see for herself, but when she inserts her finger into Mary to determine if her hymen is intact, her hand is “consumed in fire.” Only holding the Christ Child restores her hand to her. All this to demonstrate that the Infancy Gospel of James may indeed be the “mythological trash” that scholars have said it is, making it unreliable as evidence for what the Star of Bethlehem was or how it led the Wise Men to the Christ Child. But, then again, is it any less unbelievable than other wonder-filled books of the Bible that have been established as canon?

For a more rational interpretation of the Star of Bethlehem, we must consider why these Wise Men are sometimes called the Magi. The original Greek word used in the Gospel of Matthew that has been translated as “wise men” was mágoi (μάγοι), a seemingly direct identification of these men from the east as followers of the ancient Persian religion of Zoroastrianism. It is curious that the term magi would be translated as “wise men” since the magi were largely seen as practitioners of evil magic. Even elsewhere in the Bible, the term is applied, in its singular form, to the most wicked sorcerer of all, the originator of all heresies, Simon Magus. However, it may be that the word was simply being used by Matthew to indicate that the men were astrologers, for Zoroastrian magi were widely credited as the inventors of astrology. And here we find an interesting explanation for the Christmas Star. As astrologers search for portents in the stars and alignments of planets, perhaps this is what led the Wise Men to Bethlehem. In fact, a few noteworthy planetary alignments have been suggested by astronomers as possible candidates. Keep in mind that the exact year of Christ’s birth has never been determined with any certainty, and he likely was not born at the end of the year 1 B.C. as the former calendrical reckoning of “Before Christ” would imply (evidence of which, having to do with the known dates of King Herod’s life and reign, I discussed in my first Christmas special). So if we are not tied to that date, we can see a triple conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn in 7 BCE that may have inspired astrologers to make a journey to the land of the Hebrews. Three times that year, Jupiter, a planet representing royalty, passed before Saturn, a planet seen as a protector of eastern Mediterranean peoples, and this took place within the astrological sign of Pisces the Fishes, which to many eastern astrologers meant a portent for the Hebrew people. If that didn’t fit the bill, another possibility exists.

The Journey of the Three Kings (1825) by Leopold Kupelwieser. Public Domain.

In 3 BCE, a number of curious planetary alignments occurred. In August that year, while Venus and Jupiter were in conjunction, Mercury and the Sun and Moon were in the sign of Leo the Lion, a sign associated with the Jewish tribe of Judah. Then the next month, Mercury aligned with Venus and the Sun entered the sign of Virgo the Maiden. Considering that a prophecy foretold of a virgin birth in the House of Judah resulting in a savior, these planetary movements may have been interpreted as confirming the prophecy’s imminent fulfillment. After that, Jupiter aligned with the brightest star in Leo, Regulus, and would pass it again two more times in the next year, 2 BCE. Then, in June of that year, exactly 2 years from the summer of 1 CE, when, it should be remembered, it was more likely for shepherds to be watching their flocks by night as described in one version of the Nativity, a spectacular “double planet” conjunction of Jupiter and Venus occurred that would have been unlike anything astrologers of the day had ever seen. Indeed, we did not see a similar occurrence for another 2000 years, in 2016. A similar “double planet” conjunction of Jupiter and Saturn on the 21st of December this year is likewise being hailed as a “Christmas Star.” Before we say case closed and declare that Matthew was certainly referring to these conjunctions, though, it must be pointed out how strange it is that, considering the astronomical knowledge of the day, Matthew used the word for star rather than referring to the event as a conjunction of planets, and Herod and his court, who would have been familiar with astrology, had no idea about this conjunction. Moreover, a conjunction of planets would not explain how the star appeared to move as it led the Wise Men, or how it stopped over the place where the Christ Child was. And perhaps most strange is that Matthew would indicate by this passage the efficacy of astrology, a forbidden practice and belief considered to be false and against God.

Now we get to the heart of the matter. Who was this Matthew who wrote the only canonical Gospel that mentions these Magi from the east who followed a star to Jesus, and what can the historical and geographical context in which it was written tell us about why this singular passage appears? Little is known about the author of this gospel, but it can be discerned that he was a speaker of Greek, and a Jew who had converted to Christianity. He is believed to have written the document in Antioch, sometime between 80 and 90 CE, almost a hundred years after the events he is recording. Antioch was connected via some nearby major commercial roads to cities like Edessa and Hierapolis, which had inherited much from ancient Persian and thereafter Parthian cultures, including thriving Zoroastrian traditions. Indeed, as a center for education, Antioch received eager-to-learn young people from these other cities, who brought with them Zoroastrian beliefs. As such, Antioch was a multi-cultural milieu where syncretistic beliefs began to sprout up and where astrology was popular. As such, it is perhaps no surprise that Matthew incorporated astrologer Magi into his version of the Nativity. Indeed, it may have represented an effort at syncretism, an attempt to reconcile Christianity with the practice of astrology, for if astrology had successfully predicted the birth of the Messiah, it couldn’t be all bad, right? But more than this, the very notion that Magi, or priests of the Zoroastrian faith, would recognize Jesus as the foretold savior is a syncretism of Christianity and Zoroastrianism, for as I discussed in my previous post on the topic, Zoroastrians too believed in the coming of a savior figure who would be born to a virgin mother.

The Adoration of the Three Kings, anonymous. Public Domain.

Another possibility may be that, rather than trying to co-opt Zoroastrianism, Matthew may have been inventing details in order to make it seem as though Christ’s birth represented the fulfillment of known prophecy. First, there is the prophecy of the wicked Gentile diviner Balaam in Numbers Chapter 24, which states that “there shall come a Star our of Jacob, and a Sceptre shall rise out of Israel.” Interestingly, some early Christian writers viewed Balaam as an astrologer and even sometimes suggested he was Zoroaster himself. Then there is the prophecy from the Book of Isaiah, Chapter 60, which indicates that “Gentiles shall come to thy light, and kings to the brightness of thy rising” and mentions specifically their arrival on camels and gifts of gold and incense. Some writers, including Catholic scholar Dwight Longeneker, who has written a whole book about the topic, use this verse of prophecy to try and narrow down who the Magi were. Based on these verses mentioning that Gentiles would come from such places as Midian, Ephah, and Sheba, he argues that they were not Persian Zoroastrians but rather astrologers from the neighboring kingdoms of Nabatea and Sheba, and that the word magi was a common misnomer for any astrologers. To support his claim, he argues that these Kingdoms were linked to the kingdom of Herod by a trade route, on which they traveled to sell incense and myrrh, made from resinous plants native to their lands. This is all rather convincing, but only if you believe that what Matthew wrote had to be true, when in fact, he was likely aware of these prophecies and working them into his account. His inclusion of the brief story of the Wise men recalls both Balaam the Gentile astrologer’s metaphor of a King in Israel as a rising star AND the notion of Gentiles coming from afar to offer gifts specifically of gold and incense. So what is more likely, that this one version of the Nativity, written almost a hundred years later, with details not corroborated by contemporary sources, proves these prophecies accurate, or simply that these prophecies served as Matthew’s source material?

As we consider what may have driven Matthew to invent the story of the Wise Men and the Star of Bethlehem, yet further agendas present themselves. In emphasizing that wise Gentiles recognized Christ as the Messiah, perhaps he was not trying to validate astrology so much as he was trying to present a negative view of the Jews, who were not as accepting of Christ’s divinity. Certainly this has been one reading of the story. Or, there is the idea that, rather than validating astrology or co-opting Zoroastrianism, the story of the Star of Bethlehem was intended as a repudiation of those beliefs. After all, early Christian literature sometimes described the Star as being brighter than anything else in the sky, causing all other heavenly bodies to be dim. By this reading, the Star represented Christianity rising victorious over Zoroastrianism and astrology, a symbol of God’s destruction of magic. Lastly, it is also possible that there was a more political motivation behind the story. The arrival of Persian magi who sought to give respect not to Herod but rather to a new king appears to represent the Persian or later the Parthian rebellion against Roman rule, which the Jews had long associated with liberation. The Persian king Cyrus had previously liberated the Jews from Babylonian captivity, so during the Roman occupation of Judea, many looked again to the enemies of their enemies, the inheritors of the Persian Empire, the Parthians, for a second liberation. By this reading, Matthew’s Gospel is revolutionary literature. What all of these interpretations have in common is that they view the passage concerning the Magi not as fact but as metaphor, which of course would make all the subsequent mythologizing of their characters nothing but fantasy. It seems this figurative interpretation of scripture was actually rather common among early Christians. It is very odd, then, that today, after the Scientific Revolution and Age of Enlightenment, so many still insist on an absolute, literal reading of the Bible.  

The Adoration of the Magi by Matthias Stom. Public Domain.

Further Reading

Bakich, Michael E. “What Was the Star of Bethlehem?” Astronomy, vol. 38, no. 1, Jan. 2010, pp. 34–39. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f6h&AN=45390790&site=ehost-live.

Estakhr, Mehdi. "The Journey of the Magi: Its Religious and Political Context." World History Bulletin, vol. 32, no. 1, Spring 2016, p. 24+. Gale Academic OneFile, link.gale.com/apps/doc/A603404338/GPS?u=modestojc_main&sid=GPS&xid=59f778a1.

Grigson, Geoffrey. “The Three Kings of Cologne.” History Today, vol. 41, no. 12, Dec. 1991, pp. 28–34. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f6h&AN=9112233542&site=ehost-live.

Hegedus, Tim. “The Magi and the Star in the Gospel of Matthew and Early Christian Tradition.” Laval théologique et philosophique, vol. 59, no. 1, Feb. 2003, pp. 81-95.  Érudit, www.erudit.org/en/journals/ltp/2003-v59-n1-ltp477/000790ar/.

Longenecker, Dwight. “Who Were the THREE WISE MEN?” Catholic Digest, vol. 82, no. 2, Dec. 2017, pp. 52–55. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=f6h&AN=127134763&site=ehost-live.

---. “‘We Three Kings’. (Cover Story).” Catholic Answer, vol. 28, no. 5, Nov. 2014, pp. 15–17. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=a9h&AN=98513445&site=ehost-live.

The Eleventh Hour: Presidential Pardon Power

Every year, just before Thanksgiving, the President of the United States keeps the time-honored tradition of the National Thanksgiving Turkey Presentation. Since the late 19th century, foreign dignitaries seeking favor, various organizations evincing patriotism, and ranchers promoting their industries have sent gifts of livestock to the U.S. Chief Executive. By the time of the Coolidge administration in the 1920s, the flood of gifted turkeys became too much, prompting the President to discourage the sending of birds to the White House. Equally time-honored, it is said, is the practice of the Chief Executive of exercising his federal pardoning power to grant clemency to birds presented to him every Thanksgiving. But how time-honored is that charming tradition, really? One story recorded in the press suggests it goes back to Lincoln, who spared a turkey’s life when his son Tad pleaded for mercy on its behalf. But this was no “Presidential pardon.” Another claim is that President Truman started the tradition, as his administration had promoted “Poultryless Thursdays” in an effort to conserve food in 1947, a year when Thanksgiving, Christmas, and New Year’s all fell on a Thursday. In fact, that year marked the first official presentation of birds to the White House, but in protest, as the poultry industry inundated the President with crates of live “Hens for Harry.” But Truman relented in his food conservation efforts before Thanksgiving, so this was not the start of the tradition. Some say JFK issued the first turkey pardon, but he only said, rather vaguely, “Let’s keep him going” in regard to the turkey presented to him. It was Washington Post reporting on his statements that used the words “reprieve” and “pardon.”  In ensuing years, it became the norm for the turkey presented to the White House to be retired to a farm rather than face the butcher’s block, but it appears the first time a President actually joked about issuing a pardon to a turkey was very recently, in the 1980s, when in the presence of animal rights protesters George H. W. Bush joked that the turkey presented to him was “granted a Presidential pardon as of right now.” Most recently, President Trump kept up this new tradition, although he sometimes politicized the occasion. For example, in 2019, amid an impeachment inquiry, he suggested the Turkeys would be subpoenaed by House Democrats, and he likened the turkeys to the media, saying both were “closely related to vultures.” More ironic today, though, were his jokes during the ceremony in 2018, when he quipped about how the turkey presented to him, named Peas, had been chosen over its alternate, named Carrots: saying it had been a fair election, but that the Carrots had refused to concede, and demanded a recount that in the end changed nothing. Who’s the turkey now?

Currently, though, if you were to look up “Trump” and “pardon” on the Internet, any search engine will give you lots of other results besides his most recent turkey ceremony. The power of the Presidential pardon is currently under scrutiny. One reason is because, as a lame duck, Trump is likely to wield his power to grant clemency more liberally, issuing what are known as “eleventh hour pardons,” as is typical of Presidents whose clout with the legislature is greatly reduced during the last months of their administrations. Secondly, and somewhat more uniquely, this is because Trump himself is believed by many to be looking down the barrel of prosecution after he leaves office. The list of possible federal criminal charges that he might be indicted on after leaving office include violations of the Foreign Emoluments Clause in his acceptance of money from foreign governments through his golf courses and hotels, obstruction of justice and perhaps witness tampering in his efforts to disrupt the Mueller investigation into Russian election interference, and bribery of the Ukrainian president in his attempts to get them to launch a groundless investigation into Biden’s son. In part, the likelihood of his prosecution explains his efforts to overturn the election and remain in office by any means, for retaining the office of President grants him some measure of immunity, although the extent of such immunity is debated. Since a tweet in 2018, Trump has publicly claimed his “absolute right” to pardon himself, a right that is also disputed by legal scholars but that many still suspect he may attempt to exercise before vacating the White House. So this holiday season, let’s examine the constitutional power of presidents to pardon those convicted of federal crimes or commute their sentences, considering how it has been used and abused in the past in order to determine whether it should be restricted or reformed in the future.

Pres. Bush issuing the first Presidential pardon of a turkey. Public Domain image.

As we consider the possibilities for Trump’s eleventh hour use of the pardon power during the last months of his presidency, we should look at how he has used it prior to his lame duck period. Typically, presidents save their most controversial pardons for their last days in office, but Trump has not previously shrunk from issuing controversial pardons. Among the list of pardons he has issued are a variety of right-wing ideologues who have praised him in the media and donated to his PACs, many of them guilty of bribery and campaign finance violations, like Rod Blagoojovich and Dinesh D’Souza, and some guilty of far worse violations, like Sheriff Joe Arpaio, who refused to stop racially profiling and mistreating immigrants despite a court order. But perhaps the most blatantly corrupt use of this presidential power was when he commuted the sentence of Roger Stone, his longtime political advisor, who had been convicted of witness tampering, obstruction, and lying to Congress with regard to Mueller’s Russia investigation. In what appeared to be a reward for Stone’s refusal to cooperate with prosecutors, Trump is said to have had his Justice Department pressure prosecuting attorneys to seek a reduced sentence, and in the end commuted the sentence he was given. Even as I write this episode, Trump has given a further indication of the eleventh hour pardons that may come, as he has pardoned Michael Flynn, his former national security advisor who pleaded guilty in the Russia investigation to lying about his meetings with a Russian ambassador while working with the Trump campaign. Earlier this year, Trump’s Justice Department attempted and failed to get the case against Flynn dismissed, so now lame duck Trump has let Flynn simply walk. Rather than a power to unfairly benefit cronies, the framers of the constitution envisioned this pardon power of the chief executive as a way to grant mercy, which is a common and usually applauded application of the power. Trump also has used the power to grant reprieves and clemency in a merciful spirit, although he has thereafter been known to prop up the recipients of such pardons in Super Bowl ads to burnish his image. However, even the framers must have foreseen the possibility of such a king-like power being abused, for they limited it in cases of impeachment. But, as with many unenforced norms, Trump has shown us that an unscrupulous President can break with tradition in such a way as to flout the rules. In fact, some in the media have suggested that his disregard for the traditions of the office warrant the passage of a constitutional amendment to do such things as require the release of tax returns, strengthen the Emoluments Clause, make the Attorney General answerable to Congress as well as the President, and to restrict the pardon power of a lame duck President. But does the history of presidential use of this power warrant amendment of the Constitution?

Some questionable uses of the President’s pardon power can be observed by William Howard Taft. First, his pardon of U.S. attorney John Hicklin Hall may raise some eyebrows. Hall had led investigations into fraud among land companies in Oregon, but it was later found that he himself had become complicit in the fraud by looking the other way and not prosecuting certain offenders. Worse than this, he used evidence of who had been involved in this land fraud to influence political races, extorting rival politicians and forcing them out of elections by threatening to leak information about their crimes to the public. After having been removed from office by Teddy Roosevelt and convicted of these crimes, President Taft pardoned him without any clear justification. But it must be remembered that there may have been other considerations, such as time served, good behavior, and expressions of contrition. So perhaps we should not judge Taft unfairly. Another example from among Taft’s pardons actually illustrates how the corruption of others might take advantage of the President’s power to pardon. I refer to Taft’s pardoning of the so-called “Ice King,” Charles W. Morse, a legendarily corrupt businessman who had leveraged political connections to gain a stranglehold on the ice business in New York, a monopoly that allowed him to purchase numerous shipping companies and become active in banking. It was as a banker that he ran afoul of the law, manipulating copper prices and setting off a banker’s panic in 1907. For his violation of federal banking laws, he was sentenced to 15 years imprisonment, and immediately commenced petitioning President Taft for a pardon, paying journalists, lobbyists, and attorneys to pressure Taft to intercede. To Taft’s credit, he several times denied Morse’s petitions for a presidential pardon, only relenting and granting him clemency when Morse became ill with what several physicians declared to be a terminal case of Bright’s disease. However, after the pardon was issued, it turned out Morse had been faking the illness by drinking a cocktail of soap and other chemicals. Chagrined, Taft bemoaned that that he had been duped, but there was little he could do, for once awarded, it seemed the pardon was Morse’s to either use or decline. This treatment of pardons as gifts that afterward belong to the recipient had been established far back, during the Andrew Jackson administration, when Jackson had granted a pardon to George Wilson, a man sentenced to death for robbing a mail carrier. When Wilson declined the pardon, the Supreme Court decided that they must carry out the sentence despite the President’s wish to intervene, for once the pardon had been given, it no longer belonged to the President. Thus by this precedent, it seemed Taft could not take back the Ice King’s pardon once he’d signed it.

Taft at his desk. Public Domain image.

For an example of rather blatant corruption leading to undeserved pardons, we would look to the 1920s and the administration of Warren G. Harding, who it was well known owed much to a group of corrupt men known as the Ohio Gang. Once in office, despite protests from the Republican Party who had nominated him, he made one of these gangsters, Harry Daugherty, his Attorney General, and gave several others influential staff positions as well. In this office, Daugherty set about enriching himself and other Ohio Gang members. Among the moneymaking schemes that he concocted were selling federal jobs to the highest bidders and taking money from booze runners to look the other way as they trafficked in alcohol during Prohibition. In addition to these corrupt practices, it seems he also sold Presidential pardons, taking money and then fast-tracking recommendations for Harding to sign off on. In one case, when Harding learned that Daugherty had lied to him and gotten him to sign off on a pardon for a man who had not yet even served any time, Harding protested. One Ohio Gang underling of Daugherty’s, Jess Smith, ended up taking the fall for selling pardons this way, probably because Daugherty threw him under the bus. Harding insisted that Smith be removed from his position and sent back to Ohio, but before this could happen, Smith was found dead of apparent suicide in a house that he shared with Attorney General Daugherty. Smith’s wife, who had spoken with him the night before and found him the next day with his head in a waste-paper basket, a pistol in his hand and bullet holes in his temples, afterward suggested, based on their talk, that Smith had killed himself out of loyalty, to protect Daugherty. If that is indeed what happened, then it did not work. Daugherty and other cronies were thereafter embroiled in controversy and investigation. After President Harding’s death, a Senate investigation helped force Daugherty to resign, after which he was tried for his influence peddling more than once. However, both trials concluded with hung juries, and Daugherty never ended up convicted for his perversion of the president’s power to pardon. If he had been convicted, though, one assumes he would have just pulled some strings to get himself pardoned. 

While the preceding was an example of how a corrupt Attorney General could misuse the presidential pardon power, all too often what we have seen is the President himself using his power to pardon in secret, sometimes even circumventing the Department of Justice and its petition process altogether. President Harry Truman was widely criticized for this in the early 1950s, when he made several eleventh hour pardons that to many reeked of cronyism. Just before leaving office, Truman commuted two sentences and pardoned 26 people, and several people with political connections were among those to receive his clemency, including erstwhile governors, congressmen, and other officials. One was a former counsel to the Democratic National Committee who’d been convicted of engaging in election fraud. Not only were Truman’s choices of who to pardon suspect, but the fact that his choices had not been recommended to him by the attorney in charge of pardon petitions in his Justice Department made allegations of cronyism even more credible. As a result of the furor over Truman’s eleventh hour pardons, his successor, Eisenhower, felt obliged to promise more transparency in the pardon process from then on. This promise, however, would not be kept by future administrations. 

Truman at his desk. Public Domain image.

Beginning in the 1980s, abuse of the pardon power seemed to become rather more blatant. Ronald Reagan, for example, granted an eleventh hour pardon to a major Republican donor, George Steinbrenner, the notorious former owner of the New York Yankees baseball team. Steinbrenner had been tried for illegal contributions to Nixon’s election campaign and for obstructing justice by coercing employees into lying before a grand jury. Steinbrenner’s significant contributions make his pardon questionable, but more recently, declassified FBI documents suggest that Steinbrenner may have won his pardon by providing assistance to the FBI in certain undisclosed investigations. Far less debatable is the misuse of the pardon by Reagan’s VP and successor, George H. W. Bush, who at the end of his presidency was embroiled in investigations into his involvement in the Iran-Contra scandal. For any who don’t recall this controversy, it involved Reagan administration officials, likely led by Bush himself, breaking an arms embargo to sell weapons to the Islamic Republic of Iran in order to raise money to fund anti-Communist rebels in Nicaragua. Before leaving office, Bush pardoned several administration officials for their involvement in this affair, and it’s said that he even considered pardoning himself. And can you guess who advised President Bush to make these pardons? None other than Trump’s Attorney General, Bill Barr. Some have suggested that Bush’s pardoning of these officials amounted to a self-pardon, since it destabilized the investigation in such a way that he would never be indicted himself, but in fact, he stopped short of explicitly pardoning himself. One wonders, though, whether Barr, the poster boy for unchecked executive power, was pushing for that self-pardon.

Lest one be led to believe Republicans have a monopoly on misuse of the pardon in modern times, Bill Clinton is here in recent memory to show us how Democrats too have wielded the pardon to aid their cronies, and even their own family members. That’s right. Before leaving office, Bill Clinton pardoned his own brother, Roger, who had been convicted of possessing and trafficking cocaine in the 80s. This was not the most controversial of his eleventh hour pardons, though. Far more scandalous was his pardon of Marc Rich and his partner Pincus Green, who had been indicted on more than 50 counts of breaking a trade embargo to deal in oil with Iran and evading income tax in the amount of almost $50 million dollars, as well as other charges like racketeering and wire fraud. Rich and Green had fled the country rather than face justice, and they lived a life of luxury in exile in Switzerland. Eventually, though, Rich put out feelers to the Clinton administration about the possibility of a pardon. In the end, Clinton obliged, pardoning Rich and Green in the eleventh hour of his presidency, an act that afterward occasioned Senate hearings over whether the pardons were “appropriate,” specifically because of the sense that Clinton had granted the pardons as a quid pro quo after accepting gifts from the Riches, including generous donations to his legal defense fund and to his Presidential Library, as well as some quite pricy tables and chairs. The hearing, which raised the idea of a constitutional amendment, in the end amounted to little more than grandstanding, as all present appeared to concur with the professor of constitutional law they called on to give expert testimony, who declared that “[t]he Founding Fathers placed this absolute power, albeit undemocratic power, in the Constitution in recognition of the fact that governmental adherence to the letter of the law does not, in all instances, result in justice.”

Bill Clinton issuing a turkey pardon. Public Domain image.

This intended use of the Presidential pardon as a hedge against injustice and a mechanism by which to extend grace and mercy to those who most need it has a far longer history with far more examples than we can find of the power’s misuse. Going back to George Washington, we see the pardon power being used to heal divisions in the country after significant rifts. Over the protests of Alexander Hamilton, Washington chose to pardon two men involved in the insurrection of distillers in Pennsylvania over the taxation of whiskey, a fracas known as the Whiskey Rebellion. These men had been convicted of treason and sentenced to hang, but according to Washington, “The misled have abandoned their errors.” Washington expressed his reason for the clemency thus: “… it appears to me no less consistent with the public good than it is with my personal feelings to mingle in the operations of Government every degree of moderation and tenderness which the national justice, dignity, and safety may permit.” Likewise, when Thomas Jefferson took office in the aftermath of the contentious election of 1800, as he sought to repeal the Judiciary Act of 1801 he also sought to repeal the Alien and Sedition Acts, which restricted the freedoms of foreigners and native residents alike, resulting in the imprisonment of citizens who spoke against the Federalist regime and President Adams, despite First Amendment speech protections. So in addition to dismantling these laws, Jefferson pardoned 10 people who were serving time for exercising their rights of free speech. And finally, there is the most dramatic example of pardons being granted in an effort to heal a divided nation: The Christmas Amnesty of 1868. See, I told you this was a holiday-themed episode. After President Abraham Lincoln’s assassination, Vice President Andrew Johnson assumed the presidency. More than once he used the presidential pardon power in an effort to heal the nation, including granting clemency to some of the conspirators in Lincoln’s assassination. On Christmas day, 1868, nearing the end of his tenure, he completed the gesture by pardoning every last Confederate. Granting “to all and to every person who, directly or indirectly, participated in the late insurrection or rebellion a full pardon and amnesty for the offense of treason.” That Christmas, Johnson wielded the power of the presidential pardon as it was meant to be wielded, and did his best fulfill the promise Lincoln made in his second inaugural address, “With malice toward none, with charity for all…let us strive on to finish the work we are in, to bind up the nation’s wounds….”

The Christmas Amnesty of 1868 demonstrates not only how the pardon power was intended to be used by the Framers of the Constitution, but also the extent of the power. It proves that the power can be used to issue mass pardons to entire categories of people, and it shows us that it can be used to pardon preemptively, before individuals have even been charged with a crime. Just as this preemptive effect is likely of great interest to Trump right now, who has yet to be indicted for any of the criminal activities in which he has been implicated, so too was it very important to another President looking down the barrel of criminal charges once he left the White House. That President was, of course, Richard Nixon. Just as Trump clearly believes he can pre-emptively pardon himself, so too Nixon considered self-pardon as a possible course of action. While the power to pardon pre-emptively has been established, however, the power to pardon oneself remains questionable. Constitutional scholars have argued on historical grounds that the Framers only failed to expressly forbid it because such an act is clearly unacceptable by the basic legal doctrine and principle of justice nemo judex in causa sua, a Latin phrase meaning “no one is judge in his own case.” Thus Nixon never attempted such a perversion of the presidential pardon power, and instead left his fate to Vice President Gerald Ford, who a month after Nixon’s resignation and his assumption of the office of President, granted a preemptive pardon to his predecessor on the grounds that, again, the nation needed to heal. In Trump’s case, whether or not he attempts a self-pardon, I think we could see a similar conclusion. If he actually tries to pardon himself, that may need to be decided in the Supreme Court—which of course, seems to favor him these days—but barring that nuclear option, a simple resignation would allow Pence to issue him a pardon. Somehow, though, Trump doesn’t seem the resigning type. Or, upon leaving office, President Elect Joe Biden could see fit to grant him a pardon in the same spirit as Ford’s pardon of Nixon, as an attempt to heal the country’s wounds and prevent a debasement of the office. This would, I think, be foolish, since even in many of the worst cases I’ve outlined, the recipients at least expressed some contrition. In fact, Presidents can make conditional pardons, and I think it would be appropriate for Biden to make any pardon of Trump conditional on some sort of public admission of guilt and remorse… which would, of course, mean Trump would never accept it, as it’s clear his ego would not allow it. Regardless, even if Biden issued him a full pardon, or if a self-pardon managed to work, Presidential pardons are only effective against federal crimes, but Trump also faces numerous criminal charges in civil and state courts. These include sexual harassment, defamation, and rape charges from women he has allegedly abused, and illegal campaign payments, money laundering, tax evasion and bank fraud being investigated by the New York Attorney General. So after all, no matter what, it looks like this turkey may not be getting the pardon he needs. Rather than retiring to run free across the golf courses of Mar-A-Lago, he may end up fleeing the country instead, as he has already suggested during his campaign.

Ford announces his pardon of Nixon. Public Domain image.

*

Since I wrote this, more has come out to indicate the depths of Trump’s misuse of the pardon power. It was reported that the DoJ is investigating an alleged bribery-for-pardons operation within the Trump White House, which sounds very much like the Harry Daugherty scandal I described in this episode. It will be interesting to see what comes of that. And even more recently, it’s been reported that Trump is considering granting pre-emptive pardons for his children, Eric, Don Jr, Ivanka, and son-in-law Jared Kushner, as well as his fixer, Rudy Giuliani. The power of the President to grant preemptive pardons has been clearly established, as has the ability to grant blanket immunity from federal prosecution when Gerald Ford pardoned Nixon for “all offenses against the United States.” If Trump were to pardon his kids, he would certainly have to make some similar blanket pardon, since pardoning them of any particular crimes that they haven’t yet been charged with would seem tantamount to an admission of guilt. And the same goes for any possible self-pardon. But even if he didn’t attempt a self-pardon, this would still be unprecedented, for he would be granting blanket immunity to numerous people, family members, who have never admitted fault or expressed regret as Nixon did. So I think this is going to get a whole lot crazier before the eleventh hour of Trump’s presidency ticks away.

Further Reading

Dibacco, Thomas V. “Once Upon a Crime: The Harding Pardons.” The Orlando Sentinel, 23 Feb. 2001, p. A23. Newspapers.com, www.newspapers.com/image/236040680.

Gaughan, Anthony. “The Christmas Amnesty of 1868.” The Faculty Lounge, 27 Dec. 2018, www.thefacultylounge.org/2018/12/the-christmas-amnesty-of-1868.html.

Gerstein, Josh. “Pardoning in Secret.” The New York Times, 13 Feb. 2001, p. A31. TimesMachine, timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/2001/02/13/issue.html.

Kalt, Brian C. “Pardon Me?: The Constitutional Case against Presidential Self-Pardons.” The Yale Law Journal, vol. 106, no. 3, Dec. 1996, pp. 779-809. Digital Commons at Michigan State University College of Law, digitalcommons.law.msu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1233&context=facpubs.

Williamson, S.T. “Smith, Mystery Man of Daugherty Inquiry.” The New York Times, 30 March 1924, p. 177. TimesMachine, timesmachine.nytimes.com/timesmachine/1924/03/30/issue.html.

Circuit Riders, Midnight Appointments, and Packed Benches: A History of the Supreme Court

One ruler by which to measure the success of a given presidency is by its appointment of judges, as these appointments remain long after a president leaves office, allowing a lasting influence on law and public policy. In fact, according to Jay Sekulow of the American Center for Law and Justice, court appointments are “the lasting legacy of the President, for every conceivable issue.” By this benchmark, if you’ll excuse a pun, and perhaps by no others, Trump’s presidency can be considered a success by his party. For reference, over 4 years, he managed to nominate almost 300 federal judges, and got more than 240 confirmed, including three Supreme Court Justices. By comparison, over 8 years, Obama only got about 350 confirmed, including 2 Supreme Court seats. This means Trump was on track to appoint nearly double the number of judges as Obama had. Now, Trump claimed in his recent “debate” with Biden that this is because Obama negligently left him seats to fill. In point of fact, Obama had been obstructed throughout his presidency by Senate Republicans, even when they did not have control of the Senate. You see, there was a longstanding practice of senatorial courtesy that said a federal court nominee for any given state must get approval from both its Senators, which Republicans consistently refused to give. In 2013, Majority Leader Harry Reid exercised a “nuclear option” to circumvent their obstruction, limiting confirmation debate and requiring only a simple majority to confirm, which resulted in Obama’s judge confirmation rate soaring to 90%. However, Republicans took the Senate in 2014, and new Majority Leader Mitch McConnell took their obstruction to unheard of levels, reducing Obama’s confirmation rate to a dismal 28% over the next two years. This was why so many seats remained to be filled when Trump took office, and McConnell, already leveraging the Democrats’ own nuclear option against them, introduced a few tricks of his own: he extended the practice of requiring only a simple majority even to Supreme Court nominations, which Reid had excluded, AND he declared that they would not observe Senatorial courtesy, meaning essentially they would ignore a blue slip from a Senator objecting to a nominee in his or her state, a completely hypocritical flip flop from when he insisted that Republicans could use blue slips to veto any nominees. This paved the way for Trump to get judges confirmed far more easily than his Democratic predecessor. But I suppose, if we’re looking for who to credit or blame for the Trump administration’s appointment of a quarter of all active federal judges within 4 years, it seems more like McConnell’s legacy than Trump’s.

But here’s the thing. Judges are meant to be non-partisan. Of course, all people have political leanings, but judges are expected not to let their partisanship influence their interpretation of law. Therefore, clearly ideological nominees have always been controversial and even damaging to a President, especially when they are nominations to the Supreme Court of the United States. In 2009, when Obama nominated Sonia Sotomayor, Republicans objected that she was a liberal judicial activist, and 31 of them voted nay on her confirmation, but Dems still managed to get her confirmed with a supermajority of 67 votes, surpassing even the 60 votes needed. Then, in 2010, conscious of the Senate fight that might result from a controversial nominee, Obama nominated the moderate Elena Kagan and was criticized by his own party for it, since she would be replacing John Paul Stevens, who was considered by many the most liberal leaning justice on the bench. But despite this concession of nominating a moderate even while his party held the majority and he could have gotten a liberal-leaning justice confirmed, he faced an uphill battle with Senate Republicans, who seemed determined to object to any nominee, resulting in an even more hard-won confirmation with only 63 yea votes for Kagan. Come March 2016, a full 8 months before the election of a new president and ten months before the end of Obama’s final term, sitting conservative Supreme Court Justice Antonin Scalia passed away unexpectedly of natural causes in his sleep. Trying to avoid another controversy, Obama nominated another moderate, Merrick Garland. This time, McConnell had a firm stranglehold on the Senate, and he made the scandalous decision to simply ignore the nomination and not convene a confirmation hearing at all. He cited history to defend his decision, claiming that no Senate has confirmed a nominee from a President of an opposing party during the last year of their presidency since the 1880s. It’s unclear what example of such a confirmation he’s referring to in the 1880s, but it is clear that he was not telling the truth. In 1988, during the last year of Reagan’s presidency, a Democrat-controlled Senate confirmed Anthony Kennedy 97 to 0. McConnell might object that Dems confirmed Kennedy because the moderate Kennedy was a concession, but so was the moderate Merrick Garland. And here’s the thing, if we want to find an actual historical precedent for the obstruction of McConnell and his Republican Senate, we have to look much further back than the 1880s. You see, no Senate has simply refused to hold a confirmation hearing for this reason since 1853! Back then, when political parties held no resemblance to our party system today, Whig president Millard Fillmore nominated Edward Bradford in August of 1852, an election year, and the Senate, controlled by the opposing party, did nothing. Then, as a lame duck, Fillmore made two more nominations, George Badger and William Micou, and the Senate majority continued to do nothing, waiting it out until the inauguration of the new president, one of their own, so that they could give him the seat to fill. And if one is not troubled by the hypocrisy of McConnell’s justification for his inaction—claiming falsely that such a thing hadn’t been done since the 1880s when in fact what HE was doing hadn’t been done since the 1850s—then certainly one should be appalled at his subsequent flip-flop in 2020, when just days before an election his party’s president was polling to lose—and of course did, unequivocally, lose—he rammed through a conservative nominee to the Supreme Court to fill the seat of the recently passed liberal justice Ruth Bader Ginsburg, against her dying wishes, just a week before election day. Since these events, there has been much talk among progressives of a need to expand the Supreme Court, which liberals may characterize as a balancing of the bench, and conservatives denounce as packing the bench. So it’s time to look to the history of the Supreme Court and its structure to determine what precedent there may be for its expansion and to evaluate what the case may be for doing it beyond partisan one-upsmanship.

George Badger, a Supreme Court nominee denied a confirmation hearing like Merrick Garland way back in 1853. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

In discussing the controversy over McConnell’s underhanded tactics to take a conservative majority of Supreme Court seats and the controversy over the prospect of a Democratic Congress expanding the court, we must first establish a baseline understanding of the formation of the Supreme Court, how its structure has changed throughout American history and why, as well as how those changes were effected. Recently, with some Democrats discussing their openness to judicial reforms like expanding the Supreme Court bench or establishing term limits for its justices, Marco Rubio, a Republican Senator from Florida, has proposed a Constitutional amendment to prevent more than nine seats from being added to the Supreme Court bench, which Rubio says would be “delegitimizing" and suggests would represent a “further destabilization of essential institutions,” though of course he doesn’t indicate how this would delegitimate or destabilize the highest court in the land. In fact, he himself admits that “[t]here is nothing magical about the number nine. It is not inherently right just because the number of seats on the Supreme Court remains unchanged since 1869.” So it seems apparent that by delegitimize and destabilize he only means that he wants to prevent the opposing party from offsetting of the ill-gotten majority that conservatives have seized… so really he wants to prevent it from being stabilized. But regardless, getting an amendment passed is unlikely, since it would require a supermajority vote in both houses OR two-thirds of states legislatures to approve—I think I said it requires both in my last post, but it’s either/or, and regardless, it’s unlikely to happen. But this just highlights the fact that the number of seats on the Supreme Court is not written into our Constitution. In fact, the Framers of the Constitution had little to say about the structure of the Supreme Court, preferring to leave that to the first Congress, who in the Judiciary Act of 1789 established three circuits and a Supreme Court of six justices who would preside over the circuits. Even then, though, Senators argued for more than six justices, suggesting that a deeper bench of justices would lend the court dignity, like England’s Exchequer chamber, and that having more critical minds at work would make for better considered verdicts. In the end, though, they settled on the six, reasoning that, as the country’s population grew, they could always add more. Since then, seven more times, by the passage or repeal of Judiciary Acts, it has fluctuated between 5 and 10 seats. So all it takes, all it has ever taken, is an act of Congress to add seats to the Supreme Court. What Rubio wants to do with an amendment is take away the ability of Congress to pass Judiciary Acts to alter the structure of the Supreme Court, which itself would be a “further destabilization of essential institutions.” But the question to be considered now is, what was the reasoning, historically, behind changes to the structure of the Supreme Court, and how does it reflect on the case for expanding the Supreme Court today?

The first of these changes to the structure of the Supreme Court came just after the contentious election of 1800, about which I spoke so much in my episode on Illuminati conspiracy theories in America, and the Judiciary Act of 1801 was extremely controversial then and even today. The act, passed by lame duck Federalists after their party’s power had essentially been obliterated with John Adams’s defeat in the recent election, was portrayed by Thomas Jefferson as a last ditch effort by Federalists to entrench their power institutionally in the judicial branch of government. It looked suspicious that it had been passed with such haste less than a month before Jefferson’s inauguration, creating with the stroke of a pen several new circuit courts and with them, more than 20 new judge seats, 18 of which Adams managed to fill with so-called “midnight appointments” made between February 20th and March 4th, literally the day before Jefferson took office. And not only did this act dramatically expand the federal court system and pack it with Federalists, it also made it more difficult for Jefferson to put any man of his own on the Supreme Court by establishing that, at the time of the next vacancy, the court would simply be reduced by one seat, bringing it from six to five justices. Adams refused to attend Jefferson’s inauguration, where Jefferson actually made a conciliatory plea to his opponents for national unity. Upon taking office, he found some of these midnight commissions signed and undelivered, and he refused to deliver them, instead appointing men of his own to some of these judgeships. Not only that, he immediately set about working with his party to repeal the Judiciary Act of 1801, which he succeeded in doing, reversing the expansion of the federal circuit courts and restoring the size of the Supreme Court. A few years later, when Federalist Supreme Court Justice Samuel Chase publicly expressed his dissatisfaction with the act’s repeal, Jefferson called his remarks “seditious” and encouraged the House of Representatives to impeach him, which they did. This was the first and only time a sitting Supreme Court Justice was impeached.

Tiebout, Cornelius, Engraver, and Rembrandt Peale. Thomas Jefferson, President of the United States. [Philada. Philadelphia: Published by A. Day, No. 38 Chesnut Street, Philada., ?] Photograph. Retrieved from the Library of Congress, <www.loc.gov/item/96522974/>.

For about a century, historians gobbled up Jefferson’s version of the Midnight Judges Act, vilifying Adams for abusing his power to embed Federalism in the courts, but in the 20th century, this view of the act has been questioned. In point of fact, the act had been written before the Federalists lost their power in the election, and all of its provisions were enacted to address the real concerns of Supreme Court Justices. The way the court system had been established in 1789, the Supreme Court was the highest appellate court, but some of its justices were also required to sit as trial judges in the circuit courts. This meant that justices had to “ride the circuit,” or travel sometimes great distances in inclement weather in order to judge cases in the various circuit courts, and it also meant that, when some of the same cases they had presided over on the circuit were appealed, they were appealing to the same judge who had already decided the case. While it was believed that Supreme Court Justices would become better judges by being out there, sitting in courtrooms all across the country, justices complained that the burden of constant travel prevented them from cultivating their knowledge of the law through study—basically time they spent on the road, they said, would be better spent in a library—and the fact that the process frequently resulted in them reviewing their own decisions shows it was poorly thought out. In practice, circuit courts often could not even be convened because the Supreme Court Justice who was supposed to preside did not show up. So, although the making of midnight appointments placing mostly his own loyal Federalists into judgeships remains questionable, the Judiciary Act of 1801 can be seen as a clear attempt to address these problems by creating the office of the circuit court judge, and since Supreme Court Justices would no longer need to ride the circuit, it stood to reason they also would not need so many justices. Thus the reduction in seats. Perhaps the most important lesson to take from this episode, however, can be found in a petition to Congress by the Supreme Court in 1792, asking for Congress to fix the court. In their appeal, they referred to the “general and well-founded opinion” that the Judiciary Act of 1789 that had created the court “was to be considered as introducing a temporary expedient rather than a permanent system and that it would be revised….” Here the first Supreme Court Justices themselves indicate that the structure of the Supreme Court was not set in stone at its creation. Rather, it was meant to be an evolving institution, changing with the needs of the country.

At first, the court expanded specifically because of the growth of the country. After the repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801, justices were once again required to ride the circuit, but as new circuit courts were added, so also were new Supreme Court Justices to ease the burden. With the Seventh Circuit Act of 1807, another circuit was added and thus another Supreme Court justice. Then during Andrew Jackson’s administration, the Eighth and Ninth Circuits Act of 1837 added a couple more, bringing the number of justices to nine. If we had continued to keep the number of seats on the bench proportional to the number of regional circuits, then we would have 12 or 13 justices now, but this did not remain the basis for the Supreme Court’s structure. A 10th Circuit and thus a 10th justice were added briefly during the Civil War, but in 1866, the Judicial Circuits Act reduced the number of circuits to nine and the number of Supreme Court seats to seven. This act was really a redistricting effort to minimize the influence of Southern slaveholding states, which because of the way circuits had been drawn had previously dominated the Supreme Court. Finally, in 1869, another Judiciary Act set the number of justices at nine and once more created circuit court judges who would sit with district court judges to hear appeals, thus greatly reducing the burden placed on Supreme Court justices of having to ride the circuit. One would think that, after this, all was well. Thus divorced from the circuit courts, nine justices should have been plenty to hear whatever higher appeal cases arose, especially since only 6 of those justices were needed to form a quorum, the minimum number assembled to be considered valid. But the country was growing still, and so was the court’s workload. By the late 19th century, with around 600 new cases being filed a year, they were running a backlog of nearly 2 thousand cases! Once again, the Court appealed to Congress, and many believed then that the Supreme Court should be expanded to eleven or even eighteen justices in order to handle their case load. One Senator Manning even proposed that it be expanded to 21 justices composed of three panels of seven justices each! In the end, though, instead of expanding the bench, Congress chose to reduce the case load first, in the Judiciary Act of 1891, by creating a court of appeals for every circuit, and then, in 1916, by giving the Supreme Court the right to decline to review cases. So rather than increase the ability of the highest court to take on more cases, they enabled it to simply refuse to consider cases. So the Supreme Court went from hearing arguments on nearly 100% of the cases brought before it to considering only around 1% of petitions.

FDR delivering a “fireside chat.” Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Then came the Great Depression and Franklin Delano Roosevelt’s New Deal legislation, intended to aid in the country’s recovery. FDR could not contain his disappointment and reproval when the Supreme Court handed down a series of decisions in 1935 and ’36 that vitiated some key centerpieces of the New Deal, such as the Railroad Retirement Act, the Agricultural Adjustment Act, the National Industrial Recovery Act, and a minimum wage law for women and children. In one of his signature Fireside Chats in March of 1937, he characterized the court as working at counter purposes with the rest of the government. To FDR, the refusal of older justices to retire was something that had not been foreseen by those who had crafted the structure of the court, allowing a bench dominated by individuals who were out of touch with the current needs of the country and the political will of the people. He proposed the automatic addition of a younger justice whenever a sitting justice reached 70 and refused to retire. This proposal was dubbed “court packing,” a term you may have heard recently with the resurgent talk of expanding the bench. If such a policy were enacted through legislation today, it would automatically result in the addition of three new justices, one each for Stephen Breyer, Clarence Thomas, and Samuel Alito, all of whom are 70 or older. The total number of justices would rise to 12 until some older justices retired. And if Sonia Sotomayor and John Roberts, both of whom are nearing seventy, didn’t retire in a few years, that number could climb higher. But no Democrats have specifically proposed FDR’s plan. Nevertheless, opponents of expanding the court still summon memories of this controversial proposal by calling any judicial reform “court packing.”

As a bit of an aside, I recently received a critical email from a listener suggesting that I have a case of historical blindness because in my last episode I referred to the current Supreme Court as “packed” and “conservative-packed,” after asserting that Trump had packed it with conservative justices. He, like some in that media, would accuse me of purposely misusing the term, and of projection, since in his view, I am saying conservatives are guilty of packing the court, when liberals are the one advocating “court packing” in the 1930’s sense of the term. First, I’ll say that I would never claim to be immune from historical blindness. I have many times during the course of making this podcast exploded myths that I myself have previously held as true or even mentioned on the show! Case in point: the midwife-witch and folk healer-as-witch myths that I believe I ignorantly spread before discovering they were dubious this October. However, in this case, I don’t believe that the word “packing” is or even historically was used only to refer to Supreme Court expansion. Who can forget the ribald jokes about “Bush packing” when George W. Bush was being accused of packing the courts. Indeed, if you look to the useful Google NGram tool, it’s rather easy to see how early the term was being used. While the specific phrase “court packing” does indeed first peak in the literature of 1937, the phrases “packed bench” and “packed court” (the latter of which was the term I used) were in fact far more commonly used in the 19th century. The terms “packed court” or “packed bench” were invariably used to refer to courts in which the judges were prejudiced, among whom a certain ideology dominated, coloring their decisions. An apt example of this usage can be found in the remarks of Ohio Representative Benjamin Wade regarding the Supreme Court decision on the Dred Scott case, when he called the justices “packed judges—for they were packed, and I have about as little respect for a packed court as I have for a packed jury.” To clarify, Wade was alleging a conflict of interest, a prejudice or bias, stating, “I believe, the majority who concurred in the opinion were all slaveholders, and, of course, if anybody was interested to give a favorable construction to the holders of that species of property, these men were interested in the question.” So, as it turns out, I would venture to assert that my usage of the term “packed court” as referring to a bench of justices dominated by ideologues was correct. Of course, that is a case that I’ll have to make, and I’ll attempt to do so, momentarily.

The Supreme Court bench that Benjamin Wade called “packed,” via supremecourthistory.org

FDR’s “court packing” proposal ended up fizzling out when the Supreme Court started reversing decisions and finding in favor of New Deal legislation. Some have portrayed this as the Supreme Court beating FDR at his own game, causing him to lose support for “court packing” because there was no longer a need for it. However, another view is that he put political pressure on the court and got what he wanted. A historical debate has since raged over whether or not the justices of the Supreme Court at the time were actually swayed by FDR’s pressure or whether they would have ended up coming to their favorable decisions regardless. This debate, between “externalists” arguing that external pressure made the difference, and “internalists” who assert that the justices did not allow themselves to be influenced by partisan politics, really gets at the heart of the debate surrounding both the Supreme Court’s partisanship and its role among the tripartite branches of government. One common view is that regardless of the personal views of the justices, the Supreme Court is inevitably a majoritarian force, if not bowing to the will of the party in power then at least leaning in the direction the wind seems to blow, which is sometimes in the direction of cross-partisan coalitions. The idea here is that the court must play politics to a certain degree and cannot make decisions that are unpopular with the majority or they may be viewed as illegitimate and risk congressional intervention. This view works well with the externalist idea that FDR made them reverse their decisions by appealing to the people and painting them as obstructive to the national recovery. Then there is the view that the Supreme Court justices truly are uninfluenced by politics, a perspective that somehow raises them up as superior to most people in their ability to disregard such matters, a view encouraged by the “internalist” interpretation of this so-called Constitutional Revolution of 1937. But then there is the view that the Supreme Court is a counter-majoritarian force, in that, through its power of judicial review, it can strike down legislation passed by the representatives elected by the people, and thus acts as a check on not just other branches of government but on the will of the majority. Although historians of the court consider this latter view of its role something of a myth, Roosevelt certainly seems to have held it, at least until the court turned his way. But what about today? Can this Supreme Court be considered a “packed court” dominated by partisan activists poised to act counter to the will of the people?

If we are looking for proof of a concerted effort to pack the bench of the Supreme Court and federal courts generally with justices who will take a conservative view in all their decisions, we need look no further than the Federalist Society. You may have heard of this organization before, but now, after my discussion of Adams’s midnight appointments, you know that their name could easily be interpreted as a reference to the original court-packers, the Federalists. Starting out during the Reagan Era as a group of conservative and libertarian law students mentored by Antonin Scalia, they bemoaned the atmosphere of liberal academia and advocated for a more originalist view of the Constitution. Since then, the organization has grown by leaps and bounds, mainly due to a vast influx of funding from donors with deep pockets, so that now it boasts several tens of thousands of members, law professors, politicians, pundits, and judges. In fact, many in the field see the Federalist Society as their best shot at securing a judgeship, because the organization has established itself as the go-to for any Republican President, providing a short-list of candidates who conform ideologically with their conservative principles. So you have lawyers and judges toeing this ideological line, kowtowing to the Federalist Society and their rubric in order to secure a better chance of advancement. At this point, the majority of the Supreme Court bench attained their lifetime appointments by meeting this de facto conservative requirement of membership in the Federalist Society: Chief Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Samuel Alito, Neil Gorsuch, Brett Kavanaugh, and now Amy Coney Barrett, who seems to have been groomed by the society to take her seat on this packed bench. An enlightened centrist might argue that both sides are guilty of such judge grooming, but in fact, the frequently cited liberal counterpart to the Federalist Society, the American Constitution Society, was only formed in 2001 when the growing influence of the Federalist Society became clear after the Supreme Court handed George W. Bush the presidency. The ACS, however, is still in its infancy, without the deep funding and membership that the Federalist Society enjoys.

Now, it may be hard to imagine anyone these days being wide- and dewy-eyed enough to argue that the Supreme Court really is the non-partisan institution that idealists would like it to be. But the mere fact that the Supreme Court bench is and always has been a partisan battleground doesn’t mean that taking back a majority for the other side is enough of a justification for expanding the court. In fact, such an argument should rightly be viewed as squalid and distasteful. Actually, I don’t shrink from suggesting that the ruthless tactics employed by conservatives like Mitch McConnell and the Federalist Society to take their majority might call for equally obdurate countermeasures, and that “balancing” the court would not be an unfair characterization of such measures. However, there is a far more virtuous case to be made for the expansion of the Supreme Court. Beyond a possibly pressing need to thwart a counter-majoritarian power grab, there is the fact, as made evident throughout this history of the Supreme Court, that having a deeper bench would allow the highest appeals court in the country to take on far more cases than it currently deigns to hear. More decisions would result in more consistency and clarity in American jurisprudence. More cases means more chances for judicial review and interpretation, which makes the Supreme Court a far more effective check on the executive and legislative branches of government as well. And more justices, able to rotate and interchange in differently structured quorums, would vastly reduce the influence of swing votes. Right now, just as swing states decide presidential elections, swing justices decide most important interpretations of the Constitution. Reducing the disproportionate power of the swing justice will then in turn reduce partisan activism on the court, or at least it will diminish the perception of its politicization. And that is just what the U.S. needs right now, to turn down the country’s partisanship generally. This might be a hot button partisan issue, but it represents a path to a little less division.

Further Reading

Bomboy, Scott. “Packing the Supreme Court Explained.” Constitution Daily, 20 March 2019, constitutioncenter.org/blog/packing-the-supreme-court-explained.

Bridge, Dave. “The Supreme Court, Factions, and the Counter-Majoritarian Difficulty.” Polity, vol. 47, no. 4, 2015, pp. 420–460. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24540303.

Carney, Jordain. “Rubio to introduce legislation to keep Supreme Court at 9 seats.” The Hill, Capitol Hill Publishing, 20 March 2019, thehill.com/homenews/senate/434888-rubio-to-introduce-legislation-to-keep-supreme-court-at-nine-seats.

Carpenter, William S. “Repeal of the Judiciary Act of 1801.” The American Political Science Review, vol. 9, no. 3, 1915, pp. 519–528. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1946064.

Farrand, Max. “The Judiciary Act of 1801.” The American Historical Review, vol. 5, no. 4, 1900, pp. 682–686. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1832774.

Gramlich, John. “How Trump compares with other recent presidents in appointing federal judges.” Pew Research Center, 15 July 2020, www.pewresearch.org/fact-tank/2020/07/15/how-trump-compares-with-other-recent-presidents-in-appointing-federal-judges/.

Greenberg, Jon. “Fact-check: Why Barack Obama failed to fill over 100 judgeships.” Politifact, Poynter Institute, 2 Oct. 2020, www.politifact.com/factchecks/2020/oct/02/donald-trump/fact-check-why-barack-obama-failed-fill-over-100-j/.

Kalman, Laura. “The Constitution, the Supreme Court, and the New Deal.” The American Historical Review, vol. 110, no. 4, 2005, pp. 1052–1080. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/ahr.110.4.1052.

Kruse, Michael. “The Weekend at Yale That Changed American Politics.” Politico Magazine, Sep/Oct. 2018, www.politico.com/magazine/story/2018/08/27/federalist-society-yale-history-conservative-law-court-219608.

Madonna, Anthony J., et al. “Confirmation Wars, Legislative Time, and Collateral Damage: The Impact of Supreme Court Nominations on Presidential Success in the U.S. Senate.” Political Research Quarterly, vol. 69, no. 4, 2016, pp. 746–759. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/44018054.

Mandery, Evan. “Why There’s No Liberal Federalist Society.” Politico Magazine, 23 Jan. 2019, www.politico.com/magazine/story/2019/01/23/why-theres-no-liberal-federalist-society-224033.

Matthews, Dylan. “The incredible influence of the Federalist Society, explained.” Vox, 3 June 2019, www.vox.com/future-perfect/2019/6/3/18632438/federalist-society-leonard-leo-brett-kavanaugh.

Robinson, Nick. “Structure Matters: The Impact of Court Structure on the Indian and U.S. Supreme Courts.” The American Journal of Comparative Law, vol. 61, no. 1, 2013, pp. 173–208. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/41721718.

Surrency, Erwin C. “The Judiciary Act of 1801.” The American Journal of Legal History, vol. 2, no. 1, 1958, pp. 53–65. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/844302.

“What Is The Federalist Society And How Does It Affect Supreme Court Picks?” NPR, 28 June 2018, www.npr.org/2018/06/28/624416666/what-is-the-federalist-society-and-how-does-it-affect-supreme-court-picks

Williams, Joseph P. “McConnell to End Senate’s ‘Blue Slip’ Tradition.” U.S. News & World Report, 11 Oct. 2017, https://www.usnews.com/news/politics/articles/2017-10-11/mcconnell-to-end-senates-blue-slip-tradition.

The Smoke-Filled Room: Contested Elections in America

This was written before November 3rd, so if you’re wondering why I didn’t address some travesty or other, that is why. At the time of its posting, Joe Biden has been declared President Elect, but Trump continues refusing to concede, which unfortunately has ensured the continued relevance of this episode's subject matter.

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Prominent conspiracy theorist Donald Trump has long been casting doubt on the legitimacy of presidential election results. The most obvious early example of this was his claim, made very vocally in media appearances during Barack Obama’s 2011 reelection campaign, that Obama was not born in America, which if it were not completely false, would have made the 44th President illegitimate. Audio clips Then in 2015, when he was running for President, he made baseless claims about widespread voter fraud and election rigging and refused to commit to a peaceful transition of power. Audio clips Even after he won the office of President, he continued to claim that widespread voter fraud was the only explanation that he hadn’t won the popular vote, even going so far as to form a voter fraud commission to investigate. Audio clips Finding no evidence of widespread voter fraud, his commission was short-lived, and he quietly dissolved it without its having any effect on election law. Considering this background, it should have come as no surprise this year, during his reelection campaign, that he would again cast doubt on the legitimacy of the election before results were even determined. Audio clips Despite his claims, expert after expert have confirmed the security of mail-in ballots, which have long been used by absentee voters. But doubling down on his conspiracy theory, Trump went so far as to recommend that his base engage in voter fraud in order to counteract the voter fraud he suspected would be taking place. Audio clips And this wasn’t the only measure he took. It is one thing to expect election results not to be satisfactorily determined by the end of election day during a pandemic when many mail-in ballots have yet to be counted. It is quite another to hatch plans to contest the election results when polls are showing you trailing. Alarm bells rang earlier this summer when Trump appointees on the US Postal Service Board of Governors installed a new Postmaster General who began sweeping cost-cutting measures that some feared were designed to slow mail delivery ahead of the election, though it may be just as likely that these measures were an effort to make the USPS fail in order to justify its privatization, or that they were indeed earnest if misguided attempts to restore the agency’s solvency. Some of these may be conspiracy theories, and I recognize that, but Republicans certainly aren’t making it easy to disbelieve such claims. Here in California, the Republican Party got caught and admitted to placing more than 50 drop boxes om public that they had fraudulently labeled “official ballot drop off box[es].” Then there are the troubling inroads they’ve made with the Supreme Court, which Trump has had the opportunity to pack with conservative justices specifically sympathetic to his brand of authoritarian executive privilege because of the unfortunate recent deaths of sitting justices, and because of Republican obstruction during Obama’s final term and Senate hypocrisy in ramming through a nominee just days before the election. It is this conservative-packed Supreme Court bench that could be called upon to determine the outcome of a contested election, which seems more and more likely since all it would take would be for Trump’s sycophantic Attorney General to make some claims election fraud, and we have already seen that Bill Barr is willing to undertake whatever baseless investigation into political rivals that his boss requests. Already, without the benefit of having the latest Trump-nominated justice on the bench, this Supreme Court has decided that in Wisconsin, mail-in ballots that were postmarked by election day will not be valid if they are not received before the end of the day. In other words, voters who did everything they were supposed to do, and got their ballot in the mail in time, or even early, might have their ballots thrown out depending on the speed with which the postal service processes their ballot—a clear victory for Republicans, who have established themselves as the party of voter suppression. With the new justice Amy Coney Barrett on the bench, it would seem the circumstances favor Trump in the seemingly unavoidable event of a contested election. Indeed, by the time this episode releases, I anticipate that it will be well underway, unless one of the candidates wins by an inarguable landslide. It all seems rather chaotic and messy, not politics as usual… but is this really such an unusual scenario? What can American history tell us about how we deal with contested elections?

As I write this, less than a week remains until election day, but I do not anticipate that by election day we will know the results of this election. Indeed, I expect the results to take some time to calculate based on the delayed return of mail-in ballots, and then I assume we will see some kind of challenge to the results, whether that be from Trump claiming fraud or from Biden citing voter suppression. So by the time I publish this, the issue may still be foremost on American minds. Of course, I may be wrong, and there may be a landslide victory such as cannot be denied, such that contesting the results reported by any one state wouldn’t make a difference, but I doubt it because of how close elections have been in recent elections. In 2016, it was close enough that Trump won without earning the largest number of votes. And similarly, in 2000, George W. Bush also won the Electoral College vote but not the popular vote, and that election ended up being decided by the Supreme Court—not because Bush’s rival Al Gore had earned more votes, but because of voter irregularities in Florida that cast doubt on whether Bush should have taken its electoral votes. Who can forget the ceaseless jabbering of cable news talking heads about the Florida punched card ballots, which apparently presented a lot of clarity problems when their chads not completely punched, resulting in “fat chads” and “hanging chads” that weren’t properly counted by vote tabulating machines. While this ballot system was discontinued in the U.S., Trump’s recent grumblings about ballot security may portend another long battle looking endlessly at the ballots used certain states. Again, if I’m wrong, great! Even so, a close look at the history of our presidential election process seems warranted, and we must start with the Electoral College, which caused much upset and debate in the aforementioned elections of 2000 and 2016.

Punch card chads, photo by Marcin Wichary, licenced under Creative Commons (CC BY 2.0)

One delegate at the Constitutional Convention of 1787 described the issue of how to decide presidential elections and “the most difficult…on which we have had to decide.” The sovereignty and factionalism of separate states in the Union required an arcane and unique system. In seeking a historical precedent for the electoral college, one would have to look to the Holy Roman Empire, whose emperor was chosen prince-electors, or the Roman Catholic Church, whose Pope is selected by a College of Cardinals. This is especially ironic given the Founding Fathers’ feelings about royal governments and papistry. The idea, though, was to preserve the union by assuring small states that they too had a stake in the election of the chief executive. Thus, while electors, or representatives appointed to cast a vote for the president, were apportioned based on population, every state would receive at least two electors automatically. And in the event of no single candidate earning a majority of electoral votes, which the Framers expected would usually be the case, the contest would be decided by the House of Representatives, in which case each state would receive one vote only, completely equalizing populous and less populous states. And all states would enjoy the freedom to determine how they would select each of their districts’ electors, whether it be by popular vote or caucus. Almost immediately problems with the system arose, the first being that the number of electors apportioned to Southern states would be inflated by their slave population, who were not permitted to vote. Their notorious compromise to address this problem at the convention was that slaves would only count as three-fifths of a person with regard to not only number of electors apportioned but also House representation and taxation. The next complication was the emergence of partisan politics. By the original design, the runner-up would be installed as the vice-president, but in 1796 this resulted in an administration of bitter rivals, with John Adams as president and his opponent Thomas Jefferson as vice president. Imagine for a just moment if Hillary Clinton had been installed as Trump’s Vice President. Then in the election of 1800, during the Illuminati scare that I spoke so much about in a recent episode, the Democratic-Republicans nominated Jefferson for president and Aaron Burr as their choice for Vice President, but the two of them tied for electoral votes, which cast the contest into the House of Representatives to decide who would be President. Since electoral votes for not a particular office, Burr had as legitimate a claim to the presidency as Jefferson, despite being his party’s second choice. In fact, as every state had equal say in the House contingency, their Federalist rivals, bitter over their recent defeat, tried to vote Burr in to spite Jefferson, and it took more than thirty votes ending in an impasse with no clear majority until a single representative from Delaware final broke the deadlock and gave the majority to Jefferson. Thereafter, the Twelfth Amendment was ratified, requiring electors to cast different ballots for the offices of president and vice president.

This was by no means the end of the issues with the Electoral College system the Framers had settled on. As indicated, the Framers actually expected that presidential candidates would rarely earn a majority of electoral votes, which would mean that elections would typically be decided by the House contingency of one vote per state. It ended up being quite the reverse, though. The last time there was no electoral majority and the House contingency decided an election was in 1824, and it was far from a neat solution. The old political party system, of First Party System, had been in decline for a decade, with American politics now dominated by the party of Jefferson, the Democratic-Republicans, and in 1824, four candidates vied for the highest office all under this party’s banner: Henry Clay, William Crawford, John Quincy Adams, and Andrew Jackson. You may remember Donald Trump declaring early in his presidency that he believed himself to be very much like Andrew Jackson, an assertion that promptly drew criticism because of Jackson’s atrocities against Native Americans. Maybe Trump was referring to the way Jackson was not taken seriously early in his campaign, but more likely he meant Jackson’s reputation as a populist president, wrongfully denied the office he had earned through popular support when a rigged system gave the election to John Quincy Adams instead, afterward leading to his indisputable populist victory in the next election cycle and earning him the nickname King Mob. Indeed, this is a view of the election of 1824 promulgated by many historians, for although Jackson did not win a an electoral majority, he won a plurality, meaning he won more electoral votes than any other candidate, and unlike Trump, he also appears to have won the popular vote. Nevertheless, the House of Representatives voted in John Quincy Adams, which on its surface certainly does seem like a miscarriage of national politics, as they gave the office to a candidate with both fewer electoral votes and fewer votes generally. In reality, though, it’s not so clear that Jackson won the popular vote. Then, as today, it appears that many votes were suppressed, as entire counties worth of votes were not counted because they arrived late, or because when they did arrive, a certain seal that was required was missing. Furthermore, a lot of tallies of Jackson’s lead in the popular vote are calculated by which electors people voted for, that that is unreliable, as many electors appear to have been pledged to other candidates, like Clay or Crawford, but only gave their vote to Jackson later, which certainly doesn’t mean the people in those districts were voting to Jackson. And remember that number of votes from Southern states that supported Jackson are exaggerated by the Three-Fifths Compromise. Furthermore, the popular vote figures commonly cited today don’t even include states whose electors were chosen directly by their legislatures, including the extremely populous New York, which likely would have increased the popular vote count for John Quincy Adams since support for Jackson in New England was non-existent. So the idea that Andrew Jackson was such a clear winner may be something of a myth. But that’s not really the issue. Even if he were the clear winner of the popular vote, the fact that he didn’t get a majority of electoral votes meant that the House got to decide, in the proverbial smoke-filled room, with one vote per state, regardless of the will of the people. That’s how the Constitution was written, and that’s the problem.

This perceived “corrupt bargain” contributed to Jackson being swept into office in the next election, as depicted in the above public domain illustration.

The further problems with the Electoral College were apparent by this election of 1824. The Framers had expected states to choose electors on a district by district basis, such that not all electors in a state would vote for the same candidate, thus better representing the “sense of the people” as Alexander Hamilton put it, but many chose instead to use a winner-take-all system instead, and by 1836, all but one state had followed suit. The clear incentive to the winner-takes-all method was that a state’s influence in the Electoral College would be diluted if they allowed their electors to vote for various candidates. Then, of course, winner-takes-all politics contributed to the stranglehold of a two-party system, which in turn guaranteed that there would always be an electoral majority. After 1824, it has happened again four more times that a candidate won the office of president without receiving the most votes, and since the two most recent instances, 2000 and 2016, many have called for getting rid of the Electoral College. Predictably opposed to such a change, Constitutional purists, as always, tout the wisdom of the Framers of the Constitution, but in truth, the Electoral College did not turn out how the Framers envisioned. They did not anticipate winner-takes-all politics or a two-party system as we have it now, and further, they did not anticipate the apportionment of electors eventually providing an advantage to less populous states, such that now, per capita, voters in populous states like California have less clout than voters in, say, Wyoming, based on number of electors per voting-age citizen—about 200% less clout in fact. And the winner-takes-all system means empowers so-called “swing states,” encouraging candidates to cater to the issues of small populations just to ensure electoral college victory, while taking “safe states” for granted. Then of course there is the feeling of powerlessness in safe states when voting for a different candidate than most of the state. But getting rid of the Electoral College is more difficult than it sounds. It can’t be done by executive order, or ratification by the House or Senate alone. In fact it would take ratification by two-thirds of both houses of Congress, and then further ratification by 38 states! There are alternatives, though. Some states are entering into a compact to pledge their electors to whichever candidate wins the popular vote. If enough states entered this compact, it would eventually make the Electoral College something of a dead letter. Another option is ranked-choice voting, which, if states allowed it, could make it possible for third-party candidates to get a foothold and break through this two-party system.

Finally, as our last historical example of a contested American presidential election decided in an honest to God smoke-filled room, let’s look to 1876, the first incident of a candidate winning the popular vote but losing the election after 1824, for this was by far the most acrimonious and bitterly fought election in our history, and came close to ending in national chaos. The specter of the Civil War still haunted the country, with the surrender at Appomattox only a decade earlier and the chance at a peaceful reconciliation killed with President Lincoln at Ford Theater. Since then, the Radical wing of the Republican party had reigned supreme, controlling the North and also the South through Federal troops stationed there during Reconstruction, Northern opportunists called carpetbaggers who went South to profit from Reconstruction, and emancipated slaves. During this decade of punishment, white Southerners of the Democratic Party strove slowly but surely to wrest back political control of Southern states, in in 1876, it looked like they had a fighting chance. Ulysses S. Grant was concluding a final term marked by scandal and corruption, and for their candidate, the Democrats nominated Samuel J. Tilden, a Governor of New York known for fighting corruption and famously bringing the corrupt politician “Boss” Tweed to justice. The Republicans, perhaps seeing the writing on the wall, ended up running a more moderate candidate, Rutherford B. Hayes, the Governor of Ohio, whose nomination might be looked at as a concession to the South that had suffered under the Radical wing of their party. At this point, I would be remiss if I didn’t address the elephant in the room. At this time, the two-party system of Democrats and Republicans was in full swing, but it must be recognized that the parties then were entirely different than the parties now. This is a common bit of Historical Blindness we see paraded about quite often, such as when people say the Democratic Party of today is the party of the KKK and for proof they show pics of Southern Democrats in the late 19th century, or when Republicans today brag about their party being founded by Abraham Lincoln. Audio clips In fact, if you were comparing Lincoln to the modern Republican Party, one would have to say he was Republican in name only. You see, a funny thing happened about 20 years after this election, when the Democratic Party nominated William Jennings Bryan unsuccessfully three times, undergoing an ideological shift that focused more on economic populism, decrying the abuses of the wealthy against poor workers and farmers and seeking solutions through government intervention. This was the birth of the modern Democratic Party, and simultaneously, Republicans gained a foothold in the South, where they had long been seen as the party of carpetbaggers, such that complete reversal in the electoral map occurred in the early 20th century, with almost all the states that previously went to one party now being taken by the other. So don’t let the names fool you, the Republicans and Democrats of 1876 were not the R’s and D’s of today.

Public Domain portrait of Abraham Lincoln, perhaps the most well-known RINO in American history.

Outside of the names of the parties, though, there were some real parallels with the current election. The corruption of the incumbent was a central issue, and fake news played a major part. Republicans distorted the facts to damage Tilden’s reputation, suggesting he had actually been colluding with the racketeer “Boss” Tweed, and that he’s been a proponent of Confederate secession, when neither of these was the case. Dirty tricks were also rampant, such as Republicans printing ballots in some states that placed a Republican symbol above the names of Democratic candidates hoping to trick illiterate voters. Come election day, though, it appeared that Tilden had won regardless, with a confirmed 184 electoral votes to Hayes’s 166. Rutherford B. Hayes actually went to bed that night conceding his defeat to his advisors, though, importantly, not making a public concession. Overnight, however, Republican strategists saw a path to victory in the remaining 19 electoral votes of three Southern states, Florida, Louisiana, and South Carolina. After a series of telegrams to the Republican canvassing boards, who had the power to throw out ballots and certify votes. When these three states declared for Hayes, the Democrats asserted fraud and certified their own electors. The Senate would decide which votes were legitimate, but the Senate was controlled by Republicans and refused to let the Democrat-controlled House of Representatives have a say. It appeared to many that Republicans were in the process of stealing the presidency, and another civil war loomed. Militias mustered, performing drills and parades, and Democratic governors discussed the possibility of commanding their National Guard troops to install Tilden in the White House by force, while President Grant sent troops into Southern state capitals and prepared to send the Army against the forces of any rebel states. Thankfully, some cooler heads prevailed. Recognizing that neither a Senate nor a House decision in the matter would be satisfactory, an Electoral Commission was formed consisting of five Senators, five House representatives, and five Supreme Court Justices. They voted strictly along party lines and found in favor of Rutherford B. Hayes, 8 votes to 7. This might have done nothing to head off the conflict, if it hadn’t been for Tilden’s acceptance of the decision, and most historians agree that he only accepted it because of some private dealings in a smoke-filled room at the Wormley Hotel in Washington. There, a negotiation took place that conceded much to Southern Democrats if they would accept Hayes as their President, the foremost of these concessions being a promise to recall Federal troops from the South and effectively end Reconstruction.

There was even more to this so-called Compromise of 1877, including tacit promises to fund a railroad, appoint a Southern Postmaster General, provide financial assistance for Southern states, and, ominously, to let the South deal with its own problems of race. Historians like C. Van Woodward and others have questioned the importance of the meeting at the Wormley in the resolution of the election or have suggested that the compromise has been exaggerated by historians, especially since Southern Democrats might have gotten all they wanted with Tilden as President and since it seems Hayes ended up not keeping up his end of this bargain in several respects. But whatever was the case, we can certainly see that politicians of the day worked to avoid absolute catastrophe. I look back on this episode in history with some hope. If, God forbid, a modern election resulted in such an impasse, with questions of fraud, legitimate or fabricated, casting such doubt on the results that violence or disunion appear imminent—and make no mistake, with Qanon conspiracy theorists ready to declare revolution against an imaginary Deep State and white nationalist militias demonstrating their lack of compunction about storming capitol buildings with firearms, it is a real possibility—with a packed Supreme Court being so clearly partisan and the Senate and House dominated by different parties, I would hope that those with the reins of government will actually do their jobs and find a peaceful solution. While an Electoral Commission like that of 1877 is not strictly Constitutional, there is historical precedent for it, and it helped to give at least a semblance of impartiality to the resolution of that election. And if those who govern the people have to make shadowy dealings in a smoke-filled room in order to avoid bloodshed, as distasteful as that may be, it may still be preferable to the alternative.

Political cartoon from Harper’s Weekly

*

When I wrote this, I was feeling more pessimistic than I feel now. My rather obvious prediction that Trump would contest the results with lawsuits that he hopes to bring before his Supreme Court has proven accurate, but now, with Biden declared President Elect by credible news outlets as well as by partisan networks, I am feeling more confident about a peaceful transition, regardless of Trump's tantrums. So far, threats of violence or disunion appear subdued and relegated to the fringe. This could change of course, but as it stands now, rather than hoping for some arcane bipartisan arbitration, I'm hopeful that Trump's baseless claims of election fraud will not be seriously entertained. And so far, this seems to be the case even among many who have previously enabled such rhetoric. One further concern could be faithless electors, that is electors who are pledged to give their Electoral College vote to a certain candidate but give it instead to another--yet one more serious problem with Electoral College. This leeway was meant to allow the wiser among us to prevent the election of demagogues that rise on a cult of personality, but clearly that check wasn't used in 2016. There was a record number of faithless electors that year, but some of them gave their vote to the demagogue when they were pledge to the other candidate! Some states have laws preventing the validation of faithless electoral votes, but many don't. Nevertheless, with the electoral lead that Biden has...is poised to have, the number of validated faithless electoral votes would have to be record-breaking--far more than the already historic 7 electors that defected from their pledged candidates in 2016. But while there may still be rocky shoals to avoid, it appears the ship of state has successfully entered safe harbor. Now it's time to reconcile with each other. 

Further Reading

Azari, Julia, and Marc J. Hetherington. “Back to the Future? What the Politics of the Late Nineteenth Century Can Tell Us about the 2016 Election.” The Annals of the American Academy of Political and Social Science, vol. 667, 2016, pp. 92–109. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24756145.  

Chang, Stanley. “Updating the Electoral College: The National Popular Vote Legislation.” Harvard Journal on Legislation, vol. 44, no. 1, 2007, pp. 205-229. Fairvote.org, archive.fairvote.org/media/documents/chang.pdf.

Heath, Brad. “'Dueling' electors, 'hanging chads': a history of contested U.S. elections.” Reuters, 23 Oct. 2020, www.reuters.com/article/us-usa-election-contested-examples/dueling-electors-hanging-chads-a-history-of-contested-u-s-elections-idUSKBN2781G4.

Kleber, Louis. “The Presidential Election of 1876.” History Today, vol. 20, no. 11, Nov. 1970. History Today, www.historytoday.com/archive/presidential-election-1876.

Peskin, Allan. “Was There a Compromise of 1877.” The Journal of American History, vol. 60, no. 1, 1973, pp. 63–75. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2936329.

Ratcliffe, Donald. “Popular Preferences in the Presidential Election of 1824.” Journal of the Early Republic, vol. 34, no. 1, 2014, pp. 45–77. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24486931.

A Rediscovery of Witches, Part Two: The Moon Goddess and the Cunning Folk

This is not a complete or accurate transcript of the podcast episode, as it does not include portions of my interview with Sarah Handley-Cousins.

According to Charles Godfrey Leland, as a child in Philadelphia, he had a Dutch nurse who was reputed to be a sorceress. One day, she carried him up into the attic of their home and performed a ceremony over him, placing a plate of salt with money and a lit candle by his head and laying a Bible, a key, and a knife on his little chest. Her ritual was meant to ensure that he would succeed in life as a scholar and as a wizard. The truth of this episode is impossible to determine, but indeed, Leland grew up to attend Princeton, study linguistics, and write numerous books about the traditional poetry and folklore of the Algonquian people and the Romany, or as he called them, Gypsies. Certainly the story of his early dedication to wizardry complements the eventual direction of his interests, which tended toward the occult. He spent a great deal of time traveling around Europe, especially Tuscany, and produced a volume in 1891 called Gypsy Sorcery and Fortune Telling. One of his principal sources was a woman named Maddalena, an Italian fortune teller whom Leland called his “witch informant.” From her, he received a manuscript, written in her own hand, that purported to lay out the doctrines of an ancient religion in Italy, what Leland believed to be the tenets of Italian witchcraft going back to antiquity. In prose poetry which Leland translated and expanded upon, Aradia, the Gospel of the Witches, as he called it, revealed that those persecuted as witches by the Church in early modern times were in fact a cult to the goddess of the moon, Diana, theirs was a religion of the oppressed or the outcast, revenging themselves upon the feudal lords who did them wrong and holding naked orgies in worship of Diana, which rites were mistaken by the Church as gatherings to worship the devil. The book had Judeo-Christian parallels, for in it, it was said Diana and her brother, Luciferus, the god of the sun, had a daughter named Aradia, whom they sent to earth to be the leader of the witches. Leland’s book proved to be relatively obscure, but after the spread of Margaret Murray’s witch-cult hypothesis, it was rediscovered by some and raised as proof of Murray’s thesis. The problem is, scholars like Ronald Hutton have cast doubt on its authenticity. It is fundamentally different from medieval texts derived from ancient Latin works, Hutton argues, and appears to be of 19th century origin. As it was said to have been written in Maddalena’s own hand, some have suggested that Leland’s witch informant had hoaxed him, while others have suggested that Leland himself authored the work, making it a literary fraud. Whatever the case, there is certainly no evidence beyond the book of the organized religion it describes.

Margaret Murray, who later propagated the myth that women accused of witchcraft were actually observing a secret religion, wasn’t working in a vacuum when she formulated her witch-cult theory. As I noted, she was influenced most notably by the comparative religion work of James Frazer. But she also wasn’t the first to suggest the idea that the witches of early modern persecutions in Europe were actually pagan cultists. However, Leland’s book doesn’t appear to have been an influence on Murray. Its claims were very different. It made no assertions that the Italian witchcraft it described was a pan-European religion, and nowhere was the Horned God of Murray worshipped. In her earlier work, Murray did acknowledge Diana as a goddess the witches worshipped, but she suggested that it was really Janus, the Roman god of passages, rather than Diana, the Roman goddess of the hunt. She, of course, had in mind the medieval canon law called Canon Episcopi, which described the existence of “some unconstrained women, perverted by Satan, seduced by illusions and phantasms of demons, [who] believe and openly profess that, in the dead of night, they ride upon certain beasts with the pagan goddess Diana, with a countless horde of women, and in the silence of the dead of the night to fly over vast tracts of country, and to obey her commands as their mistress, and to be summoned to her service on other nights.” This canon law was claimed to be from the 4th century CE, but many scholars believe it to have been a medieval forgery dating to the 10th century. This was the law that had encouraged more lenient treatment of witches as people with erroneous beliefs, who had been misled to believe that their dreams of night flights with Diana were real, a view reversed by the time of Pope Innocent VIII’s bull declaring them to be real devil worshipers. But even if it only dated to the 900s, where did this idea of women worshiping Diana come from? And was this the same Diana described in Leland’s Aradia?

Depiction of the goddess Diana portraying all her associations with hunting, the moon, and night flight. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

It seems that what the Canon Episcopi was describing was a certain strain of folklore, and as usual, when delving into the development of folklore, it is a story of syncretism, or the merging of beliefs. For instance, the Roman goddess Diana was not the goddess of the moon but of the hunt, with perhaps some association with the sky or daylight if one can judge by the etymology of her name. However, through identification with the Greek goddess of the hunt, Artemis, she inherited associations with Selene, the goddess of the moon, and Hecate, the queen of the dead. Hecate’s rides with the unquiet dead, which became all mixed up with Northern European folklore about the Wild Hunt, may be the basis for the idea of night rides with Diana, and may also be the point of intersection between these goddess traditions and folklore about faeries, creatures whom Diana leads in her rides, much as Hecate leads a host of the dead or Odin leads a host of faeries from the underworld in his Wild Hunt. In order to account for the strange creatures described in witchcraft trials as demons, Margaret Murray came up with an unusual explanation that again shows how she leapt to absurd and unsupported extremes in reaching for some interpretation that could make the witch narratives both real and rationally explainable. She suggested that faeries, styled as demons by witch-hunters, were really a now extinct race of diminutive people, like pygmies. But lacking substantive support for such a theory, I think we can just look at it quizzically for a moment before moving on. Another strange bit of syncretism in this folklore derives from the Old Testament. Some versions of the Wild Hunt folklore motif associated it with Herod the Great’s hunt for the “Holy Innocents” who might become the prophesied King of the Jews. And strangely, Diana appears to be strongly syncretized with Herodias, wife of Herod the Great’s youngest son, Herod Antipas, who convinced her daughter Salome to ask King Herod for John the Baptist’s head on a platter as reward for a particularly alluring dance she’d performed. According to legend, once the deed was done, Salome was remorseful, and a powerful wind blew from the murdered saint’s mouth, blowing her into the sky where she was doomed to fly forever. Salome seems to have become identified with her mother, so that it was said Herodias was the legendary flying dancer, and some used Herodias’s name or some derivative of it, like Aradia, as being synonymous with the pagan goddess Diana. As usual when I delve into folklore, I come out with my head spinning, but what can we take from all this? Despite a throughline of folklore that might help us identify the myth of Diana associated with witchcraft, there remains no evidence of a widespread religion devoted to her worship. What may be more likely is that, as folklore, these myths were passed as oral traditions, and the medieval church first misunderstood these tales to be real experiences that their tellers believed they were having, and later that the stories were real indeed. And even if women of the age occasionally got together and acted out the legends of Diana/Herodias, it would not been an organized revival of pagan religion but rather a reenactment of a popular folktale. These notions would, however, be involved in just such a revival but centuries after the early modern witch purges.  

In 1951, the Witchcraft Act of 1735 was finally repealed in Great Britain, replaced by Parliament with the Fraudulent Mediums Act, and almost immediately, a man named Gerald Gardner began to give interviews with the press claiming that he was a practicing witch, carrying on an age-old tradition of witchcraft. Gardner was a colonialist, having made his fortune operating rubber and tea plantations on the Malay peninsula. After retiring to England in 1936, he took the interest he had developed in Malay tribal magical practices and applied it to the field of folklore, writing a number of monographs. Once there was no longer a law against such claims, he let it be known that there existed a coven of witches in the New Forest district of Hampshire who had initiated him into their old religion. He named a certain local woman, Dorothy Clutterbuck, as the leader of the coven, and his favorite story about her coven was that they had engaged in magical battle against Hitler, gathering numerous covens to New Forest for what was called “Operation Cone of Power.” This was an ancient and powerful spell which had previously been directed against Napoleon, and before that against the Spanish Armada. The witches danced nude in the cold night with such abandon in casting this spell that some of them died of exposure or exhaustion. This coven’s rites involved much in the way of naked dancing as well as circle rituals and feasting, much of it for the purpose of promoting fertility and to achieve trance states that brought them closer to their gods. As Gardner described this religion in his book Witchcraft Today a few years later, they worshipped two gods in a duotheistic system. One was the Horned God described by Margaret Murray, while the other was the Goddess of the Moon described by Charles Godfrey Leland. While Murray had envisioned her witch-cult as a patriarchal system led by male priests, despite her feminism, Gardner described a more feministic secret witch-cult, and it is Gardner’s work in bringing this ancient witches’ religion to light that serves as the foundation for the modern religion of Wicca and neopagan beliefs generally. But how much truth was there to what Gardner taught?

Gerald Gardner, via Fortean Picture Library

First, consider the source of Gardner’s knowledge. Scholarly historians, such as Ronald Hutton, have investigated Gardner’s claims extensively and concluded that they seem very unlikely. The woman he claimed inducted him, Dorothy Clutterbuck, appears to have been a pious Christian and conservative Tory pillar of the community, which would indicate that she lived quite a double life if true. Only one other person has been recorded as claiming to have known about the coven and its operation against Hitler, but he told of it after Gardner himself had and may have just been repeating the story as he’d heard it. There were reports that Aleister Crowley, when Gardner met him, confirmed the existence of the New Forest coven, which would seem a strange thing to need confirmed if Gardner had been initiated as he claimed, but Crowley’s diaries and other accounts of their meeting don’t mention this. What they do show is that Gardner came to him and exaggerated his academic credentials and Masonic clout, hoping to get Crowley to initiate him into the magical secret society Ordo Templi Orientis, with no such luck, as Crowley doesn’t appear to have thought much of him. What seems likeliest is that he was searching for some occult initiation to make his retirement more interesting, first in the Folk-Lore Society, then in a Rosicrucian Theater he joined, and afterward in Crowley’s order or other mystical societies, like the Order of the Golden Dawn or the Ancient Druid Order, both of which he dabbled in, and when he failed, he simply created his own brand of magical order. He made up a supposedly ancient witchcraft religion, perhaps as a prank suggesting a stodgy old woman he knew of, who had since passed away, had inducted him into her coven’s mysteries. By mashing up the work of Leland and Murray, he produced their doctrines, and for rituals he cherry picked whatever suited his fancy from those two sources, including nudity and sexual cavorting, and added some that seem to be more of his own practices, such as flagellation to produce ecstasies or hallucinations. Certainly as the religion developed, it became clear that the writings he claimed were ancient were actually, at least in part, written by him, for when a High Priestess he had initiated into his feministic religion later tried to take the reins, he conveniently produced a new discovery of supposedly ancient rules that clarified the power he as a man should have over the women in his coven, making it more of a patriarchy after all. Now, don’t get me wrong. I don’t begrudge neopagans or Wiccans the conviction of their beliefs or the freedom to express them by whatever observance they wish—as the Wiccan tenet goes, “An it harm none, do what thou wilt”—but I cannot pretend that the historical basis for the faith is any more valid than, say, that of Mormonism, or of Scientology, another religion fabricated by an acquaintance of Aleister Crowley.

Thus we have more than one myth borne out of Margaret Murray’s discredited work. First, her own myth of a pan-European pagan fertility cult mistaken for Satanists by their persecutors, and then, Gerald Gardner’s derivative neopagan religion of Wicca, claiming to be a continuation of an ancient religion that had been practiced in secret into modern times. Next came the myth that most women accused of being witches were practicing midwives, whose knowledge of medicine was feared and misunderstood as magic. But this myth did not originate from Murray. As with many descriptions of the witch, it was spread in early modern Europe by Heinrich Kramer’s book, the Malleus Maleficarum, which described midwives as the being in the perfect position to take newborns and offer their souls to the devil, or to take them for sacrifice. As we have already seen, Murray relied heavily on the Hammer of the Witches as a primary source for her interpretation, rationalizing what seemed outrageous and taking what pleased her at face value. As it went well with her theory, she argued in her characteristically assertive style that the female worshippers of her imagined fertility cult were also practicing midwives with medical expertise. This argument would be taken up again in the 1970s by second-wave feminists and as a result would be presumed true by many. In an effort to address the sexual politics and history of the marginalization of women in medicine, sociologists and social critics Barbara Ehrenreich and Dierdre English latched on to the Murray’s claims about midwifery’s connection to witchcraft allegations in their pamphlet “Witches, Midwives, and Nurses: A History of Women Healers,” and from there it spread. It would not be challenged as a myth until 1990, when medical historian David Harley wrote his article “Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-witch.” In his article, Harley revealed that it was actually relatively uncommon for midwives to be accused of witchcraft, as they were usually considered trustworthy women.

Witches dancing with devils, featured in The History of Witches and Wizards (1720), via Wellcome Library

While it may be a myth that midwives were common targets of witchcraft accusations, what about female healers generally? Historians have revealed to us the presence in early modern Europe of a class of folk healers whose folk medicine essentially was spellcraft, and there has long been a view both popular and scholarly that it was these wise men and women, or cunning folk, who were most commonly persecuted as witches. The problem is that this too appears to be a misconception propagated by 1970s scholarship that has since been challenged, specifically a 1979 article called “Who Were the Witches?” by Richard Horsley in the Journal of Interdisciplinary History. To clarify, cunning folk were practitioners of operative magic, meaning they performed services such as creating charms to cure people and livestock or acted as diviners for hire, telling the fortunes of those who paid them. Theirs was an especially practical magic, sought out in rural areas as a remedy to misfortunes that were believed to have been caused by evil magic or curses, counteracting black magic with white magic, as it were. I have given an apt example of cunning folk being accused of witchcraft in the famous case of the Pendle Witches in Lancaster, England, in a recent Patreon exclusive podcast episode. Because of prominent cases like these and the simple logic behind the proposition that it was practitioners of magic who were being accused of witchcraft, like the midwife-witch myth, the notion is easy to believe. I myself am guilty of having repeated the claim on previous episodes of this podcast. The problem is that there the evidence doesn’t allow for so grand a generalization. First of all, as we see in the Pendle Witches trial, much of the folk magic performed by cunning folk was widely considered a good magic and involved explicitly Catholic ritual elements—in fact, in his 1994 article in Social History, “Witch Doctors, Soothsayers and Priests: On Cunning Folk in European Historiography and Tradition,” Willem de Blécourt points out that there were even Catholic clergymen who dabbled in folk magic as well. The cunning folk certainly were not part of a pagan cult holding meetings. Historical records show they were almost invariably solitary figures, practicing extremely individualized rituals. Some may have been engaged in cursing those who had wronged them, as we see among the Pendle Witches, but those who were accused of evil magic, or maleficium, may have just been dealing with dissatisfied customers. If one hired a good witch to heal a family member or some livestock and instead of being healed their condition worsened, one might presume the charm they had worked was actually a curse. But the most problematic aspect of the cunning folk as witches claim is that it ignores the majority of the accused, who don’t appear to have engaged in the selling of magical services at all.

So let us look at what was behind the accusations against those who were not admitted practitioners of folk magic. First, there were those who were assumed to have been practicing maleficium because they had given someone an odd look or even a harsh word and afterward by coincidence some misfortune had befallen the person they’d looked at or dealt with unpleasantly, as we see was the case with Alizon Device, the first of the accused Pendle Witches. Among these, being socially isolated made the accusation harder to refute, for if no one knew you well, imaginations could run wild about what you believed and what you did with your time. And of course, witchcraft allegations as mechanism for revenge played a role in many cases as well, for when one saw that the charge of witchcraft brought someone, even an innocent, to ruin and death, what better way destroy an enemy? As for the confessions of the accused, as alluded to before, we know enough now about coercion and the effects of torture to easily explain these. In fact, some scholars have even examined the differences in confessions given under different types of torture, such as physical torment as opposed to sleep deprivation, and observed that the confessions take on a different quality of detail, with those elicited by physical torture being brief and without detail, as if blurted out to stop the pain, and those produced by sleep deprivation being more dreamlike, as though from the description of a hallucination. Nor can we discount the mere threat of torture as a driving factor behind the confessions. The details may clearly have been fed to the accused by their torturers, or they may have been gleaned from common knowledge of what witches were being accused of. The witch craze happened to coincide with a revolution in publishing that resulted in the spread of cheap publications detailing witch trials, featuring woodcuts that depicted what witches were supposedly up to so that even the illiterate acquired a working knowledge of the claims. Many accused witches hoped that by confessing to their accusers and saying they repented, the inquisitors and magistrates would have mercy on them, which certainly worked for some of them. And others, as mentioned earlier, may have simply been describing folk stories about Diana and her night rides in such a way that witch-hunters may have taken it for an admission of first-hand experience when it was only an oral tradition. Wherein lies the reality? Likely in some combination of all these scenarios.

Witches feasting, featured in The History of Witches and Wizards (1720), via Wellcome Library

The question remaining, then, is what drove the witch-hunters themselves? Typically they are depicted as zealots, unable to see past the tips of their noses, which they’d buried in the Bible. Certainly it is hard to refute that this was the case, but in recent times a more nuanced view of their motivations has emerged. The papal bull of Pope Innocent VIII that is seen as the beginning of the early modern witch craze explicitly accuses witches of having “blasted the produce of the earth, the grapes of the vine, the fruits of the trees.” This has led some historians to suggest that the real impetus behind the witch craze was climate change, specifically the Little Ice Age that cooled Europe starting as early as 1250, causing many crops to fail. As the human mind is hardwired to find someone to blame for things that are outside our control, a scapegoat was sought, and witches fit the bill. Another theory has it that the worst of the witch purges occurred in places where civil authority was relatively weak, and the execution of outsiders as witches served as a show of strength to consolidate power and enforce social conformity. But recently, in 2018, two economists, Peter Leeson and Jacob Russ, put forward a different theory, based on statistical analysis. They claim that the evidence supports the idea that the early modern witch-craze was triggered by the Protestant Reformation. By their view, the Catholic and Protestant Churches engaged in witch purges as a kind of advertisement for their respective brands of religion, each demonstrating through their witch trials their power over the devil as well as their willingness to use violence against those who rejected their faith. This may seem like conspiratorial thinking, but this could be true even without an organized conspiracy to knowingly make false accusations against and put to death innocents. Economic forces may be at work without conscious knowledge of them, and furthermore, these economic motivators may have been working in combination with the people’s desire to scapegoat for failed crops and weak governments needing to enforce their authority. As I have shown time and time again, it is more the domain of conspiracist thinking to oversimplify very complicated episodes in history in order to create a tidy explanation at which one can point an accusatory finger.

Further Reading

Crabb, Jon. “Woodcuts and Witches.” The Public Domain Review, 4 May 2017, publicdomainreview.org/essay/woodcuts-and-witches.

De Blécourt, Willem. “Witch Doctors, Soothsayers and Priests. On Cunning Folk in European Historiography and Tradition.” Social History, vol. 19, no. 3, 1994, pp. 285–303. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/4286217.

Ehrenreich, Barbara, and Deirdre English. Witches, Midwives, & Nurses (Second Edition) : A History of Women Healers. Vol. 2nd ed, The Feminist Press at CUNY, 2010. EBSCOhost, search.ebscohost.com/login.aspx?direct=true&db=nlebk&AN=597965&site=eds-live&scope=site.

Harley, David. “Historians as Demonologists: The Myth of the Midwife-witch.” Social History of Medicine, vol. 3, no. 1, April 1990, pp. 1–26. Oxford Academic,  doi.org/10.1093/shm/3.1.1.

Hutton, Ronald. “Paganism and Polemic: The Debate over the Origins of Modern Pagan Witchcraft.” Folklore, vol. 111, no. 1, 2000, pp. 103–117. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1260981.

———. The Triumph of the Moon: A History of Modern Pagan Witchcraft. Oxford University Press, 1999.

Leeson, Peter T., and Jacob W. Russ. “Witch Trials.” The Economic Journal, vol. 128, Aug. 2018, pp. 2066-2105. PeterLeeson.com, www.peterleeson.com/Papers.html.

Magliocco, Sabina. “Who Was Aradia? The History and Development of a Legend.” The Pomegranate: The Journal of Pagan Studies, no. 18, Feb. 2002. The Wayback Machine, web.archive.org/web/20070717043727/http://chass.colostate-pueblo.edu/natrel/pom/pom18/aradia.html.

Murray, Margaret Alice. The God of the Witches. Blackmask Online, 2001. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/godwitch/mode/2up.

———. The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. Oxford University Press, 1921. Project Gutenburg, www.gutenberg.org/files/20411/20411-h/20411-h.htm.

A Rediscovery of Witches, Part One: The Hammer and the Horned God

This transcript is incomplete. It does not contain material from my interview with Sarah Handley-Cousins of Dig: A History Podcast. Listen to the episode for more.

Last October I explored the origins of the legend of werewolves, and during the course of that exploration, I was obliged to speak about accusations of witchcraft, as the two were intimately connected. Among all the iconic monsters that appear this time of year on dollar-store decorations, the vampire, the werewolf, and witches, it is the witch that people generally know has some basis in history and truth, as it is common knowledge that large numbers of accused witches were put to death, both here in America in New England and across Europe in the early modern period. But what do we really know about the women, and men, accused of witchcraft and what led to their trials? Is there any historical evidence to suggest that these people had actually done anything we might today think of as witchy? Or was it a moral panic that claimed the lives of many who were completely innocent? If so, what touched off this panic? Who and what were these accused witches, really, and why did they end up burned and hanged? You probably think you know the answers to these questions, but you may be surprised. For example, belief in witches may go all the way back to antiquity, when those believed to practice sorcery, incantations, and poisoning were punished under the law in many lands. However, it seems lesser known that during the Middle Ages, with the Christianization of Europe, authorities both divine and secular passed laws against persecuting others for witchcraft and even denied its existence. Medieval canon law declared that any who believed they did such things as witches were commonly accused of doing, such as riding on beasts by night in the train of the pagan goddess Diana, had simply been deluded by the devil to believe their dreams were real. A number of Catholic Popes expressly forbade the torturing and executing of those accused of witchcraft, such as Pope Nicholas I and Pope Gregory VII. However, by the 13th century, the Catholic Church’s Holy Inquisition was involved in crusades against heretics in France, the Cathars and Waldensians, and the accusations of devil worship leveled against them as well as their brutal extirpation hearkened back to witch purges of the past and presaged the witch-hunts to come. Even so, as late as 1258, Pope Alexander IV declared a bull that prohibited Inquisitors from investigating sorcery. A couple hundred years later, though, the Catholic Church essentially invented the idea of the witch as we know it today, not as a simple sorcerer or diviner or a pagan worshipper but as a servant of Satan, when they combined witchcraft accusations with accusations of heresy. Many see its beginnings in the late 15th century, when Pope Innocent VIII issued an infamous bull that acknowledged the existence of real witchcraft—not just dreams or visions but real sorcery—and empowered the Inquisition to prosecute its practitioners. We don’t know for certain the exact number of people tried and executed for witchcraft by the Holy Inquisition in Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries, but surviving records indicate that around 40,000 were killed. Who were the accused? And what led to the accusations made against them?

I have always covered something a bit spooky around Halloween. In 2018, I spoke about Spring-Heeled Jack and the Devil’s Footprints in Devon, but most of my other Halloween episodes have really focused on moral panics having to do with accusations of monstrous behavior, and these episodes really culminate, I feel, with this series. At the end of my first year of podcasting, I did a 2-part series on the history of false accusations of devil worship, and last year, I did another 2-part series on werewolf trials. I’m proud of both of those and encourage you to listen to them this October if you’ve never heard them. The topic also flows well from episodes I’ve done this year. Starting with the patron exclusive I did on the suppression of the Knights Templar, and through my discussion of the supposed origin of magic and my look at heresy and heterodoxy in the Apocrypha, I can see a thread. My discussion of anti-Semitism through the ages certainly serves as a parallel to the witch-hunts I will be discussing, and even my series on Mary, Queen of Scots connects, for her son, James, as king, wrote his own book on witchcraft justifying the prosecution of witches under canon law. I even see a direct connection to my last episode, in which I drew a connection between Qanon conspiracy theories and longstanding conspiracy theories about the Illuminati. To clarify, the accusations made by Qanon believers owe a lot to witchcraft accusations, for they claim that the deep state is run by devil-worshipers who torture and kill children in order to harvest from them adrenochrome, a drug they enjoy, or simply to eat them. Anyone who has studied witchcraft accusations recognizes these claims. Witches were also accused of being devil-worshipers who ate children or sacrificed them or harvested fat from them to make their hallucinogenic flying ointment. One could argue in fact that Qanon is just another witch-hunt. But despite the progression from topics I’ve covered this year and throughout the lifetime of the show, I have found the witch-hunts of early modern Europe very difficult to parse and wrap my mind around. First of all, it feels wrong, somehow, to question what these women’s lives were like, what they might have done, for neighbors or authorities to target them for prosecution as witches, as if I’m engaging in victim-blaming, yet the more I look into this topic, the more a cut-and-dry claim that all accusations had sprung from the fevered imaginations of Inquisitors seems untenable. Yet neither can I entertain the notion that witch-hunters were justified in their prosecutions. So we must consider all sides… what did the Inquisitors believe of the accused, and what different views of them have historians taken, and what theories are there for why the witch purges of early modern Europe happened.

The 1669 edition of the Malleus Maleficarum. Public Domain image, via Wikimedia Commons.

To understand how witches were defined in early modern Europe and made into the perennial horror icons we know today, we must look to the writings of one true believer, Dominican monk and Inquisitor Heinrich Kramer. Early in his career, this Inquisitor undertook a witch-hunt at Innsbruck, where a certain woman suspected of witchcraft challenged his authority, spitting on him in the street, calling him a “bad monk,” refusing to attend his sermons and suggesting that, because of his own rabid belief in literal witchcraft, he was the one in league with Satan. This set Kramer off on a rampage of a witch purge, putting this woman and others on trial not so much for practicing sorcery, although there were rumors of this, but rather for their sexual behavior, which he asserted proved that they worshipped and engaged in sexual contact with the devil. The local Bishop, however, disagreed, finding that Kramer asked leading questions, “presumed much that had not been proved,” and “clearly demonstrated his foolishness.” After the trial had been vacated, Kramer went home and stewed over it, and ended up, as a defense of his actions and a rebuttal to his critics, writing what turned out to be the most infamous witch-hunting manual of the era, the Malleus Maleficarum, or “Hammer of the Witches.” Kramer’s was not the only witch-hunting manual used during the early modern witch-hunts, but it was the most influential in German-speaking regions, and this was the heart of the witch purges that followed, with a majority of the prosecutions taking place within 300 miles of the Rhineland city of Strasbourg (Leeson and Russ 2067). The Malleus Maleficarum serves as the perfect source for understanding the conception of witchcraft that became dominant during the ensuing witch craze. Although witchcraft had long been thought of as a practice of both men and women, and indeed, during the early modern panic, men too were accused and executed for it, for Kramer, witches were women. As at Innsbruck, Kramer blamed what he perceived as their lustful nature, as well as their supposed intellectual weakness, for their susceptibility to the devil’s charms. A witch, he argued, was not simply a woman who performs magic. To be considered a witch, they have to “deny  the  Catholic  faith  in  whole  or  in part through verbal sacrilege, to devote themselves body and soul [to the devil], to  offer  up  to  the  Evil  One  himself  infants  not  yet  baptized, and  to  persist  in diabolic filthiness through carnal acts with incubus and succubus demons.” So we see these motifs, of sex with demons and the sacrifice of babies, not entering the discourse for the first time, but here cemented in a definition with criteria. And since, according to this definition, they were essentially heretics, he recommended torture in their prosecution and encouraged that they be burned at the stake, both standard Inquisitorial practices for rooting out heresy.

To think of Kramer’s understanding of witches as an artifact of a dark age of ignorance that disappeared with the Enlightenment would be erroneous, though, for even in the 20th century, at least one erudite and scholarly writer was giving them credence. The first English translation of the Malleus Maleficarum was published in 1928 by Montague Summers, a Catholic writer who perpetuated the witch-hunting manual’s notions as legitimate and true. In his books on witches, werewolves, and vampires, he presented the accusations of Inquisitors as completely reliable, even the supernatural parts. But more than this, he painted the picture of witchcraft practitioners as a vast conspiracy like unto the Illuminati, describing the witch as

an evil liver; a social pest and parasite; the devotee of a loathly and obscene creed; an adept at poisoning, blackmail, and other creeping crimes; a member of a powerful secret organisation inimical to Church and State; a blasphemer in word and deed, swaying the villagers by terror and superstition; a charlatan and a quack sometimes; a bawd; an abortionist; the dark counsellor of lewd court ladies and adulterous gallants; a minister to vice and inconceivable corruption, battening upon the filth and foulest passions of the age.

Also like believers in an Illuminati conspiracy, he saw the Bolsheviks as a parallel, and even suggested that the actions of Inquisitors against such a conspiracy were justified, writing, “who can be surprised if, when faced with so vast a conspiracy, the methods employed by the Holy Office may not seem – if the terrible conditions are conveniently forgotten – a little drastic, a little severe?” And while acknowledging the misogyny of Kramer’s Malleus Maleficarum, he makes the loathsome suggestion that such persecution might be just what was needed for the women of his own day, stating, “I am not altogether certain that they will not prove a wholesome and needful antidote in this feministic age, when the sexes seem confounded, and it appears to be the chief object of many females to ape the man, an indecorum by which they…divest themselves of such charm as they might boast.”

Photo of Montague Summers, attributed to DiscipulusMundi on WIkimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0)

Regardless of his politics or misogyny, what is so striking about Montague Summers is that, as an Oxford educated man about town and fixture of the London literary scene, he actually believed the irrational things he claimed to believe. One might blame this on his religious background, but his religiosity may have been an affectation. He was ordained a deacon in the Anglican Church, but after a scandal in which he was accused of sexually assaulting boys, his career in the church came to an end. He converted to Catholicism after that and appears to have pursued ordination as a priest so single-mindedly that he travelled to Italy in search of a Cardinal who would be willing to ordain him in an unorthodox ceremony. So it seemed the pretension of being a clergyman was more important to him than any doctrine or faith. He was known to go about town in a cape and the black felt shovel hat typical of clergymen, presenting himself like an 18th-century Inquisitor. In fact, his interest in witchcraft too may have been an affectation. Originally, he had made a name for himself as a scholar of Restoration theater. After being approached by a publisher who requested he write a volume on the occult, Summers wrote the first work in what would end up being a large body of work on the topic, and after his first, more academic treatments of the topic, he pivoted into works on the occult aimed at popular audiences, and even into writing Gothic horror fiction. Montague Summers was a contemporary and acquaintance of Aleister Crowley, and it may be that he was influenced by Crowley’s own cultivation of a public image as an occultist and warlock. Some contemporaries believed Summers was himself an occultist and that he wrote of such things from experience, but based on Summers’s surviving letters and his work, it is much more likely that he had been attempting to cultivate an image of himself as a counterpart to Crowley, a modern witch-hunter to Crowley’s modern witch. On Montague Summers’s gravestone, the epitaph reads “Tell me strange stories,” and this suggests that, rather than being a true believer, perhaps he simply enjoyed a good dark tale, as do so many of us.

Bust of Margaret Murray housed at UCL Institute of Archaeology. Photo attributed to Midnightblueowl on Wikimedia Commons (CC-BY-SA-3.0)

The case of Montague Summers mirrors in some ways the case of another academic, a contemporary of his, who spread a different, more rational view of the nature of witches, but whose view was no less problematic, whose methods were flawed in some of the same ways, and whose career followed a comparable trajectory. Her name was Margaret Murray. Essentially, Margaret Murray too believed that the women accused of witchcraft in early modern witch trials were part of a kind of vast conspiracy in that she asserted they were actually secretly practitioners of an ancient pagan fertility cult that operated like a secret society in Christian Europe. Yet her theory stands in opposition to Montague Summers’s, for she approached the subject of witches with a more skeptical and rational perspective. She claimed that everything witch-trial records spoke of witches doing had really been done, but had been misunderstood or misrepresented by prosecutors. Her theory evolved from her first book, The Witch-Cult in Western Europe, to her follow-up, The God of the Witches. At first, working from reports of witches being deluded by the devil into the worship of a goddess named Diana, she suggested this Diana was actually the ancient Roman two-faced male deity, Janus. In her later work, though, influenced by the comparative mythology work of James Frazer in The Golden Bough, she identified their deity with the “Horned God,” who had been mistaken for the devil by witch-hunters, but was really a representation of a syncretistic deity that could be found in many cultures, stretching back to the Ancient Greek Pan. Murray believed that a male priest or authority figure wore some headdress to act as a stand-in for their Horned God, and performed these sexual acts on the female adherents of the cult, using a prosthetic phallus when the physical demands were too much. And again drawing on James Frazer’s work, which identified the figure of the sacred king who must atone for his people as a sacrifice, she suggested this male figure was ritualistically or at least symbolically burned , which could be discerned in witch confessions that spoke of the devil disappearing in flames, and in the ultimate reversal of what is generally believed about early modern witch-hunts, she claimed that these pagan cultists actually provoked Christians into burning them alive in order to imitate their Dying God and effect the human sacrifice their cult required.

At first, the theory seemed promising in its rational view and even believable, and it spread widely when in 1929, Murray was invited to write Encyclopedia Britannica’s entry on witchcraft and took the opportunity to present her theory as if it were historical consensus or fact. But it was not, for there were real problems with her ideas and her methods. For example, Murray cited witch trial records that recorded confessions describing intercourse with the devil as being cold as her only evidence that her cult’s priests used prosthetic phalluses for their ceremonies… and her insistence that descriptions of the devil disappearing in flames were proof of their burning sacrifice of their Horned God effigy seems a bit ridiculous since the association of the devil with the flames of hell seems a clearer origin for such details. So ironically, her supposedly rationalist view of witchcraft suffered from the one of very same problems as Montague Summers’ work. She presumed that the acts confessed to under duress had actually taken place. She may have sought a different, more naturalistic interpretation of the lurid descriptions than witch persecutors and Summers had taken, but she never stopped to ask whether the accused may have just been telling the witch-hunters what they demanded to hear.

A photo of the Dorset Ooser, a wooden head or mask of uncertain origin used in folk traditions in Dorset. This is one of many unconnected examples cited by Murray as support for her theory of a cult to a Horned God. Public Domain in the U.S., via Wikipedia.

Among the many criticisms of her work were doubts expressed about her “dubious etymology” in suggesting that the name Diana was derived from Janus, or that the word “sabbath,” used by witch-hunters and in the confessions of the accused to refer to their gatherings and rituals, was not used in mockery of Jewish customs, as was commonly believed, but must have been derived from a word for “frolic,” even though elsewhere in her own work she takes no issue with the Jewish term “synagogue” being used to refer to witches’ gatherings. Her principal historiological sins are that she was supremely selective in her use of primary sources, quoting only that which supported her claims and omitting all else, and she presents even her wildest assertions as if they were so clear and obvious as to be unquestionable. This quote from Jacqueline Simpson’s article on Murray in Folklore paints a clearer picture of her scholarship, criticizing the

…inclusion of many chunks of miscellaneous material from a huge variety of periods and cultures, flung together in a hotchpotch where a paleolithic cave painting, an Egyptian mask and the Dorset Ooser all are said to represent the same Horned God, and where Robin Hood, fairies, scrying, Merlin, Norse seers and Celtic saints are all swept up into the discussion. Precisely because the material is so diverse, the links so tenuous and the tone so dogmatic, untrained readers are naturally mystified, and assume that their own limited knowledge is at fault; overawed, they feel themselves to be in the presence of great scholarship which they dare not query. Her books, alas, are not alone in profiting from this effect.

This method and the reliance on dubious etymology reminds me of the style of another writer who argued that pagan traditions had secretly survived in modern times: the anti-Catholic conspiracy theorist Alexander Hislop, who in his book The Two Babylons argued that Catholicism was just a collection of pagan traditions from antiquity. Have a listen to my episode on him and his work, A Tale of Two Babylons, and I’m sure you’ll recognize the similarity.

It seems to me that, much like Montague Summers, Margaret Murray may have been bewitched, if you’ll excuse the pun, by the popularity of her work on witches and the prospect of further success among general audiences. Certainly, when academic historians and folklorists are generous enough to afford her any praise, it’s usually for her early work and not for her later books, which are generally considered to have gone entirely off the rails. Yet her work has had a major impact among feminists. And beyond the spread of her peculiar myth of a pagan cult in Western Europe persecuted as devil-worshippers by Christians, her work also contributed to other historical myths related to the nature of witches. We’ll discuss these further developments next time, in part two of A Rediscovery of Witches, and we’ll get down to brass tacks in discussing whether witches really were practicing some kind of magic, and what other reasons may have led to accusations of witchcraft in early modern Europe.

Further Reading

Broedel, Hans Peter. The Malleus Maleficarum and the Construction of Witchcraft: Theology and Popular Belief. Manchester University Press, 2003. OAPEN, library.oapen.org/handle/20.500.12657/35002.

Clack, Beverly. “Heinrich Kramer and James Sprenger 1486.” Misogyny in the Western Philosophical Tradition, Palgrave Macmillan, 1999, pp. 83-92. Springer Link, https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230212800_7.

Herzig, Tamar. "Witches, Saints, and Heretics: Heinrich Kramer’s Ties with Italian Women Mystics." Magic, Ritual, and Witchcraft, vol. 1 no. 1, 2006, p. 24-55. Project MUSE, doi:10.1353/mrw.0.0038.

Hume, Robert D. “The Uses of Montague Summers: A Pioneer Reconsidered.” Restoration: Studies in English Literary Culture, 1660-1700, vol. 3, no. 2, 1979, pp. 59–65. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/43291376. Accessed 30 Sept. 2020.

Murray, Margaret Alice. The God of the Witches. Blackmask Online, 2001. Internet Archive, archive.org/details/godwitch/mode/2up.

———. The Witch-Cult in Western Europe. Oxford University Press, 1921. Project Gutenburg, www.gutenberg.org/files/20411/20411-h/20411-h.htm.

Regal, Brian. “The Occult Life of Montague Summers.” Fortean Times, January 2017. Magzter, www.magzter.com/article/Entertainment/Fortean-Times/The-Occult-Life-of-Montague-Summers.

Simpson, Jacqueline. “Margaret Murray: Who Believed Her, and Why?” Folklore, vol. 105, 1994, pp. 89–96. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1260633. Accessed 14 Oct. 2020.

The Illuminati Illuminated, Part Two: The Order in America

As conspiracy theories about an American “deep state” have spread and gone viral over the last four years, they have been taken up by a particular online persona, combined with variety of other conspiracy theories, both modern and classic, and been transformed in the Coronavirus Era into a kind of cult. I am speaking, of course, about Qanon, a kind of anonymous prophet for today’s conservative conspiracy theorists. It all began back in early October, 2017, when Donald Trump posed for photos with a group of military leaders and, smirking, made a cryptic comment about a calm before a storm. Many assumed he was joking, or that if it was anything, it may have been in reference to some imminent military adventure, but to conspiracy enthusiasts, or those eager to dupe them, it was a perfect segue into wild theories. Before the end month, a post called “Calm Before the Storm” appeared on the “politically incorrect” board of the website 4chan, a home away from home for Nazis and incels where most users forego a username in favor of appearing “anonymous.” But this poster, who was claiming inside information about Hillary Clinton’s impending detainment and extradition, used the moniker Q, which many assumed was in reference to some clearance authorization for top secret data in the Department of Energy, though the contents of Q’s posts seem to claim White House access rather than any knowledge of nuclear materials. For all we know, the poster originally meant it as a reference to the omniscient character of Q in Star Trek the Next Generation, meant to indicate his or her being all knowing, and the connection to a top secret clearance authorization was a happy accident. The poster, or posters, as they often refer to themselves as “we,” certainly encouraged the idea that they had intimate knowledge of the goings on at the highest level of government, and they painted President Trump as a lone warrior against a deep state conspiracy, insisting, in fact, that he was winning this battle. They depicted him as being in total control, just biding his time until the forthcoming “storm,” or “great awakening,” when he will finally make his perfectly orchestrated move to checkmate the cabal of globalists that control everything. Who is this cabal? Well, Q remains cryptic, including actual ciphers in posts so that followers can see what they want, implicate who they want to implicate. Certainly the Clintons, who it was claimed were the real subject of Mueller’s investigation, and establishment Democrats generally, but the followers of Qanon were not satisfied with such a prosaic conspiracy. They wanted to fold in the greatest hits of every wild conspiracy theory for the last hundred years, so they embraced Pizzagate and made their deep state a pedophile ring, and they revived the Satanic Ritual Abuse panic of the 1980s to make them actual devil-worshipping eaters of children. They take up the Jewish World Conspiracy by arguing that Jewish banking families like the Rothschilds are behind everything, and they follow in the path of many who came before them in pointing at Freemasons and the Illuminati. Indeed, a key element of their theory, that the deep state cabal with whom Trump is doing battle engages in drinking the blood of children and harvesting adrenochrome from abused children’s brains, seems to echo directly some of the more outlandish claims John Robison made, without evidence, against the French scientists he hated and accused of being Illuminist conspirators before the French Revolution: Robison claimed that they would purchase children from the poor in order to dissect their living brains in search of a life force, a horrifying mad-scientist experiment that even the police were supposedly powerless to stop. So it seems nothing that Qanon spews is new. They’re just dredging up baseless conspiracy theories that have been around since the Enlightenment, and have been influencing U.S. politics since at least 1798.

In choosing a place to start with a discussion of the Illuminati’s presence in America, or its supposed presence, then the clearest starting point would be to discuss the Great Seal of the United States. This is image you see on the dollar bill. On one side, there is an eagle wearing a striped shield, grasping arrows in one talon and an olive branch in the other, with a constellation of stars over its head and the Latin Motto E Pluribus Unum. On the other side is the iconic pyramid with a floating and radiant eye in its peak, with the Roman numerals for the year of our independence at its base and two Latin phrases: Annuit Coeptis above, meaning God has favored our undertakings, and Novus Ordo Seclorum below, meaning “a new order of the ages.” It is this second image that drives conspiracy theories about Illuminati influence at the dawn of our nation, especially since the phrase New World Order has come to be associated with the supposed worldwide conspiracy. In reality, the notion and phrase would not actually appear until the middle of the 20th century, with a push toward world governing bodies like the League of Nations. The phrase Novus Ordo Seclorum can be traced back to the poet Virgil, who in a passage of the fourth Eclogue used similar language to describe the coming of a golden age of justice. So it was really a reference to the idea that the independence of America represented the dawning of a new age, which it was widely regarded as signaling. Many will say that the eye in the triangle is Illuminati iconography, but this is not accurate. The Illuminati used the symbol of an owl on a book. The radiant eye used on our seal is the Eye of Providence, supposed to represent God watching over mankind, and thus complementing the motto above it on the seal. The Eye of Providence would go on to become a common Masonic symbol, but it’s unclear whether it was common among Freemasons before its adoption on the Great Seal of the United States. Today, people try to claim that the triangle is an Illuminati sign, and this appears to have come from lore about the symbolism on our Great Seal. The problem with this is that the Eye of Providence was suggested as an element of the seal in August of 1776, during the first committee on the topic, which included Benjamin Franklin, John Adams, and Thomas Jefferson. At that time, the Bavarian Illuminati was just a fledgling club among university students in Ingolstadt, as I indicated in Part One. The inclusion of the Eye of Providence seems to be an earnest attempt to illustrate through symbolism that God approved of their democratic experiment and nothing more. As for the eye being enclosed in a triangle, that wasn’t because it was pictured as the tip of a pyramid, for we see even in early versions of the seal without the pyramid that the eye was in a triangle. It may be that the triangular shape of the seal’s eye was due to the importance of geometry and triangles specifically to Freemasons, as at least some on the committee certainly were Masons. This would have nothing to do with the Illuminati, however, as the Bavarian order had yet to spread among continental Masonic lodges, and the brand of Masonry in Revolutionary America was far different from continental Masonry anyway. The other possibility is that the triangular shape represents the trinity, making it simply a Christian symbol that ironically has encouraged a fear of a sinister anti-Christian conspiracy for decades.

The reverse of the Great Seal of the United States, via Wikimedia Commons. (Use of this image is in no way meant to convey the false impression that any part of this article or podcast episode is sponsored or approved by the Government of the United States or by any department, agency, or instrumentality thereof)

Knowledge of the Bavarian Illuminati did not reach American shores until the work of John Robison and Abbé Barruel did. Interestingly, neither Robison nor Barruel suggested that the American Revolution had been orchestrated by the Illuminati as they claimed the French Revolution had been. However, they both vaguely and without evidence suggested that the Illuminati had begun infiltrating Masonic lodges there, Barruel by stating that “sects equally inimical to Royalty and Christianity are daily increasing in numbers and strength, particularly in North America,” and Robison by including America on a list of countries with lodges corrupted by the Illuminati, assuring his readers in parentheses that there were “several” there. As obscure and ambiguous as these claims were, they still touched off an Illuminati panic in America because of prevailing political and ecclesiastical conditions. For simplicity’s sake, it can be characterized as similar to modern America. At the time, there were two principal parties, the conservative Federalist party that held control of both houses of Congress as well as the presidency under John Adams, and their more progressive rivals, the Democratic-Republican party, championed by Thomas Jefferson, who contrary to the sentiments of most Federalists believed that the French were our revolutionary brethren. In fact, the country was in the midst of a diplomatic and trade crisis with the revolutionary government of France when American editions of Robison’s and Barruel’s books were being published. Called the XYZ affair, it involved the refusal of an American diplomatic commission to pay off French officials, and it led to an undeclared naval war between our countries called the Quasi-War. To those with anti-French views at the time, the Illuminati conspiracy theory gave further reason to distrust and hate any post-revolution government of France and allowed the Federalists to paint themselves as the last bulwark against a further lawless and godless brand of revolution that, if the conspirators had their way, could consume our young republic the way that it had France. It was a perfect political barb to fling at their political rivals, as well, for rather than engaging in legitimate debate about our relationship with France, the Federalists could make a straw man of the Jeffersonians and say their sympathy for the French proved they were in on the Illuminati conspiracy. And just as conservatives in Britain had attempted to delegitimize the Irish rebellion by calling it an Illuminati plot, after the conspiracy theory reached America, the rural Whiskey Rebellion against a whiskey tax during Washington’s presidency was later recast as proof of Illuminati machinations in our country. Even George Washington, who was sympathetic to Federalist policies but had always tried to remain non-partisan, let himself be swayed by the conspiracy theory. While at first he expressed doubt that any Masonic lodges in America were “contaminated with the principles ascribed to the Society of the Illuminati,” only a month later he qualified that assessment and wrote that “individuals of them may have done it,” and the idea that some founders of lodges and democratic societies in America “actually had a separation of the People from their Government in view” he then characterized as “too evident to be questioned.” But it’s clear from his letters that the only evidence he is referring to is the work of John Robison, which was, of course, no evidence at all.

There were, however, more forces than just the political pushing the American people to believe in an active Illuminati plot in America in those years. Orthodox Congregational ministers of New England in that time had seen their power and influence wane with the rise of millennial doctrines and evangelical faiths after the Great Awakening (the historical one, not Qanon’s imagined “Great Awakening”). Predictably, these clergy attributed the changes to impiety and a widespread corruption of morals. To them, the works of Robison and Barruel explained the turning away from their brand of religion as the result of an anti-Christian plot. The appeal is understandable. Their flocks were only shrinking because Illuminati agents of the devil were secretly corrupting their society. Reverend Jedidiah Morse, famous for his work in American geography, was the most adamant in his preaching of the Illuminati conspiracy theory. From his Boston pulpit in May of 1798, Morse declared that there was a conspiracy “to root out and abolish Christianity, and overturn all civil government.” Soon Morse was not the only one taking up the conspiracy claim. Congregationalist theologian and president of Yale Dr. Timothy Dwight preached it as well. This clerical campaign represents a concrete effort to move away from the enlightenment ideal of the separation of church and state and an effort to Christianize the nation. In the ramp up to the presidential election of 1800, these Congregationalists naturally threw their weight behind the party and candidate that had positioned themselves as being against the Illuminati threat by being anti-French: the Federalists and John Adams. So in an American election year, we have preachers at their pulpits convincing their parishioners that they must vote a certain way because of a false conspiracy theory. It’s just this sort of thing that the Johnson Amendment of 1954, which denied tax exemption to organizations involved in partisan politics, was meant to prevent, an amendment that the Trump administration has attempted to do away with recently through executive order and tax legislation. With the power of New England organized religion behind them, helping to convince even the less politically conscious that Thomas Jefferson was a threat to America, they likely would have succeeded in getting Adams reelected. But they didn’t count on their conspiracy theory being turned around on them.

Portrait of Jedidiah Morse. Public domain work available at Wikimedia Commons.

There is a strong argument to be made that the result of the election of 1800 owed a lot to a series of newspaper articles that appeared in a Philadelphia newspaper called the Aurora during the years leading up to the election. This anti-Federalist, Jeffersonian organ saw its circulation increase substantially after it began publishing the diatribes of a preacher named John Ogden, who spent many of his columns enumerating the offenses of the Federalist powers against, for example, an innocent congressman they had jailed for political reasons, or a poor widow that they had ruined. Rather than focusing his withering articles on only the politicians in power, though, he identified the orthodox Congregationalists of New England, especially Yale’s Dr. Dwight, as the pharisees that reinforced their power. He depicted Dwight as a popish figure and accused him of indoctrinating the youth at Yale, and he characterized the existing power structure as a blend of both priestcraft and aristocracy that was threatening to destroy the foundations of our new democratic republic. And when Morse and Dwight started their Illuminati disinformation campaign, Ogden flung their accusations right back at them, calling them the Clerical Illuminati of New England. By his reckoning, the Federalist brand of government looked far more like the authoritarianism of the Bavarian Illuminati, and the orthodox Congregationalist suppression of alternative doctrines showed that they were the true enemies of religion. Ogden’s Illuminati looked far more like the modern idea of a “deep state,” an entrenched power structure, but rather than a bureaucratic machine, it was a secret marriage of church and state. In the topsy-turvy, paranoid rhetoric of that election year, the fact that the Federalists and Congregationalists were so vehemently insisting that the Democratic-Republican Jeffersonians were the Illuminati was the clearest evidence that it was the other way around, since clearly the Illuminati would accuse their enemies of being the conspirators in order to hide the truth that they were the conspirators themselves. Ogden passed away before the election was decided, but his widely read counter-accusations appear to have been a decisive factor, helping to sweep Thomas Jefferson into office in 1800 despite the fact that many still suspected him of being a godless agent of chaos.

After the election of 1800, with no concrete evidence of the conspiracy ever coming out despite the Reverend Jedidiah Morse insisting that he had incontrovertible proof in his possession, the Illuminati scare just dissipated. President Jefferson clearly wasn’t going to abolish all religion and overthrow all civil government, and a few years later, the French appeared to be moving away from the fearful brand of democracy associated with the Illuminati conspiracy when their Senate proclaimed Napoleon Emperor. Thus, the specter of the Illuminati faded into the background of political discourse for about a quarter century, until the kidnapping and suspected murder of one man once again dredged up the talk of a sinister Illuminati conspiracy in relation to Freemasonry. In 1826, a man named Captain William Morgan who had recently been involved with Masonry in upstate New York advertised his intention to publish a book revealing their initiation rites. In retaliation, some local Masons had him jailed on a minor debt then pulled him out of the jailhouse, after which he was never seen again. Outrage over this crime led to a political movement to suppress Freemasonry in America, not because of any specific Illuminati-esque plot, though. Rather, it was because many civil servants were also Masons, and it was argued that their vows of loyalty to their lodges and fellow Masons superseded their oaths of office, inviting corruption. Out of this movement grew an organized third political party in America for the first time, the Anti-Masonic Party, which in the 1830s was actually the first party to ever conduct a convention for the nomination of a presidential candidate. During these years of rampant anti-Masonic rhetoric, the word Illuminati was certainly tossed about frequently again, as if it were a slur synonymous with Freemason, for Barruel and Robison had effectively linked the two forever. If you want to know more about William Morgan and this chapter of American history, you can get yourself a copy of my historical novel, Manuscript Found, in which I go into far more detail. Maybe one day I’ll do an entire episode on the topic, but for our purposes in this study, suffice it to say that this was only a blip in the story of the Illuminati conspiracy theory in America, a short-lived and minor resurgence of the language rather than the theory itself.

A depiction of Captain William Morgan’s alleged murder at the hands of Freemasons. Public Domain work available at Wikimedia Commons.

For a long time after the Anti-Masonic movement, conspiracy theory in America was more dominated by nativism, specifically positing that the Catholic Church was plotting to overthrow our democracy. As though taking up the legacy of his father, the Reverend Jedidiah Morse’s son, Samuel Morse, the telegraphy pioneer, spread his own brand of conspiracy theory in Foreign Conspiracy Against the Liberties of the United States. Samuel Morse’s conspiracy theory was not about the Illuminati, but in some regards it shared themes with the theory his father had promulgated. Both postulated that a sinister cabal out of Europe was secretly acting to undermine American government and religion. Also, just like the Illuminati conspiracy theory, Samuel Morse’s Anti-Catholic conspiracy theory developed into a creed justifying bigotry, specifically against the Irish and other Catholic immigrant groups. As for the Illuminati conspiracy theory, it would eventually become inextricably linked to anti-Semitism, but that would not occur until the 19th century, after the emergence of forgery The Protocols of the Elders of Zion. Ever since the Middle Ages and the rise of the Blood Libel, there had been some form of a conspiracy theory that Jews all over world conspired against Christians, but it wasn’t until the Protocols hoax that this conspiracy theory took a form undeniably similar to that of the Illuminati, spreading the idea that Jews were not just scheming to desecrate the host or commit ritual murder or poison wells… but that they were engaged in an organized worldwide plot to overthrow all governments and religions. Interestingly, the tendency to link Jews to the Illuminati conspiracy theory seems to have been present from the beginning. In 1806, Abbé Barruel received a letter from a Piedmontese soldier named Jean Baptiste Simonini that claimed it was really the Jews behind the Freemasons and the Illuminati. To his credit, after some further research, Barruel decided that this Simonini fellow was wrong, that although many Jews were Freemasons, it was the Freemasons generally, manipulated by the Illuminati, who had conspired to foment the French Revolution. And he even suggested that blaming the Jews was dangerous and could lead to a massacre.

It would not be until the work of one Nesta Webster that the Illuminati theory and the Jewish World Conspiracy theory would become more concretely combined. Daughter of a successful banker, Nesta Webster was a British woman of means who had travelled the world. Along the way, she developed the notion that she was the reincarnation of a French duchess who had been guillotined during the Terror. This started her interest in the French Revolution, which she began to research and write about, along the way, predictably, encountering the work of Abbé Barruel, which she accepted enthusiastically. In her book The French Revolution: A Study in Democracy, she revived Barruel’s theory of an Illuminist-Masonic plot having orchestrated the French Revolution, and her work was accepted as credible by none other than Winston Churchill, who then helped spread the ideas of Barruel further, stating “This conspiracy against civilization dates from the days of Weishaupt... as a modern historian Mrs Webster has so ably shown, it played a recognisable role on the French Revolution.” But Nesta Webster did not just parrot Barruel’s ideas. She took them further, suggesting that Communism and the widespread European revolutions of 1848 were later examples of the Illuminati revolution machine at work, and that Bolshevism in Russia was the new Jacobinism, the latest evidence of the Illuminati plot. After developing this idea in her next book, The French Terror and Russian Bolshevism, she eventually made the leap to anti-Semitic conspiracy theorist, based on the idea promulgated in The Protocols of the Elders of Zion that Bolshevism was a Jewish plot, arguing that the Illuminati conspiracy to spark revolutions the world over had been a Jewish conspiracy plot all along, with the Rothschild Jewish banking family behind it. Unsurprisingly, Nesta Webster’s far right views led her to become involved with British fascist groups. And I’m not just labeling these organizations fascist; they were explicitly self-described fascist groups, like the British Fascisti, comprised of members of the British Conservative Party who were troubled by the Bolshevik Revolution, inspired by Mussolini, and described themselves as Christian patriots; and later, the British Union of Fascists, an actual fascist political party. By the 1930s, Nesta Webster was defending Nazi persecution of Jews and praising Hitler for fighting the supposed Jewish conspiracy.

Photo of young Nesta Webster. Public domain work available at Wikimedia Commons.

Returning to America and the influence of the Illuminati conspiracy in our own politics, it may come as no surprise that white supremacist groups like the Ku Klux Klan discovered the writings of Nesta Webster and touted them as scholarly evidence of a Jewish plot against Christians. But it was Webster’s linking of the Illuminati and a Jewish World Conspiracy to Communism that really drove the resurgence of the theory in America. In the midst of the so-called Second Red Scare and Senator Joseph McCarthy’s campaign against Communism in America, the John Birch Society was formed by a Massachusetts candymaker, and it was this group that would bring Nesta Webster’s revitalized version of Barruel and Robison’s Illuminati theory into modern U.S.  politics, and in the process reshape conservative politics in America. Named after a military intelligence officer killed in a confrontation with Chinese Communist forces at the end of World War II, The John Birch Society made clear from the beginning that they believed the threat of Communism was far more than an economic model or political ideology. One quote from their founding meeting clarifies their view of Communism as a worldwide conspiracy, as there at the start of things, they asserted that “both the U.S. and Soviet governments are controlled by the same furtive conspiratorial cabal of internationalists, greedy bankers, and corrupt politicians. If left unexposed, the traitors inside the U.S. government would betray the country's sovereignty to the United Nations for a collectivist New World Order, managed by a ‘one-world socialist government.’” Through their publications, Review of the News and American Opinion and later The New American, they spread their version of a worldwide Communist conspiracy, and folding Nesta Webster’s version of events into their own, it just became more and more massive and sinister. The version of history spread by the John Birch Society is that, after pulling off the French Revolution through their front groups, the Illuminati continued their orchestration of revolutionary activity through other secret societies, like the Carbonari in Italy and Masonic or Masonry-inspired societies across Europe. They saw only the machinations of the Illuminati leading up to the Springtime of the Peoples in numerous countries during 1848. Despite the fact that they were more like the American and French revolutions in that for the most part they sought the end of absolute monarchy and the establishment of representative democracy, the John Birch Society characterized them as the first Communist revolutions, kicked off by Karl Marx’s publication of The Communist Manifesto. And rather than admitting that Communism might have been a genuine historical development or a natural evolution of socialist thought, they said this too was part of the plot, reducing Marx to nothing more than a hireling paid by the Illuminati to write the manifesto in order to provide a new revolutionary philosophy for a new age. Of course, one can easily counter this idea by citing Marx’s work as a newspaper editor in the Rhineland years before he was supposedly hired by the Illuminati, as a clear progression of his theories can be discerned. But the John Birch Society was, to use Marx’s turn of phrase, haunted by the specter of Communism, seeing in every progressive, every liberal, even every moderate conservative, a secret agent of the Illuminati.

Thus the Illuminati came to be used, once again, as a tool of the conservative right, especially the far right, as a weapon against the far left that they feared or hated. But just as in the election of 1800, it would soon be taken up by their rivals and used against them. During the 1960’s, riding a cresting wave of counter-culture and civil disobedience, a new concept of the Illuminati was born. It started in the pages of Playboy Magazine, which published a letter about the Illuminati suggesting they might be behind the assassinations of King and Kennedy and giving a false background that the Illuminati could be traced to the Historical Arabic Order of Assassins, or Hashishim, though there is no clear connection between them or any other ancient mystical group, as discussed in my most recent patron exclusive, The Myth of Occult Illuminism. Then more letters appeared, each contradicting the last, more and more confusing the understanding of the Illuminati theory that I have tried to clarify in detail during this series. It turns out that these letters were fake, written by a Playboy staff member named Robert Anton Wilson, in collaboration with one Kerry Thornley, author of a little pamphlet called Principia Discordia. Thornley’s book parodied religious tracts and promoted a satirical religion in which the goddess of chaos is worshipped and adherents are encouraged to perpetrate hoaxes like the Illuminati letters to Playboy. Wilson, who would go on to adapt some of these ideas into a popular gonzo fiction series called the Illuminatus! Trilogy, explained that the goal of Discordianism was to fight authoritarianism by spreading disinformation in order to make people think. Their goal in their fake letters to Playboy was to flood readers with competing viewpoints in the hope that they would think critically in order to resolve the conflicts. Ironically, though, it had the opposite effect, increasing awareness of and belief in this baseless conspiracy theory. The Illuminatus! Trilogy is even sometimes mistaken as an exposé of Illuminati activity in modern times, like a sequel to the works of Robison, Barruel, and Webster, when it is clearly an absurdist satire. 

Satirical song about The John Birch Society from the 1960s, performed by the Chad Mitchell Trio, featuring John Denver.

So here we are in the 21st century, and conspiracy theories are a major component of American cultural and political life, playing perhaps the biggest part in a presidential election since 1800. And I would be remiss if I didn’t make it clear that belief in conspiracy theory is not exclusive to the far right. As the example from the pages of Playboy in the 1960s shows, plenty on the left see the Illuminati or similar shadowy groups as being behind the assassination of the Kennedys and Martin Luther King. Liberal proponents of the Illuminati conspiracy love to point to George H. W. Bush’s speech about the Gulf War in 1991, in which he mentions a New World Order, as proof of his involvement in the conspiracy, and 9/11 Truthers will suggest that the neoconservative administration of George W. Bush was secretly behind the September 11th attacks, perpetrating them in order to justify war in the Middle East. Indeed, Qanon paints itself as a non-partisan conspiracy theorist movement, since they see not only establishment Democrats but also establishment Republicans like the Bushes as part of the evil cabal they envision Trump heroically battling. To be clear, I am also not asserting that belief in conspiracy theory indicates stupidity or mental illness. A recent study shows that more than half of all Americans believe in at least one major conspiracy theory. And this is attributed to a specific mindset and psychological factors such as the cognitive biases that I listed at the end of Part One. Another factor that can encourage even very intelligent and level-headed people to engage in conspiracist thinking is narcissism, as the idea that we are privy to the truth when so many are deluded can be very appealing. Existential crises also seem linked to the development of this mindset. Feelings of personal anxiety and alienation, especially when combined with anxiety over the state of society, can draw us down the path of spiraling conspiracy theory, and doesn’t that just describe how we are all feeling right now in 2020? Nevertheless, another recent study does seem to suggest that this “conspiracy mindset” does disproportionately affect those on the right side of the political spectrum.

It used to be that conspiratorial thinking was more common among the right when the left were in power, and more common among the left when the right held the reins of government. Now, though, with a conspiracy theory salesman in the highest office of the land, this no longer seems accurate. Even The John Birch Society, purveyor of a Jewish World Conspiracy theory thinly veiled as anti-Communist conservative patriotism, has agreed that their brand of paranoid politics contributed to or even is responsible for the rise of Trump in their article “Is ‘Trumpism’ Really ‘Bircherism’?” In the 1960s, when the JBS first came on the scene, true conservatives like William F. Buckley, Jr., decried their feverish paranoia as fringe madness and warned that “sincere conservatives” ought to distance themselves from their views, which he described as “far removed from reality and common sense.” Yet today, Bircherism has become the norm for the GOP, or at least for the version of it that Trump and his base have made dominant. One cannot help but see a parallel here of a political society convincing a large swathe of the common people that the powers that be must be overthrown… could the John Birch Society and Qanon be the real Illuminati? Of course it’s possible that Trump and the anonymous Q really believe the misinformation they’re spreading. One last psychological feature of conspiracy belief is projection, the idea that one assumes those in power have undesirable character attributes because of one’s own undesirable character, and this could well explain why the Trump administration, which has proven itself to be the most corrupt administration in modern history, might spread the idea that their political rivals are secretly so very corrupt. But to engage in a bit of tit-for-tat, as Ogden did back in the election of 1800, consider the notion that there is no “deep state” arrayed against Trump, but rather that, by taking over the Republican Party apparatus the way the Illuminati tried to take over Freemasonry, it is his own power that has become entrenched. Ponder a moment whether it’s possible that, rather than being engaged in a secret war against Satanic establishment powers as Q claims, Trump has already overthrown establishment powers to raise up an extremist, far-right New World Order. Just as it was once said that the Illuminati might point to their enemies and call them the Illuminati, couldn’t it also be said that Trump and his bootlickers in the John Birch Society and Qanon and all the far right madmen and talking heads, like Alex Jones, Glenn Beck, Ben Shapiro, Dinesh D’Souza, Tucker Carlson, and Sean Hannity, are all agents of the real conspiracy, pointing their finger with one hand so you don’t pay attention to what the other hand is doing? And if that sounds too far-fetched for you, then you should find all of their massive conspiracy theories just as unbelievable.

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Further Reading

Barruel, Augustin. Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism. American Council on Economics and Society, 1995. Internet Archive, archive.org/stream/BarruelMemoirsIllustratingTheHistoryOfJacobinism/barruel+Memoirs+Illustrating+the+History+of+Jacobinism_djvu.txt.

Briceland, Alan V. “The Philadelphia Aurora, The New England Illuminati, and The Election of 1800.” Pennsylvania Magazine of History and Biography, Jan. 1976, pp. 3-36. PennState University Libraries, journals.psu.edu/pmhb/article/view/43215/42936.

Buckley, William F. “Goldwater, the John Birch Society, and Me.” Commentary, www.commentarymagazine.com/articles/william-buckley-jr/goldwater-the-john-birch-society-and-me/.

Calfas, Jennifer. “President Trump Warns of 'the Calm Before the Storm' During Military Meeting.” Time, 5 Oct. 2017, time.com/4971738/donald-trump-calm-before-the-storm-military-white-house/.

Coaston, Jane. “QAnon, the Scarily Popular Pro-Trump Conspiracy Theory, Explained.” Vox, 21 Aug. 2020, www.vox.com/policy-and-politics/2018/8/1/17253444/qanon-trump-conspiracy-theory-4chan-explainer.

Dickey, Colin. “Did an Illuminati Conspiracy Theory Help Elect Thomas Jefferson?” Politico, 29 March 2020, www.politico.com/news/magazine/2020/03/29/illuminati-conspiracy-theory-thomas-jeffersion-1800-election-152934.

Galer, Sophia Smith. “The Accidental Invention of the Illuminati Conspiracy.” BBC, 11 July 2020, www.bbc.com/future/article/20170809-the-accidental-invention-of-the-illuminati-conspiracy.

“The Great Seal of the United States.” U.S. Department of State, Bureau of Public Affairs, July 2003, 2009-2017.state.gov/documents/organization/27807.pdf.

Griffin, Andrew. “What Is Qanon? The Origins of Bizarre Conspiracy Theory Spreading Online.” Independent, 24 Aug. 2020, www.independent.co.uk/life-style/gadgets-and-tech/news/qanon-explained-what-trump-russia-investigation-pizzagate-a8845226.html.

Hofman, Amos. “Opinion, Illusion, and the Illusion of Opinion: Barruel's Theory of Conspiracy.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, 1993, pp. 27–60. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2739276. Accessed 15 Sept. 2020.

Jay, Mike. “Darkness Over All: John Robison and the Birth of the Illuminati Conspiracy.” The Public Domain Review, 2 April 2014, publicdomainreview.org/essay/darkness-over-all-john-robison-and-the-birth-of-the-illuminati-conspiracy.

Martineau, Oaris. “The Storm Is the New Pizzagate — Only Worse.” New York, 19 Dec. 2017, nymag.com/intelligencer/2017/12/qanon-4chan-the-storm-conspiracy-explained.html.

Mason, Paul. “The QAnon Conspiracy Theory Is Absurd but Dangerous. Politicians Must Confront It.” NewStatesman, 2 Sep. 2020, www.newstatesman.com/world/2020/09/qanon-conspiracy-theory-absurd-dangerous-politicians-must-confront-it.

Mounier, J. J. On the Influence Attributed to Philosophers, Free-Masons, and to the Illuminati on the Revolution of France. W. and C Spilsbury, 1801. HathiTrust Digital Library, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101007617051&view=1up&seq=5.

Moyer, Melinda Wenner. “People Drawn to Conspiracy Theories Share a Cluster of Psychological Features.” Scientific American, Springer Nature America, Inc., 1 March 2019, www.scientificamerican.com/article/people-drawn-to-conspiracy-theories-share-a-cluster-of-psychological-features/.

Newman, Alex. “Is ‘Trumpism’ Really ‘Bircherism’?” The New American, 22 Nov. 2016, thenewamerican.com/is-trumpism-really-bircherism/.

Robison, John. Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. T. Dobson, 1798. Project Gutenburg, www.gutenberg.org/files/47605/47605-h/47605-h.htm.

Snell, Rachel A. “Jedidiah Morse and the Crusade for the New Jerusalem: The Cultural Catalysts of the Bavarian Illuminati Conspiracy” (Thesis). The Honors College at the University of Maine, May 2006. DigitalCommons@UMaine, digitalcommons.library.umaine.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1006&context=honors.

Stanton, Gregory. “QAnon is a Nazi Cult, Rebranded.” Just Security, 9 Sep. 2020, www.justsecurity.org/72339/qanon-is-a-nazi-cult-rebranded/.

Taylor, Michael. “British Conservatism, the Illuminati, and the Conspiracy Theory of the French Revolution, 1797–1802.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 47, no. 3, 2014, pp. 293–312. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24690289. Accessed 15 Sept. 2020.

Vittert, Liberty. “Are conspiracy theories on the rise in the US?” The Conversation, 18 Sep. 2019, theconversation.com/are-conspiracy-theories-on-the-rise-in-the-us-121968.

Wolf, Jessica. “Research Confirms Political Views Predict Whether People Trust False Information About Dangers, Even After Party Shift.” Phys.org, 18 Dec. 2018, phys.org/news/2018-12-political-views-people-false-dangers.html.

The Illuminati Illuminated, Part One: The Order's Origins

Four years ago, when Donald Trump was campaigning for the office of President, he ran on the idea that, as an outsider, he was best suited to clean up corruption in government, and he complained that, because of this, all the forces of establishment politics were arrayed against him. While this may have been true during the Republican primaries, it certainly was no longer the truth following his nomination, after which his party fell in line behind him as if he’d always been their first choice. Politics as usual. However, Trump never gave up his claims that an entrenched bureaucracy was sabotaging him and preventing him from doing the will of his constituents—an odd claim when he and his party held the executive office, the majority in both houses of Congress, and made history with the number of conservative judges they were appointing to federal courts and the Supreme Court. With what looked like a growing dominance over every branch of our government, it seems absurd to complain about his power being blocked. Nevertheless, every time something leaked from his administration or whenever one of his own was indicted for the very kind of corruption he had run on rooting out, his supporters blamed it on a so-called “deep state,” a kind of shadow government sabotaging their outsider president and limiting what he could do. Soon, Trump himself, already known to favor and amplify conspiracy theories like birtherism, climate change denialism, and anti-vaccination claims—began to use the term “deep state” to describe the nebulous forces he and his supporters claimed were actively foiling him. But the term did not originate here. It was originally used to describe those loyal to the secular nationalism of Turkey, who engage in violent resistance to the ruling party of President Tayyip Erdoğan. While in Turkey it refers to an actual conspiratorial network that did not shrink from murder, in America, it is used to refer to any resistance, from leakers in their own employ to negative press, none of which is uncommon or conspiratorial. Emails in which career bureaucrats expressed negative opinions of the new President were held up as proof of a plot against him, despite the fact that any new administration has to deal with holdovers from previous administrations who often don’t care for the new boss. None of this is proof of conspiracy, but that hasn’t stopped the conspiracy mongering during the last four years, which has seen the conservative conspiracy machine operated by such organizations as The John Birch Society folding this conspiracy into their already unwieldy conspiratorial view of world politics and history, suggesting this “Deep State” is just the façade of an even deeper state, composed of political think tanks and economic conferences, like the Council on Foreign Relations, the Bilderberg group, and the Trilateral Commission, and beyond them influential banking families like the Rockefellers and the Rothschilds. And if you keep pulling back the curtain, they say, you’ll find an old and insidious conspiracy, one responsible for all the major political upheavals of the modern age: the Illuminati.

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I have covered historical conspiracy theories before, including the survival of the Templars in a patron exclusive podcast minisode, the assassination of Martin Luther King, Jr. in a lengthy series, and numerous posts that address aspects of the false Jewish World Conspiracy theory. Perhaps only the last of these could possibly rival the scope of the claims about the Illuminati, and even then, it’s unclear that they can be separated. Certainly, Illuminati conspiracy theories contributed to the claims of a worldwide Jewish plot, but there are also claims that it preceded any such plots. Some conspiracists who argue that the Illuminati are bent on the subversion of all governments and the destruction of religion will claim that the Illuminati can be traced all the way back to antiquity, to the sorcerous magi of old, and the Gnostic secret societies within early Christianity that seemed bent on perverting orthodox doctrines. If you don’t know what I’m referring to, luckily I did episodes earlier this year about the Zoroastrian magi and Gnosticism that you can listen to for context. However, to simplify things, I can tell you that the Illuminati, first of all, were very real, and their origins, along with the origins of modern conspiracy theory as we know it, can be traced back to Europe during the Age of Enlightenment, in the late 18th century. Because of this, my recent series on miracles purported to have occurred in Enlightenment France also serves as a perfect backdrop to this series. Also called the Age of Reason, this period is characterized by the spread of the philosophical notions that reason is the key to knowledge and that liberty is a human right. These beliefs led many to rebel against absolute monarchy as a system of government and to throw off the yoke of traditional religion. Thus we see the revolutions of the American colonies as well as the French Revolution in these years as an organic response to specific grievances as well as a swing toward ideals of freedom and democracy. But this was a time of frightening and sudden change, especially for the more conservative of the era. Many were looking for some simpler explanation of what was behind the violent upsets of established order that they saw transpiring around them. In 1797, almost a decade after the start of the French Revolution and nearly simultaneously, two books appeared, each written without knowledge of the other, that offered many the explanation for which they yearned. A French Jesuit priest named Abbé Augustin Barruel published his Memoirs Illustrating the History of Jacobinism, and Scottish Professor of Natural Philosophy John Robison published his Proofs of a Conspiracy against all the Religions and Governments of Europe, both of which argued that a theretofore obscure secret society called the Illuminati was the prime mover responsible for the bloody revolution in France.

A cartoon that illustrates what many thought of the Age of Reason at the time. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Maybe it stretches the imagination that these nearly identical theories appeared simultaneously, but it appears they did, much as the theory of evolution occurred separately to both Charles Darwin and Alfred Russell Wallace during the same years, but in this case it is not because the theory was accurate. That is not to say that this secret society was made up, though. Far from it. The Illuminati did exist, and not everything that Barruel and Robison claimed about their intentions can be dismissed as false. What we know is that the Order of the Illuminati was founded in the university town of Ingolstadt, in the Electorate of Bavaria, in 1776. Now before that year sends any of you spiraling into conspiracy theories about Illuminist Founding Fathers in America, let me assure you that in that year, it was but a fledgling club, with few members from recruited mostly from among the university student body. There are claims that the Illuminati eventually reached U.S. shores, though, and I’ll address those later, in part two of this series. At the time of its creation, its originator, a young Professor of Canon Law at the University of Ingolstadt, Adam Weishaupt, who had dreamed up the order before his thirtieth year, conceived of it as a tool for spreading Enlightenment ideals, a remedy for the twin evils of ignorance and superstition that plagued humanity. The idea was to create a network of likeminded men who were in influential positions, such as advisors to sovereign rulers, who could quietly whisper to the leaders of this world, pushing them and therefore everyone, away from vice and toward virtue, with an eye to remaking the social order according to republican principles and attaining liberty for all peoples.

These appear to have been the Order’s objectives when Weishaupt first discussed it with friends, back when he was still toying with calling them the Perfectibilists, a name which further indicates his desire for the betterment of the world. However, Weishaupt also believed that those in power would work against these ends, and so his idea was to work in secret, through a society structured like the Freemasons, with numerous degrees to keep secrets from all but the innermost circle, but designed more like the Jesuits, who centralized power in one man, which would be Weishaupt himself, Rex or king of the Illuminati—an ironic structure since the group’s stated objectives were to do away with such clerical authority and absolute power structures. At first, slow to spread and with few members of any influence, Weishaupt’s endeavor seemed doomed to failure, but then he met Baron Adolph von Knigge, who had some influence in Masonic circles and took an interest in the goals of Weishaupt’s Illuminati. It was resolved that, in order to accomplish their goals, they would need to essentially appropriate the existing infrastructure of the Freemasons, by presenting Illuminism as the final uppermost degree of Masonry to be attained, at which the true aims of the Freemasons would be revealed—a kind of top-down hostile takeover of Continental Freemasonry. This Baron von Knigge set about doing, travelling around to lodges throughout Europe and initiating Masons into the Illuminati until the numbers of Weishaupt’s order finally began to swell, and its reach to spread.

Portrait of Weishaupt. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

According to Abbé Barruel, the conspiracy really started before the organization of the Illuminati, though, with the writings of the philosophes of the French Academy. He argued that Enlightenment thinkers like Voltaire, Rousseau, and Diderot had commenced the plot with their popular writings advocating for reason and progress and denouncing organized religion. Indeed, Barruel had been a vocal critic of the philosophes long before the French Revolution and the formulation of his grand conspiracy theory. Rather than seeing them as proponents of liberty and equality, he believed them to be a band of rabble-rousers fomenting unrest by redefining words like reason and terms like public opinion in an effort to undermine hierarchy and make the will of the populace sovereign, which was tantamount to treason. While most of these thinkers were Deists, meaning that rather than espousing a particular religion they instead arrived at a belief in a creator god based on observation and reason, to Barruel and many other clergy, this was only atheism under a different name, so he saw the destruction of Christianity as part and parcel of the plot of the philosophes, making them, quite literally, anti-Christ. While Barruel was not the only person to suggest that the philosophes contributed to the revolutionary ideology of the Jacobins and other revolutionary groups in France—indeed this is widely agreed upon—he appears to be the first to suggest that the public politics their philosophy helped bring forth could not have possibly evolved organically from ideas in the zeitgeist but rather must have been a premeditated ploy thrust upon the public by wicked academics bent on overturning the natural order. Likewise, Robison was not the only observer at the time or since to suggest the organizational structures and memberships of French Freemasonry might have overlapped or provided a framework for the revolutionary clubs like the Jacobins, but he and Barruel were alone in seeing a concerted and premeditated plot by the Freemasons to manipulate the masses and incite them to revolt, not for the Enlightenment principles they preached but in reality to achieve their own secret ends. And certainly unique was the addition of the Illuminati as the central command, inspired by the philosophes to transform the world into a place with no order, no law, no religion, insinuating their way like a parasite into the massive lodge system of the Freemasons and through them playing the public like a puppet. By their reckoning, the Illuminati, through the Freemasons, made real the impious and apocalyptic dreams of the philosophes by overthrowing both church and state, toppling altar and throne alike to usher in a new age of chaos and bloodshed.

Much of what Barruel and Robison claimed cannot in good faith be denied. First, Adam Weishaupt and the likeminded men he initiated into his order were certainly inspired by the Enlightenment ideals of the philosophes and other modern thinkers. Even their name, Illuminati, the illuminated or enlightened ones, seems to be a reflection of their Enlightenment principles. But more than this, their practices and stated goals were not as innocent as many apologists and debunkers often suggest in their efforts to discredit Barruel and Robison’s theories. The fact of the matter is that the public was eventually made privy to the innermost secret intentions of the Order of the Illuminati. In 1785, Charles Theodore, the Elector of Bavaria, concerned about the power wielded by secret societies whose memberships included many influential persons, outlawed all such orders. It was not long before the Illuminati came to his attention. According to Barruel, this transpired because a high-ranking member happened to be struck by lightning, and on his smoking body were found numerous papers and communiques that revealed the Illuminati and their plans. This story of Barruel’s isn’t supported anywhere else, though, and could well be fiction. Regardless, it is clear that, once the Elector began his campaign against secret societies, some low-ranking members betrayed the order out of resentment for never being raised to higher degrees, and soon raids were being conducted on members of Weishaupt’s inner circle. It wasn’t long before their papers were being published for all of Bavaria to read, and rather than revealing that they were just an idealistic group innocently promoting egalitarian ideals, they showed that they really were nefarious and deserved to be suppressed. Among the lower order members, they may have represented their aims as being this innocuous—to serve as a positive influence on mankind, especially to those in power, to encourage benevolence and discourage fanaticism—but among the inner circle, they emphasized a further end of establishing a world that had no need for monarchs and magistrates, princes and priests. While to many today this still seems a noble goal, the very fact that they kept their true objectives a secret even from their underlings goes to show that they were an untrustworthy group. Indeed, their papers show that they did not shrink from recommending criminal acts to seize power for their cause, like having members who were close to government officials steal and copy their seals in order to facilitate forgery. Their lofty ideals were tarnished by the very fact that they believed they could only be realized through manipulation and deceit. Believing that they knew better than the people what the people needed turned their democratic crusade into a plot for authoritarian control.

Portrait of Augustin Barruel. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Thus in 1785, four years before the French Revolution, the Order of the Illuminati was crushed, and Weishaupt and his lieutenants found themselves exiled. This turn of events serves as the central evidence against Barruel and Robison’s theses. The Illuminati had been shut down, its leaders scattered and forced into retirement, long before the events attributed to them in France. Weishaupt himself just devoted himself to writing various screeds defending his former endeavor, no longer even pretending at secrecy. And the very fact that he could not keep his order’s existence or its schemes a secret in Bavaria, whether because of a random act of god smiting someone with lightning or because of treachery from within, serves to demonstrate that a conspiracy of such a size is doomed to be revealed, and not by lone theorists in manifestos. Barruel and Robison claimed that the Illuminati had survived their exposure and suppression, but they offered no evidence. Indeed, using the telltale circular reasoning of a paranoid, they suggested that the very fact that there was no evidence of the conspiracy served as evidence of its existence. And beyond this conjecture presented as fact, Barruel and Robison also misrepresented the Illuminati’s objectives and practices in numerous ways. For example, even in their secret writings, the Illuminati did not encourage the incitement of violence. They intended to surround the powerful with men who would guide them toward establishing a perfect world, a global community, a eutopia, and they were very specific that revolutions were not to be fomented, as those simply replace one tyranny with another. They believed that wise counsel should have no recourse to violence. They did indeed seek a dramatic change in world order, abolishing property and authority, but they saw government as serving a role like that of a parent, necessary at first, but to be outgrown. In the case of humanity, they did not anticipate that these changes would happen for thousands of years and certainly did not intend to precipitate a hasty and violent reform. Barruel would argue that the truly evil plots were not made known beyond the highest degrees, but in truth, when Baron Knigge traveled among the Masonic lodges of Europe trying to grow their numbers, he readily offered the highest degrees in order to tempt Freemasons into the fold. Still, Abbé Barruel insisted, there were even higher degrees than the papers and testimonies revealed, the degree of the Magi, he called them, trying to conjure images of occult evil, and it was in those degrees, he assured his readers, that the really evil stuff happened. But there is no evidence of this.

All these things have been pointed out since the time Barruel’s and Robison’s books were published, in such authoritative refutations as Jean Joseph Mounier’s On the Influence Attributed to Philosophers, Free-Masons, and to the Illuminati, on the Revolution of France. Works such as this, and the continuing empirical scholarship of history that helps us understand more and more all the various contributing factors that culminated in the French Revolution, are why no serious historian entertains Barruel’s or Robison’s theories today, and why anyone who still relies on them as an academic proof of an Illuminati conspiracy theory is an outlier pretending at genuine historical analysis. If you challenge them on the reliability of these sources, they will likely resort to even wider conspiracy theories and suggest that historians everywhere are in on the plot to discredit Barruel and Robison. But the fact of the matter is that Barruel and Robison discredited themselves. As stated, Barruel was already a rabid opponent of the philosophes with an axe to grind, especially after the French Revolution forced him, as a clergyman, out of the country. He could not admit that the revolution had been a genuine grassroots phenomenon or that church and throne had done anything to precipitate it, so a shadowy cabal of godless provocateurs was the only natural answer. And when none of the Illuminati papers revealed an atheistic tenet, he said it must have been a closely held secret atheism, and he even, according to Mounier, mistranslated a passage discussing how to appeal to initiates that were enthusiasts of the theosophy of Swedenborg and Rosicrucianism, representing it instead as being about how to initiate people who suffer from “the fantasy of believing in God.” Mournier suggests this error is so egregious that either Barruel’s grasp of German was so tenuous that we cannot trust any of his analysis of Illuminati papers, or he was translating unfaithfully, and thus deceptively. As for Robison, he had previously been a man of strong reputation in the scientific community, but ever since a debilitating groin spasm had sent him into torturous isolation and drove him to abusing opium, he was known to suffer from paranoia and depression. It was in this state, that he read the constant barrage of news on the French Revolution. Add to this his resentment of French thinkers like Antoine Lavoisier who were revolutionizing Robison’s field of chemistry with notions that didn’t leave much room for God, and we have another reactionary seeing plots to overturn the natural order. Being a Freemason himself, and having visited Continental lodges and disliked the brand of Enlightenment atheism and licentious behavior he saw there, secret societies became a natural component of his theory, one that, as with Barruel, might reflect more on his own prejudices.

Portrait of John Robison. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Despite the credibility issues of these authors and their books, the Illuminati conspiracy theory of the French Revolution gained quite a bit of traction among conservatives in Britain. When one considers why this was, though, it becomes clear that they were drawn to the theory for the same reasons that Robison and Barruel concocted it: namely that it jibed well with their prejudices and provided a simpler explanation than the messy reality. British conservatives harbored their own distaste for the philosophes of the French Academy, preferring to lionize their homegrown philosophers like Roger Bacon, Robert Boyle, and Isaac Newton, who always kept God at the center of their philosophy. The suggestion that the Enlightenment philosophers of France were actually demoniacal agents of evil struck them as reasonable because of the disdain in which they already held them. Moreover, this view of a diabolical conspiracy to overthrow God’s ordained systems of governance gave them ammunition against their own political opponents at home. Thus when the Society of United Irishmen, inspired by revolutionary movements abroad, rose up against British rule, conservatives declared that the Illuminati had stirred up yet another club of Jacobins, this time in their own backyard. And when a group of vocal advocates for women’s rights emerged under the leadership of Mary Wollstonecraft, they declared them to be “Illuminata,” or female adepts of the order, bent on seducing all British women into depravity as part of their grand conspiracy to overthrow all moral standards. In their minds, as in the minds of most conspiracy theorists, nothing ever just happens, at least not the things with which they’re uncomfortable. There are no liberal or progressive tendencies. People don’t just stand up for their rights, or for change, not even because they are inspired by others who have done the same. Instead, they must be pawns moved by the devil’s own hand.

There are more than a few reasons that a historian might cite to disprove the Illuminati theory of the French Revolution, such as all the social and cultural dominos that fell in the decades beforehand, some of the earliest of which I discussed in my series on the Old Regime’s response to Jansenist miracles. And if it does no good to cite the specific failures of the Old Regime to handle particular crises as an explanation for the grievances and motivations of revolutionaries, then there are the facts about philosophes about whom much has been written and Barruel and Robison are poor sources of information about them. For example, many philosophes, such as Voltaire, were sympathetic to and even had close ties with the monarchy and did not want to see them abolished; the most influential, including Voltaire and Rousseau, actually passed away years before the revolution; and numerous Enlightenment scientists, many of whom were also Freemasons, found themselves in the guillotine as well, including Robison’s hated Antoine Lavoisier. Indeed, this conspiracy theory struggles to explain why so many of the initial instigators and later influential figures in the Revolution ended up themselves being victims of their own revolution except to claim that they must have only been pawns as well and not above the fray like the Illuminati prime movers. To many who believe theories like these, it seems a simpler explanation, and in a way it is. Some will even cite Occam’s razor and claim their theory must be true because it is a simpler explanation. In truth, Occam’s razor actually states that among competing hypotheses, one should err on the side of the one with the fewest assumptions. By that yardstick, grand unifying conspiracy theories like this fail miserably. Yet they remain appealing. Psychologists will suggest that it is due to cognitive biases like proportionality bias, which causes one to assume that events with massive implications and effects, like the French Revolution, must have some equally massive cause or must have been caused purposely. Others will say that we are hardwired, through adaptation for survival because of so much time spent scanning our surroundings for danger, to find patterns, and so we sometimes see enemies that aren’t there. Confirmation bias predisposes us to believe a theory that reinforces our existing beliefs, as we have seen was the case among British conservatives, and may also be the case among conservative conspiracy theorists in America today.

In part 2, we will look further into how this theory of a powerful Illuminati conspiracy reached America and changed forever our culture and politics.

Cartoon illustrating the conservative view of the French Revolution. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

Further Reading

Barruel, Augustin. Memoirs Illustrating The History Of Jacobinism. American Council on Economics and Society, 1995. Internet Archive, archive.org/stream/BarruelMemoirsIllustratingTheHistoryOfJacobinism/barruel+Memoirs+Illustrating+the+History+of+Jacobinism_djvu.txt.

Graham, David A. “There Is No American ‘Deep State.’” The Atlantic, 20 Feb. 2017, www.theatlantic.com/international/archive/2017/02/why-its-dangerous-to-talk-about-a-deep-state/517221/.

Hafford, Michael. “Deep State: Inside Donald Trump’s Paranoid Conspiracy Theory.” Rolling Stone, 9 March, 2017, www.rollingstone.com/culture/culture-news/deep-state-inside-donald-trumps-paranoid-conspiracy-theory-124236/.

Hofman, Amos. “Opinion, Illusion, and the Illusion of Opinion: Barruel's Theory of Conspiracy.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 27, no. 1, 1993, pp. 27–60. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2739276. Accessed 15 Sept. 2020.

Jay, Mike. “Darkness Over All: John Robison and the Birth of the Illuminati Conspiracy.” The Public Domain Review, 2 April 2014, publicdomainreview.org/essay/darkness-over-all-john-robison-and-the-birth-of-the-illuminati-conspiracy.

Mounier, J. J. On the Influence Attributed to Philosophers, Free-Masons, and to the Illuminati on the Revolution of France. W. and C Spilsbury, 1801. HathiTrust Digital Library, babel.hathitrust.org/cgi/pt?id=njp.32101007617051&view=1up&seq=5.

Robison, John. Proofs of a Conspiracy against All the Religions and Governments of Europe, Carried on in the Secret Meetings of Free Masons, Illuminati, and Reading Societies. T. Dobson, 1798. Project Gutenburg, www.gutenberg.org/files/47605/47605-h/47605-h.htm.

Taylor, Michael. “British Conservatism, the Illuminati, and the Conspiracy Theory of the French Revolution, 1797–1802.” Eighteenth-Century Studies, vol. 47, no. 3, 2014, pp. 293–312. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/24690289. Accessed 15 Sept. 2020.

The Murder of Lord Darnley, Part Two: The Casket Letters (A Royal Blood Mystery)

At the christening of her and Lord Darnley’s son, on the 17th of December, 1566, Mary, Queen of Scots, seemed on the eve of accomplishing everything she had set out to accomplish since her return to Scotland. The christening was a grand affair, with all her noblemen present at the chapel royal in Stirling, in new finery that she had gifted them, for a Catholic ceremony that kicked off days of opulent celebration. Mary seemed to have recovered from her recent illness—rumored to have been a poisoning—or at least to be putting on a good face in spite of any continued suffering, and her mood must have been elevated by some good news. Just the day before, an envoy from her cousin, Queen Elizabeth, arrived and informed her that the English monarch was finally willing to meet with Mary to negotiate her right of succession to the English throne. However, there were still manifold reasons to be uneasy. First, the archbishop performing the baptism was said to suffer from a pox, so Mary insisted he forgo the customary part of the ceremony in which he spit into the baby’s mouth. Second, her Protestant lords frowned upon the Catholic ceremony and refused to enter the chapel, among them her half-brother the Earl of Moray and even her stalwart supporter and advisor the Earl of Bothwell. Last and most scandalous was the absence of the king, her consort, Lord Darnley, who had travelled to Stirling but refused to attend the ceremony. There had been much talk of Lord Darnley conspiring against her during her illness, and this very public slight left Mary gloomy and brooding between smiles for her guests. Was she changing her mind about the options to rid herself of Lord Darnley at which her lords had lately hinted at Craigmillar? If so, some weeks later, when Lord Darnley himself became ill, she seems to have softened in her attitude toward him. He had run off to Glasgow with rumored plans of fleeing the country to gather some foreign power to his cause, but was struck down with some kind of pustules and wracking pains. It is not clear what illness laid the king so low. Some scholars suggest it was smallpox, while others argue that the majority of the evidence points to syphilis. Of course, at the time, as when Mary had been ill, suspicions were that Darnley had been poisoned, perhaps in retaliation. Darnley, however, doesn’t seem to have thought so, for he begged Mary to come and visit him, and Mary did, confronting him about his scheming against her and holding out the possibility of forgiveness and reconciliation if he would return to Edinburgh with her. Darnley agreed and allowed himself to be carried back on a litter. It is said that a singular raven followed them all the way back to Edinburgh, perhaps a dark omen of what lay at the end of this journey for Darnley. The intention was to install the king at the well-fortified Craigmillar Castle to convalesce, but Darnley didn’t want to stay there, so instead they made their way to Kirk o’Field, where Darnley would meet his final fate, and as they installed the king in his lodgings, the raven that had followed them from Glasgow made its perch on the soon-to-be-demolished building’s rooftop. What were Mary’s intentions in bringing Darnley back to the vipers’ nest that was Edinburgh, where all his enemies would surround him? Was she trying to mend their marriage, or was she playing her part in a murder plot as would later be alleged?

Lord Darnley’s lodgings exploded in February 1567, but his barely clothed body was found in an adjacent garden without a mark on it, with a variety of unscorched items—a chair, a quilt or cloak, a slipper, and a dagger—strewn about him. Beyond the strangeness of this crime scene, there were further details the night before the blast and just after the explosion that must be scrutinized. When Mary had come to see Darnley earlier in the evening, dressed for the masquerade she was later to attend at the palace, she had with her a number of lords who were proven enemies of the king, leading some recent writers to suggest that Darnley himself had planned the explosion as a means of killing his rivals and perhaps Mary as well, and that he was afterward killed in the garden for his actions. But it doesn’t appear that Darnley had any foreknowledge that those lords would visit that night, and by the time the explosion occurred, he certainly knew that no one was around but himself and his servants. Now the idea that whoever prepared the gunpowder that destroyed the lodgings had in mind to murder Mary as well as Darnley is a possibility, since her plans had been to sleep there, not in Darnley’s chambers but in her own, below his, and she only changed her mind when the hour had drawn too late for her to make a suitable appearance at the masquerade and return. Or as her accusers would later spin it, this was her excuse for departing, knowing full well that the powder hidden below would detonate that night. The story of this plot is absolutely obscured in gossip and conflicting testimonies from those accused of being involved, but Mary’s accusers would later assert that the gunpowder had been smuggled into the queen’s chambers below Darnley’s, in a big pile, which could indicate Mary’s involvement, as the plotters wouldn’t have dumped gunpowder in her room if she were planning on retiring there. However, the fact that the building was entirely leveled would seem to indicate gunpowder had been placed among the foundations, perhaps in packed into barrels. Curiously, as Mary made to depart for her masquerade that evening, she noticed that the face of one of her valets, who had previously been Bothwell’s servant, had been blackened, and she commented on how begrimed he looked, to which he only turned red and made no answer. This is a recollection of Mary’s after the fact, but as it would seem to implicate not only herself, as the valet’s mistress, but also Bothwell, whom she was later to defend in the matter, it seems we can trust that it happened, and if we can trust this, it helps exonerate Mary, for if she were aware of a gunpowder plot, she certainly wouldn’t have commented on the sight of her servant being covered in gunpowder. As for Bothwell, this begrimed former servant would not be the last clue of his involvement.

A contemporary sketch of the murder scene at Kirk O’Field. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Just before the explosion decimated the king’s lodging at Kirk o’Field, some lodgers staying near the orchard and garden adjacent to Kirk o’Field heard a man’s voice crying in despair, saying, “Pity me, kinsmen, for the love of Him who had pity on all the world!” Thus, in what may have been Lord Darnley’s final words, he once again acted the pious penitent, appealing fruitlessly to his assassins’ faith. Around this time, a local woman was woken up by the sounds of men running up her street. This would seem to indicate that Darnley had discovered he was in danger, perhaps because he also heard men outside his lodgings, or because he actually somehow discovered the gunpowder, and that he fled, maybe by climbing out a window into the garden with his servant, carrying some of the items that were found with them. Then the men heard running might have seen his escape and pursued him into the garden, where they killed him. Many theoretical versions of the murder had it that Darnley was strangled, but without a mark on him, it is more likely he was smothered, perhaps with the quilt found near him. So then the explosion seems superfluous, unless it was to destroy evidence. Nevertheless, at around 2am, the explosion did happen, so perhaps a fuse had already been lit and the deed could not be undone. Immediately after the blast, two other women, who were on the street, witnessed a group of eleven men running from the area. One of these women tried to grab hold of one of the men to ask where the sound of the explosion had come from, but the man shook off her hand and the group ran on, dividing in half and fleeing in two separate directions. These would seem to be the assassins themselves, as they weren’t described as members of the night watch, who would not be on the scene for a little while longer. Certainly one of the women who saw them thought them suspicious, for she called after them, “Traitors! You have been at some evil turn!” When the night’s watch did show up, they found a man under Bothwell’s command, Captain William Blackadder, already at the scene. This man’s presence was the first thing to implicate the Earl of Bothwell in the king’s murder, and soon, as the queen came to rely more and more on Bothwell’s counsel and defend him from the allegations of his involvement in the murder plot, the rumors took further shape, not only that Bothwell was behind the king’s murder but that he afterward had become, and perhaps previously had been, Mary’s lover.

The power of the Earl of Bothwell cannot be underestimated and must be considered when examining him as a suspect in the murder. The reason that the other Protestant lords and the English feared Bothwell’s return to Scotland during the Chaseabout Raid rebellion is that they understood how his support would strengthen Mary. He was Lord High Admiral of the Royal Scots Navy, and he had the support of many border clans, which meant military strength on land or sea. Such was Bothwell’s power that, when he had the queen’s favor, his rival lords believed him the chief threat to their own ascendancy. It is therefore understandable that they had wanted to see him thrown under the bus, as it were, for the murder plot, even though, if Bothwell did sign a bond at Craigmillar late in 1566 to undertake the king’s assassination, then surely he was not the only lord undersigned. So one wonders whether it was the people themselves or other lords, perhaps some of them among the conspirators, who were behind the smear campaign that commenced before a month was past, with placards placed anonymously on the doors of churches suggesting that Bothwell had murdered the king with an eye to marrying the queen, and that he had even poisoned his own wife to get her out of the way. As will be seen, there is certainly truth to Bothwell having designs on marrying the queen, but as for the rest of the allegations, no evidence seems to exist that supports them. Moreover, less than two months after the murder, Bothwell was indicted for involvement in the murder, stood trial, and was acquitted. Later accusers would suggest the jury was stacked in his favor, but Alison Weir, in my principal source, Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Murder of Lord Darnley, goes name by name through the jury to demonstrate that this was not the case. Throughout the trial and afterward, Bothwell remained the Queen’s favorite, which would appear to indicate she did not believe the allegations… or that she knew him to be guilty and defended him anyway… perhaps because she had conspired in the act herself.

James Hepburn, 4th Earl of Bothwell. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

In Part One, I called the accusation made by Mary’s half-brother that the Earl of Bothwell planned to abduct the queen and hold her as a sex slave absurd, and certainly it must have seemed ridiculous at the time, at least to Mary, who trusted Bothwell. Moreover, I declared that Bothwell would prove to be a lifelong ally of Mary’s, and certainly there is one view of what happened that would allow one to see it that way. But what comes next, after Bothwell’s trial, casts his character in an entirely different light. On April 24th, not three months since the murder of her husband for which he had been credibly accused, the Earl of Bothwell kidnapped Mary, Queen of Scots. She was traveling with her retinue after visiting with the infant prince when Bothwell met her in the road with an army of 800 horsemen with swords drawn. He told her that there was danger of insurrection at the capital, and that she must come with him to Dunbar for her own protection. Now much is made of her compliance in this situation. Mary’s later accusers would insinuate that the entire abduction had been planned in advance with her own knowledge, but Mary insisted that she only went with Bothwell to save her small retinue from being slaughtered. Then, of course, there is the third option that she might have genuinely trusted this man who had saved her from rebellion before. Nevertheless, in this instance, Bothwell was lying, and back at Dunbar, he produced a bond, signed by numerous of her lords, among them Morton, Huntly, and her half-brother Moray, urging her to marry Bothwell. It appears that Bothwell may have coerced some of the signatories, but it also seems likely that the bond was signed with a view toward encouraging Bothwell to make a fatal mistake, which Bothwell did. Understanding what happened next depends largely on one’s opinion of Mary. Those who claimed that she and Bothwell had been lovers and were laying pretext for their marriage believed that Mary gave herself to Bothwell willingly, and called it a scandal that proved she was a wanton and a murderess. But those who took Mary for an honest woman believed her when she said she had been raped by Bothwell and held captive at Dunbar and not one of her lords raised an objection or a finger to aid her.

While the queen did agree to marry Bothwell, in her letters to the French court about her decision, she indicates that, while he had mistreated her at first, he thereafter treated her with gentleness and respect, and she believed he might be the only man with the strength to help her keep her kingdom from being taken by the Protestant lords who unceasingly schemed to take it from her. Another possibility that seems awful and absurd to modern sensibilities is that Mary felt she had to marry him because he had raped her, that indeed this was Bothwell’s purpose in assaulting her, to obligate her to marry him, for stupid as it may sound, in that era, the fact that a lady, especially a queen, might openly have sexual intercourse with a man without marrying him would irrevocably tarnish her character, even if that sexual encounter had been against her will. So she may have felt that Bothwell had given her no choice and played the part of a successfully wooed woman, making excuses to help save the reputation of the man who would be king. Or the letters may have been lies manufactured by a Bothwell who had utter control over her at Dunbar. Regardless, the lords who had signed Bothwell’s bond had no intention of placing him above themselves. They deftly turned the people against both Mary and Bothwell, painting them as libertines, he with a wife he only now divorced and who it was said he still lay with, and she with a husband only lately buried. More than that, they portrayed them as murderers, guilty of the worst kind of murder: regicide. On May 15th, Mary and Bothwell were married, and less than a month later, their enemies, who called themselves the Confederate Lords, assembled forces. They met Bothwell’s and the Queen’s forces at Carberry Hill, flying a flag that depicted Darnley’s murder. Bothwell declared that he would meet any of them in single combat, but when one by one, Confederate Lords came forth to challenge him, he kept refusing on the grounds the challengers were beneath his station, which indeed everyone was, now that he was king. Eventually, Bothwell just rode off, leaving Mary to surrender herself to her rebel lords. This would be the last Mary saw of her husband, who would end up sailing overseas to gather more forces, but he was taken captive in Norway, at the home town of his former wife, who promptly sued him for abandoning her without returning her dowry. Thereafter, he was given to the king of Denmark, where he rotted for ten years, chained to a pillar until his death.

The surrender of Mary at Carberry Hill. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Mary, on the other hand, was taken to Lochleven Castle and imprisoned while her half brother Moray moved to take her power and rule as regent in the name of his nephew James VI, the baby son that Mary would never see again. Within a fortnight of her capture, whisperings arose that a silver casket had been discovered with letters inside that proved everything the Confederate Lords alleged: Mary’s affair with Bothwell and her conspiring with him to murder Darnley so that they could marry each other. Just what did these letters prove, though? They were a series of letters and sonnets said to be a longstanding correspondence between herself and Bothwell, though they lacked any clear address proving to whom they’d been written. Moreover, the strange incoherence and changes in tone have suggested to many that different letters of Mary’s to different people had been spliced together to create a forgery. In fact the letter that was supposedly the most damning actually refers to the Earl of Bothwell in the third person, seeming to prove that the letter had not been written to him. Nevertheless, these letters seemed to be enough to compel Mary to abdicate the throne to Moray. Perhaps this was because their contents had been so widely advertised that the people had generally turned against their queen, believing her a harlot and a killer. Or perhaps it had something to do with the show trial that the Confederate Lords had held while they kept her in captivity awaiting a trial of her own. On the 27th of June, William Blackadder, Bothwell’s man who had been so unlucky as to have been first on the scene at Kirk o’Field after the explosion, probably because he had been out drinking nearby, was tried with a few other men and summarily executed in what is widely regarded by historians as a farce of a trial. Blackadder was hanged, drawn, and quartered, and the various parts of his body were nailed to the gates of every major city in Scotland. With the Confederate Lords thus so crudely displaying their power and ruthlessness, it is perhaps not surprising that Mary gave them what they wanted and then, as soon as she was able, escaped Lochleven by means of a disguise and a little help. After a short-lived effort at once again reclaiming her throne, Mary finally was forced to flee to England and seek the protection of her cousin, Queen Elizabeth.

Does the evidence support the idea that Mary was complicit in the murder of her husband? Well, certainly a circumstantial case could be made. We know he had caused her much trouble and that she wanted him out of the way, no longer a threat to her rule or the succession of her son. And it certainly doesn’t look good that she dragged him out of the relative safety of Glasgow back to Edinburgh where she knew his enemies plotted against him. It seems highly suspicious that when Mary was promising to resume marital relations with the likely syphilitic Darnley, he was murdered before she would have to lay with him and expose herself to the disease. And she certainly did show much favor to Bothwell after the murder, despite the fact that Bothwell was among the lords who had at least intimated at Craigmillar that murder could be an advantageous course of action. Bothwell’s later machinations and his presence at Craigmillar when a secret agreement to murder Darnley was rumored to have been signed by various lords does seem to implicate his involvement, and the fact that he continued to enjoy Mary’s favor after the crime would seem to reflect poorly on either her character or her judgment. But this proves nothing. Her attempt at reconciling with Darnley may have reflected the fact that she dared not go as far as murder, and her favor of Bothwell may only have meant that she put great stock in him based on his years of loyalty to herself and her mother before her. She may not have had an inkling of Bothwell’s true character until the very day he abducted her. As for the allegations that they had long been secret lovers, this comes from the Casket Letters, which have been discredited as likely forgeries. The only other evidence was from the historian George Buchanan, formerly Mary’s tutor but lately elevated in position by the new regent, Moray. After Mary had fled to England, Moray took the Casket Letters there to convince Queen Elizabeth to try his half sister for the crime of regicide, and he also took Buchanan, who had written a document called Detectio Mariæ Reginæ, or “The Exposure of Queen Mary,” which painted Mary as an amoral and reckless libertine who had been carrying on with Bothwell since her return to Scotland and had colluded with him to do away with her pesky husband. This evidence too, though, is unreliable, as it appears to be completely unsubstantiated libel composed to suit the purposes of Moray, Buchanan’s patron. In my principal source, Mary, Queen of Scots, and the Murder of Lord Darnley, Alison Weir does a thorough job of pointing out nearly every falsehood that Buchanan invented, observing that much of what he alleged was never recorded as being observed in contemporary writings. For example, during a time when Buchanan says everyone was well aware that Mary and Bothwell were fornicating, contemporary records mention no such rumors or accusations, instead recording the suspicions that Mary was sleeping with poor David Rizzio. Thus it is clear that Buchanan’s purpose was only to defame, and in the end, there is no evidence against Mary, Queen of Scots.

A drawing of the later trial of Mary, Queen of Scots. Public Domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

The same might be said, though, for all the other prime suspects in the murder. Many were the accusations and testimonies sworn out that implicated this lord or the other, but little in the way of incontrovertible evidence was ever produced. Certainly Bothwell was not the only lord at Craigmillar throwing out options for ridding themselves of Darnley, nor was it said that his was the only name on the legendary bond to kill the king. First there was Morton, who had previously entered into a bond with Darnley before Rizzio’s murder and felt the king had betrayed him and his fellow conspirators. Among the many men suspected of being at Kirk o’Field that night was Morton’s kinsman, Archibald Douglas. It was said that the assassins wore silk over their armor and slippers over their boots to muffle the sounds of their movements that night, and that the slipper found near the king’s body actually belonged to Douglas, which implicates Morton. Then there was Maitland, who had previously enticed Darnley to enter a conspiracy to murder Rizzio with the intention of afterward implicating him and in this case may have enticed Bothwell to enter a conspiracy to murder Darnley with the same plan of afterward betraying him and making him the patsy, something he may have been doing later as well, when he signed Bothwell’s bond about marrying Mary. And lastly, there was Moray, the ever-scheming half-brother who had always wanted Darnley gone and never before shrank from treason to get what he wanted. The fact that afterward he doggedly pursued the escaped Mary into England with likely forged documents and false testimony hoping to see her executed so she could never take her crown back from him certainly paints him as a likely candidate for the prime mover in the plot. So who was it? Who dispatched assassins to blow up the king’s lodging at Kirk o’Field? Was it just two of these men? Three? Was Mary in on it? We simply don’t know.

There was one other possibility, that Queen Elizabeth, who had long viewed Mary as a threat and resented her insistence on being named the successor to the throne of England, had sent the assassins herself. If that were the case though, she must have relented when Mary came to her for protection. No longer was her cousin in power, but rather she was in Elizabeth’s power. Thus when Moray came with his supposed evidence, Elizabeth refused to find Mary guilty or innocent, preferring to leave matters as they stood. Eventually, though, when Pope Pius V issued a bull encouraging English Catholics to overthrow her, Elizabeth placed Mary in prison, and after dealing with a succession Catholic assassination plots that aimed to supplant her with Mary, she took the queen off the board, so to speak, and had Mary beheaded. Moray, the treacherous half-brother, did had not lived to see her end, though. He had been killed just a few short years after his regency began, shot by a supporter of Mary’s who was perched in a window of a house that Moray was riding past in a procession. He was the first head of state to be assassinated by a firearm. His nephew, Mary’s son, James, would later become the first king of a unified Scotland, England and Ireland, finally fulfilling his mother’s ambitions. As for his father, when the so-called Marian civil war had first flared in Scotland, a mob opened Lord Darnley’s tomb at Holyrood Abbey, and someone stole his skull. Through the years, different skulls have turned up, one at Edinburgh University and another by the Royal College of Surgeons in London, each claiming theirs is the true skull of Lord Darnley. In modern times, using 3D modeling and comparing the images with portraits, experts have ruled one of these skulls out… but that doesn’t mean the other is genuine. As far as we know, the skull of Lord Darnley could be forever lost amid the rubble of history.

A eyewitness sketch of Mary’s execution. Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons.

Further Reading

Weir, Alison. Mary, Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley. Ballantine, 2003.

The Murder of Lord Darnley, Part One: The Vipers' Nest (A Royal Blood Mystery)

Before the rise of a new moon, it was a very dark and cold night in Scotland on the 9th of February, 1567, with a frost encrusting the king’s lodgings at Kirk o’Field. This medieval church stood on a hill less than a mile from the Palace of Holyroodhouse in Edinburgh, the seat of power in Scotland, where Mary, Queen of Scots and wife of Henry Stuart, Lord Darnley, wielded her royal authority. Lord Darnley, the 22-year-old king whom Mary had wed less than two years earlier and as a last resort, had never been given the royal power that he’d hoped would be his, the Crown Matrimonial, and as such had been estranged from the Queen of Scots for some time. However, recently, after being installed at Kirk o’Field while he recovered from a grave illness, it had appeared that Mary was of a mind to reconcile with him. She tended to him and slept in those lodging with him frequently while he recuperated. On the evening of the 9th, it was her intention to stay there as well, but she came out to Kirk o’Field early that evening to show the more and more recovered king her gown and mask, for she was to attend a masquerade that night back at the palace before returning to him. However, after spending longer than expected at Kirk o’Field, she decided that she would have to retire back at the palace after the masquerade, for she anticipated it would be too late to return. So Mary, Queen of Scots, the most beautiful young queen in all of Europe, left her husband, Lord Darnley, promising to see him the next day. Late that night, at 2am on Monday the 10th, a great blast shattered the night’s calm, waking up everyone near Kirk o’Field and even disturbing the sleep of the Queen three quarters of a mile away at Holyrood Palace. With the explosion still echoing in their ears, night watchmen arrived with lanterns at the source of the noise: the King’s lodgings at Kirk o’Field. They heard a man crying out for help, and found a blackened figure, one of Lord Darnley’s servants, clinging to the top of a wall. The lodgings themselves had been reduced to rubble. Throughout the night, the watchmen dug frantically through the debris as snow fell all around them. Beneath the rubble, they eventually uncovered two mangled corpses, but failed to find the king. Not until 3 hours later did they search the orchard beyond the wall, where they found the dead bodies of both Lord Darnley and his valet, William Taylor. It was assumed that the king and his valet had been killed by the explosion as well, thrown from the lodgings into the orchard by the force of the blast. However, as the sun rose and made a closer examination of the scene possible, some details were observed that have turned the murder of Lord Darnley into an enduring mystery… not just a whodunnit but a howdunnit. For they found the corpses of the King and his valet had not a mark on them. Nearly naked in their nightshirts, there appeared no scorch marks, no bruises, no wounds or signs of strangulation. They looked as if they’d been laid out in the orchard, and around them were several undamaged items from the lodgings: a quilt, a chair, a piece of rope, and a dagger.

To tell of Lord Darnley’s murder, we must focus on Mary, Queen of Scots, for really, sadly, the story of his demise in large part is her story. She came to inherit the throne from her father, King James V of Scotland, whose two sons with Marie de Guise had died in infancy. It was said that upon hearing the news that he had fathered a daughter, the ailing king said, “It came from a woman, and it will end in a woman.” He was referring to the fact that the Stewart dynasty had been established through the daughter of the great Scottish leader Robert the Bruce. You may remember my mention of the endless wars between England and Scotland in my episodes on Edward II, whom Robert the Bruce defeated at the Battle of Bannockburn, thereby settling his undisputed rule over Scotland. His daughter, Marjorie, bore the first male heir of their house, Robert II, the first Stewart king. Centuries later, as he died without a male heir, James V was leaving the fate of the Stewart dynasty with his own daughter. At six days old, she took the throne, and she represented a hope not only for the future of Scotland but for a united England and Scotland, for James V was the son of Margaret Tudor, the daughter of King Henry VII of England, giving Mary a strong claim to the English throne as well. This may have been on the mind of King Henry VIII in 1544 when he sought by treaty to marry his son to the infant Queen Mary. However, the Protestant Reformation made things far more complicated. Mary’s mother, Marie de Guise, remained a loyal Catholic and refused to let her daughter marry the Protestant King Henry’s son, choosing instead to revive an ancient alliance with Catholic France, the perennial enemy of England. This perceived betrayal ignited the so-called War of the Rough Wooing, in which King Henry VIII’s forces laid waste to many Scottish villages and towns. During this war, there was one Scottish lord, Matthew Stuart, the 4th Earl of Lennox, who took up arms for the English. Invading his native Scotland, he took numerous child hostages, thereby forcing their fathers to serve under him. When these men escaped, he murdered their children, an act that would earn him the undying hatred of the Scottish. But eventually, through some unforeseen circumstances, this Earl of Lennox would find himself very close to the Scottish throne, for his son, Henry, Lord Darnley, would one day be betrothed to Mary, Queen of Scots.

Mary, Queen of Scots, depicted as a child. Public Domain artwork accessed from Art Institute Chicago.

As her mother, Marie de Guise, struggled with the Scottish lords who more and more pushed to make Scotland a Protestant country, and as James Hamilton, Earl of Arran and Governor of the Realm while Mary was in her minority, fought to expel the occupying English forces, one solution to their problems presented itself: they would marry the young queen to the Dauphin of France, putting Mary in line to rule as Queen of Catholic France as well as Scotland, and securing some immediate military aid from France to push back the English invaders. So in 1548, at five years old, Mary sailed to France, where she spent much of her youth in the royal court, surrounded by Rennaissance culture and art and exposed to the lax morals and promiscuous behavior of the French royals. There she grew into a most beautiful woman, red of hair and a statuesque six feet tall. Her French admirers called her la plus parfait, which translates as “the most perfect.” Her closest friend was Francis, the sickly Dauphin to whom she was promised. She spent her time reading and dancing and riding horse and playing all kinds of games. Her education was extensive, but does not seem to have extended to statecraft, as it was always assumed that others would govern Scotland on her behalf. Back in Scotland, by 1551, the English had finally been driven out, and Mary’s mother, the Queen Dowager Marie de Guise, finally took control as the Regent of Scotland and took steps to push back against the rising influence of Protestantism. What she managed to do was stir up a nest of vipers in Scotland, as Protestant noblemen formed a league against her, calling themselves the Lords of the Congregation of Jesus Christ. In 1558, Mary and Francis were married at Notre-Dame in Paris, and some months later, the Catholic queen of England, who had been dubbed Bloody Mary because of her violent efforts at counter-reformation, died. To all of Catholic Europe, Mary, Queen of Scots, was believed to be her rightful heir, but instead, the crown passed to King Henry VIII’s daughter by his second wife, Elizabeth I. Viewing Elizabeth as a usurper, King Henry II of France, Mary’s new father-in-law, publicly declared that she and Francis were the true king and queen of England.

Not surprisingly, then, Queen Elizabeth supported the Protestant Lords of the Congregation in their efforts to resist the Catholic Regent Marie de Guise in Scotland. After signing a treaty with these rebel lords, Elizabeth sent troops in 1560 to drive out the French and overthrow Marie de Guise, who died later that year from dropsy. In the absence of both the queen and the regent, the country was governed by a council of Protestant Lords who illegally passed legislation to criminalize Catholicism without the queen’s approval. At the end of that year, still mourning the death of her mother and lamenting the betrayal of the Scottish lords, Mary also lost her husband, King Francis II, to a brain abscess. After considering her options, which were either to find another foreign marriage prospect or to return to Scotland and wrest back control of her realm, she bravely chose to go home, where all of her mother’s enemies awaited her return. Among the most powerful of the Protestant Lords arrayed against her were Sir William Maitland; James Douglas, the Earl of Morton; George Gordon, the Earl of Huntly; Patrick, the Earl of Ruthven; and her own bastard half-brother, Sir James Stewart, later the Earl of Moray. Another Protestant lord was James Hepburn, the Earl of Bothwell, who had never allied with the Lords of the Congregation against Mary’s mother and who would prove to be a lifelong ally of the Queen of Scots. The Lords of the Congregation feared that Mary’s return would signal a counter-reformation, and her half-brother Sir James travelled to France to negotiate her return to power, eager that she promise not to interfere with the newly established Protestant Church. Once they reached an agreement and the way was smoothed for the transfer of power, she sailed back home, arriving in August of 1561 to find her homeland far poorer and less populated than France. Nevertheless, she was well-received by the public, and her accommodations at Holyrood Palace were well befitting a queen. As she took the reins of government, she relied on the advice of the loyal Earl of Bothwell as well as that of William Maitland, whom she made her Secretary of State despite his involvement in the betrayal of her mother. Other members of the Lords of the Congregation also remained on her Privy Council. So utterly surrounded by Protestant lords was she that she found herself having to placate them that she did not mean to take steps to revive Catholicism in Scotland, while also leading on the Pope in Rome that she certainly would re-establish Catholicism as the faith of the land just as soon as was feasible.

A Protestant sermon attended by the Lords of the Congregation. Public Domain artwork accessed through Wikimedia Commons.

Mary’s return meant the rise of some and the downfall of others. Her half-brother Sir James used his influence over the queen to take the title the Earl of Moray and to take lands for himself from other lords through accusations of treason and military adventure. Chief among Moray’s enemies at court was Bothwell, who was in high favor with his sister. In order to discredit him, Moray instigated groundless rumors that Bothwell intended to abduct Mary in order to keep her as a sex slave, and to murder any other lords who got between him and power. Mary doesn’t appear to have believed the accusations, but in order to make peace, she had Bothwell imprisoned. Bothwell managed to escape his imprisonment by prying a bar loose from his cell window and climbing down the side of the castle in Edinburgh where he was being held, and he fled to Northumberland and afterward would take refuge in France, establishing a correspondence with Mary to assure her that he had never planned any treason. While Bothwell remained loyal to his queen and served her as best he could while in exile, Mary was now without her staunchest ally in the viper’s nest of her court. Eventually, though, she found another whom she trusted, not a lord but rather a lowly musician. David Rizzio, an Italian singer and lute player, had become a favorite of the queen and eventually served as her personal secretary, though he was not skilled at letters. In fact, so close did the two become that members of Mary’s Privy Council feared his influence over her and suggested he was a spy sent by the pope. More than this, some insinuated that the queen was sexually involved with the musician, even though he was often described as ugly or even deformed. The truth of this, whether Mary was sexually involved with Rizzio or simply found him loyal and witty and enjoyed his company, is unknown. Perhaps she was flirtatious with Rizzio, displaying some coquetry that she picked up among the French which her Scottish countrymen misconstrued. But it can’t be denied that she was intimate with him in the sense that they spent most of their time together, and he would keep her company in her chambers even late at night. Whatever unseemliness there might have been in Mary’s relationship with Rizzio and whatever agendas the musician might have harbored, what the Protestant lords could never forgive him was his vocal support of Mary’s marriage to another Catholic.

The second marriage of Mary, Queen of Scots, was a matter of great interest not only to those in her court, but also to Queen Elizabeth. Mary, Queen of Scots, was intent on pressing her claim to the English throne. She did not seek to overthrow Elizabeth, but rather, since Elizabeth had not herself married, she pushed to be named Elizabeth’s rightful heir. However, the people of England largely saw in her the possibility of another Bloody Mary, someone who would try to reverse their Protestant Reformation, and therefore balked at the prospect that she should take the English throne. Seeing Mary as a potential threat, especially if she were to marry a powerful foreign Catholic figure and thereby give papistry a toehold in Scotland, Elizabeth sought to hold the succession rights over Mary’s head to ensure she would not seek a match with, for example, Don Carlos, the heir to Philip II of Spain. Making her declaration of Mary as her heir dependent on her approval of a match for Mary, Elizabeth suggested that she consider certain Protestant kings in Scandinavia. When Mary refused and persisted in seeking an alliance with Spain, Elizabeth went so far as to offer Mary her own lover, Lord Robert Dudley as a match. Elizabeth may have seen this as a great concession as well as a shrewd maneuver, since she was assured of Dudley’s loyalty, but as Dudley was of such a lower station than her and was surrounded by numerous scandals, Mary could not help but see this as an insult. When Mary’s hopes of marrying Don Carlos fell through, though, Elizabeth insisted that marrying Dudley was her only choice if she wished to be declared the heir to the English throne. Yet there was one other candidate who was both a loyal subject of Elizabeth and yet was a Catholic of Scottish blood: Lord Darnley, son of the Earl of Lennox, who since the War of the Rough Wooing and his massacre of Scottish children had remained in England. Back when Mary’s husband had died in France, Lennox was already seeing an opportunity to marry his son to the Queen of Scots and thereby re-establish his family in Scotland in a position of power. He even took Darnley to France to press his suit while Mary was still grieving the deaths of her husband and mother. Aware of Lennox’s atrocities and disliking their grasping at power, Mary had vowed never to marry the boy, but years later, in Scotland, the match began to seem like her only option. After all, Darnley had something of a claim to the English throne himself, and he was Catholic, which meant Mary could still keep up at least the pretense that she eventually intended to bring the Catholic Church back into power in Scotland. With Elizabeth’s permission, he came to Mary’s court and did much to impress her. He was beardless, but handsome and tall enough to cut a striking figure standing beside Mary. He charmed both Mary and her close advisor, Rizzio, with his lute playing and his dancing, and the three of them enjoyed playing dice and cards. While the Protestant lords at court mistrusted him, Bothwell, still in exile, seemed to approve of the match. So on July 29th 1565, Mary, Queen of Scots, married Lord Darnley, kicking of several days of ostentatious banquets, balls, and masquerades.

A portrait of the youthful Lord Darnely. Public Domain artwork accessed through Wikimedia Commons.

Yet there was still much disapproval of Darnley as a match for Mary. Even Queen Elizabeth, who had seemed to be agreeing to the match when she granted Darnley permission to travel to Scotland, afterward acted as though Mary had chosen him to spite her. In truth, it seems Elizabeth got everything she might have wanted. Mary would not make an alliance with a hostile foreign power and would instead ally herself with a fallen family in a marriage that provided little benefits to her, and Elizabeth could act as if she’d been defied and could continue to deny Mary the right of succession. At court in Scotland, the most powerful of the Protestant lords, who of course believed that Mary’s new marriage to another Catholic meant an impending counter-Reformation, had made their opposition to Darnley clear. When Mary proceeded regardless and had Darnley proclaimed King of Scotland, several of these lords, led by her half-brother, the Earl of Moray, went into open rebellion, leaving the royal court and amassing armies. Thus, as had happened with Edward II and many another monarch before her, Mary found herself facing a civil war with rebel earls who disliked her choice of advisors and relationships. Since Moray, who had been the principal enemy and accuser of Bothwell, stood now in defiance of her authority, she made immediate arrangements for the Earl of Bothwell to return from his exile, and less than a month after her nuptials, she rode out of Edinburgh at the head of an army, with a pistol on her hip and a helmet on her head, bent on bringing the rebels to heel. Eight days later, while Mary’s forces were in the east, near Glasgow, Moray attempted to occupy Edinburgh but was driven out after a day. Over the next month or so, as Mary led her forces all over Scotland trying to stamp out this rebellion, which would come to be called the Chaseabout Raid, the Earl of Moray, seeing the writing on the wall, wrote to Queen Elizabeth pleading for military intervention. Elizabeth, though, fearing that once again the French might land troops to prevent their invasion of Scotland, would only send warships up the coast to try to prevent Bothwell from returning and strengthening Mary. When this blockade failed and Bothwell returned to join his might with Mary’s, the only further help Elizabeth would offer Moray was protection. So Moray and Bothwell traded places; as Bothwell took up a place of honor in Mary’s court and council, Mary’s troublesome half-brother went into exile in England.

As Mary worked to resolve the threat of her rebel lords, another threat festered. Almost immediately after their marriage, Darnley began to show Mary his true colors. He insisted that she not waste time in proclaiming him king, and he began to resent her when she evaded his demands to be given the Crown Matrimonial, which would have given him the actual power of a king. It is unclear if Mary ever intended to confer royal authority to Darnley, but certainly when he began to reveal himself to be a spoiled, arrogant, jealous, and spiteful boy, she must have realized how dangerous it would be to empower him. He made few allies among the nobility at court, who all thought him reckless and haughty, scornful and paranoid. At first, besides Mary, it seemed only Rizzio was a friend and ally to Darnley, which made sense as the lords were equally resentful of the favor that Rizzio enjoyed. Indeed, just as the lords had whispered about Mary’s improper relations with Rizzio, some spread the rumor that Darnley as well had taken the Italian as a lover, and that three of them slept together. Soon though, Darnley turned against the only allies he had when he began to amplify the rumors about Rizzio and the queen, intimating that he suspected Mary and her secretary of cuckolding him. In truth, this would seem to disprove the rumors that he was sleeping with the both of them, since obviously then he would have more than suspicions about her sexual adventures. More likely, he was looking to remove Rizzio as an influence on the queen so that he could supplant him has her chief advisor and finally convince her to give him the Crown Matrimonial. Three months into their marriage, when Mary announced her pregnancy, far from being overjoyed, Darnley seemed to take it as a blow, realizing that an heir would mean even less chance that he would reign as a monarch in Scotland. During the first few months of her pregnancy, he made a spectacle of himself as a drunk and carried on affairs with other women. Then, ironically, he also made grand public displays of his devotion to the Catholic faith, perhaps in hopes that foreign Catholic powers would intervene and help him take the Crown Matrimonial hoping that he would move faster than Mary had to start a counter-Reformation. With Darnley so clearly estranged from the queen, some Protestant lords, including Ruthven and Morton, began to hatch a plot against Mary’s Italian secretary, David Rizzio, believing that without him whispering in Mary’s ear, she might be more amenable to forgiving her half-brother Moray and allowing his return. They spread the rumor that Mary was not pregnant with Darnley’s child but with Rizzio’s, and thus they drew the resentful young king into their scheme.

A portrait of David Rizzio. Public Domain artwork accessed through Wikimedia Commons.

On March 1st, 1566, the conspirators against Rizzio asked Darnley to sign a bond taking full responsibility for the plot against Rizzio. It may be that they had more planned than killing Rizzio, for if they were to assassinate Mary in the process, this document would incriminate Darnley, thereby ridding them of the king as well, whom in truth they detested. The same day, perhaps also at the insistence of these lords, Darnley wrote to the Earl of Moray, telling him as his king to await a summons, and a week later, he wrote again to promise Moray a safe return to Scotland. Thus it seems likely that Ruthven and Morton and maybe also Moray and the other conspirators were planning something of a coup. The next evening after writing this summons to Moray, Darnley let a group of assassins into Holyrood Palace and led them up a secret staircase from his chambers right into the queen’s bedchambers. Darnley appeared first from behind a tapestry and played nonchalant, sitting down with Mary. Then Lord Ruthven appeared, clad in armor, and demanded that David Rizzio come with him. Mary asked why, and Ruthven answered that he had caused her to banish nobility so that he might himself be ennobled, and that he had kept her from fulfilling her promises to the king. Mary turned to Darnley and asked if he knew about this, but Darnley feigned ignorance. Mary demanded that Ruthven leave or be arrested for treason, but Ruthven drew a pistol and a dagger and advanced on Rizzio, who cowered behind his queens skirts. A group of five other conspirators then entered the room, and a struggle ensued as they attempted to take hold of Rizzio. Ruthven threw the queen into Darnley’s arms, and the king held her firmly even as one of the conspirators seemed to purposely shove a chair into her stomach, perhaps trying to cause a miscarriage. Even more horrible is the account that, after the assassins had first stabbed Rizzio, seizing Darnley’s own dagger and thrusting very near to the queen herself, another conspirator aimed a pistol at Mary’s womb and pulled the trigger. It was said she was only saved because the pistol failed to fire. Dragging Rizzio down the secret stairs, the assassins stabbed him some 57 times, attacking so savagely that one of the assassins was accidentally stabbed in the process. The fact that they left Darnley’s dagger in the corpse seems to support the idea that they hoped the king would take the full blame for Rizzio’s death.

In the aftermath of this attack, the conspirators kept the queen captive in her rooms as they decided what to do with her. Slowly, as his own men were removed and the conspirator lords put their own guards around him, Darnley began to realize that he had been used and was a prisoner himself. He went up the secret stairs from his chamber to Mary’s and pleaded with her to let him in so that he could speak with her, and eventually she did, listening to his explanations that he had been manipulated and at least pretending to be sympathetic to his pleas to forgive him. Together, they began to hatch their own plans. She pretended to be ill and had her midwife sent to attend to her, and with her help, they managed to send a secret letter out to Bothwell to gather other lords loyal to her and await her imminent escape. While she refused to speak with her captors, Morton and Ruthven, she agreed to see Moray, who had recently returned to Scotland and been in hiding. In a tearful reunion, in which she appealed to him as her brother and he assured her he had had no part in the conspiracy to murder Rizzio, they were reconciled, and she turned Moray against the conspirators. Then, by promising a pardon to the rebel lords, she convinced them to remove their armed guards from the palace, and she and Darnley, by the dark of night, escaped by creeping down some service stairs, through the servants’ quarters, and out a wine cellar. Along the way, Mary tripped on a mound of dirt that turned out to be David Rizzio’s shallow grave. She and Darnley took horses and rode east out of Edinbugh. About ten miles on, they saw some men on horseback in the road, and Darnley panicked, begging the queen to ride fast lest they be killed by their enemies and even whipping her horse. When she begged him to consider her pregnant condition, he declared that they could always have another baby if this one died, to which she furiously suggested that he go on without her and worry for himself. To Darnley’s great dishonor, he did abandon her, riding off before realizing that the horsemen in the road were Bothwell and other loyal lords there to rescue them.

A depiction of the murder of Rizzio. Public Domain artwork accessed through Wikimedia Commons.

Not surprisingly, Mary did not so easily forgive and forget Darnley’s betrayal, and as she went about putting her country’s affairs in order, forgiving some lords, such as Moray and Maitland, while executing some lowly assassins and declaring certain rebel lords, such as Morton and Ruthven, outlaws and driving them into exile, Darnley grew once again resentful and insolent. The queen’s supporters, unsurprisingly, rejected Darnley for his part in the recent attempted coup, and as he had publicly declared his own innocence in the affair, the lords in exile also considered him an enemy. Yet as the father of her child, for whom she desired an uncontested claim to the throne of Scotland, Mary felt she could not openly turn against him and in fact needed to protect him from himself. At one point, Mary had to take his pistols out of his bedchamber as she was afraid he would attempt suicide with them. When in June of 1566 she bore Darnley a son, James, the future king of Scotland England and Ireland, this did little to reconcile them. While they had been restored to the palace at Edinburgh, Darnley, resenting his diminished status, moved away to Glasgow and began threatening to leave the country and convince certain Catholic foreign powers that he had been wronged by Mary—a ridiculous notion, but with the rumors about the child’s paternity persisting, and other, even more absurd conspiracy theories cropping up, like that their child had been stillborn but replaced by a changeling just to prevent his taking the Crown Matrimonial, there was no telling whether some who were unhappy with Mary’s lack of progress initiating a counter-Reformation might have used these claims as an excuse to back Darnley in a coup. Other rumors suggested that Darnley planned to abduct their son, and when Mary became deathly ill, vomiting blood a few months after giving birth, it was suspected that Darnley had attempted to kill her by having her poisoned. While convalescing at Craigmillar, Mary appears to have consulted with her council about what should be done in regards to her troublesome husband, and they extracted from Mary the promise of a pardon for certain exiled lords, such as Morton and Ruthven, if they could devise some way to rid her of Darnley.

In retrospect, it of course appears that Mary was conspiring with her lords at Craigmillar to assassinate the king, and that is certainly how it was presented later, when Mary’s enemies moved to hold her guilty of the murder. However, in looking closer at the evidence, it can be seen that Mary may just have been looking for some lawful means of extricating herself from the marriage, some grounds for divorcement. She expressed concern that nothing be done that might affect the legitimacy and succession rights of their son. This ruled out an annulment of their marriage. A Protestant divorce was not likely to be recognized by Darnley or his foreign Catholic supporters. Arresting Darnley for treason because of his part in the Rizzio incident might have done the trick, but by a technicality of Scottish law, a king could not be guilty of treason. Perhaps realizing that the only other option was murder, Mary is recorded as saying,  “I will that you do nothing, by which any spot may be laid on my honour and conscience; and therefore, I pray ye rather let the matter be in the estate as it is, abiding till God of his goodness put a remedy to it. That you believe would do me service, may possibly turn to my hurt and displeasure.” Thus, by this prescient statement, Mary seems to exonerate herself for what came later. But it is possible that she changed her mind when, shortly thereafter, Darnley insulted her by refusing to attend their son’s christening. According to later claims, a bond was signed at Craigmillar by numerous lords to undertake the assassination of Lord Darnley, but this document has never been found. Therefore, the great mystery of Darnley’s murder, besides how he ended up in the orchard without a mark on him after so great an explosion, is which Scottish lords undertook to kill him and why, and whether Mary, Queen of Scots, had any hand in it, as would later be alleged and contribute to her own death.

Further Reading

Weir, Alison. Mary, Queen of Scots and the Murder of Lord Darnley. Ballantine, 2003.

The Jansenist Miracles of Enlightenment France, Part Two: The Convulsionnaires

In July of 1731, as the controversy over the growing cult at Saint-Médard grew, a woman named Aimée Pivert came to François de Pâris’s tomb seeking a cure for some neurological disorder. This illness may have been epilepsy, for upon touching the tomb, she was sent into spasmic contortions, causing some to think her possessed. Almost every day for a month, she experienced these convulsions at Saint-Médard, until finally she went away claiming she’d been cured. Two weeks later, some other women appeared to convulse at the tomb and then claimed to have been healed, one of them asserting that she had regained the powers of speech and hearing after the experience. At the end of August, an anticonstitutionnaire abbot by the name of Bescherand, whose leg had been withered since he was a boy, went to the cemetery to pray for a cure in hopes of further bolstering the Jansenist cause. This abbot also began screaming and experiencing dramatic contortions and convulsions every day when he visited, with some reports claiming that his writhing body lifted into the air in a way they could not explain. He would shout that different parts of his body were in pain, and the cult’s adherents would rub dirt from de Pâris’s grave onto those places, which somehow relieved his suffering. This went on for weeks, with the police that were present to keep the peace describing his displays as scandalous and terrifying in their reports. Jansenist doctors, who had been present for some time to record any miracles at the cemetery, examined him regularly and claimed his atrophied leg was much improved, while critics of the cult pointed out that he still couldn’t walk on it, suggesting he was faking the entire thing. Soon, though, these convulsions began to spread, as though contagious, whether through the power of suggestion or for reasons we have previously seen suggested to explain the Dancing Plague, like the consumption of tainted bread, or as suggested at the time, because of “hysteria” or even “erotic vapors.” As the ecclesiastical and political controversy continued to swirl around the cult, the occurrences at François de Pâris’s tomb began to change, and certainly in a metaphorical sense, these convulsions truly were contagious, for from them originated great tremors that would shake up not only the cult members and their Jansenist supporters, but the Gallican church, the sovereign court, and the entire ancien régime of pre-Revolutionary France.

The doctrinal controversy associated with the cult at Saint-Médard—that of Jansenist resistance to the papal bull Unigenitus—had already caused a further schism, this one not in the church, but in the government, between the Parliament, or sovereign court, of Paris and the royal authority of King Louis XV. Within the Parliament were certain factions who were strongly allied with or sympathetic toward the Jansenists, and these magistrates and barristers pushed against royal authority in such matters as the Formulary controversy, when Jansenists were compelled to sign a formula of submission, as well as in the king’s subsequent efforts to make the Unigenitus bull a state law rather than just a church doctrine. But among the Jansenist-friendly members of the sovereign court, there were also those directly supportive of the cult of François de Pâris at Saint-Médard. One was François de Pâris’s own brother, who unlike François had followed his family’s path into the law but had come to hold his late brother in great esteem. Another was a magistrate named Montgeron, who had visited François de Pâris’s tomb at Saint-Médard and become a believer after lapsing into a lengthy trance there.  These figures helped to rally the Parliament of Paris not only to the cause of the Jansenists, but to the aid of the cult at Saint-Médard as well, which they did by asserting the court’s right to hear appeals on disputed ecclesiastical cases, such as the suspension of Jansenist priests and the findings of investigations into miracles, should an appeal be made. Thus when the Archbishop of Paris, Vintimille, issued a decree forbidding the observances at Saint-Médard and Cardinal Fleury arranged for police to be stationed around the cemetery, the sovereign court took up the cause of the cult in earnest. Their power was a check to episcopal power, they argued, and therefore a bulwark to protect royal authority from the growing power of the Gallican Church. The king, however, whose chief minister, Cardinal Fleury, oversaw ecclesiastical matters, saw it more as a challenge to his own power. Add to this further pressure from Rome, where Pope Clement XII had expressed dissatisfaction with the king’s inability to crush this schismatic cult, ordered a certain biography of François de Pâris to be burned in the streets, and declared all the miracles attributed to him false. King Louis XV chose to bend to pressure from the church rather than pressure from the court, and he wielded his royal prerogative to annul certain of Parliament’s decisions on these matters. In protest, the Parliament of Paris went on strike, disrupting the administration of justice in the city for three months, and turning the so-called “affair of the Bull” which had become tied to the “affair of the miracles” into the “affair of the Parlement.”  

A depiction of the Grand Chamber of the Parlement of Paris in the early 18th century, via Wikimedia Commons

Meanwhile, the miracles at Saint-Médard had begun to be overshadowed by the strange convulsionism occurring at the cemetery, and Cardinal Fleury, perhaps thinking it best to act while the sovereign court was on strike, ordered the lieutenant of police in Paris, one Monsieur Hérault, to investigate. Hérault had already undertaken an investigation of the miraculous cures for Fleury, finding most of them to have been only a temporary remission of symptoms followed by a relapse, and declaring others to be outright Jansenist frauds. Embarking on a similar mission to debunk this new development in the miracles, he started by arresting several of the growing group of people who were experiencing convulsions at Saint-Médard, those who had come to be called convulsionnaires, and locking them up at the Bastille. There, Hérault interrogated them in long, grueling sessions and had them examined by respected physicians over the course of two weeks. Among those examined were one Pierre-Martin Gontier, who under duress confessed that he consciously made himself have these convulsions and demonstrated them on command, making his limbs stiff and then shaking them and contorting himself into a variety of postures. Gontier, upon his release, recanted this confession, but others Hérault likewise grilled intensely and had examined by doctors made similar admissions. They always denied any fraudulent intent, though, claiming instead a desire to fit in among the others experiencing such convulsions. Then again, some refused, even after numerous interrogations, to admit that their convulsions were anything but genuine and divinely inspired. These he left out of his report. Armed with the results of his investigation, Cardinal Fleury succeeded in getting the king to declare the convulsions a threat to public order and issue an ordinance shutting down the cemetery at Saint-Médard once and for all. Early one morning in January 1732, armed guards marched through the streets of the Paris suburb of Saint-Marcaeu, stationing copies of the ordinance high enough that it would be difficult to tear them down, posting guards on horseback at the church and cemetery, and locking the gates of Saint-Médard. Thereafter, Hérault’s police force arrested any convulsionnaires who publicly displayed their spasms and contortions.

By this time, the Parliament had come to an understanding with the king and convened once again, but they were not about to stand by and watch what they viewed as a gross abuse of ecclesiastical authority. Especially outraged at the closing of the cemetery was Jérome-Nicolas Pâris, François de Pâris’s brother, who called the Archbishop’s denunciations of his brother’s biography calumny, and who insisted that the police and the church officials either had already or soon would desecrate his brother’s grave by exhuming him. Eventually, though, when these rumors were proven untrue by an inspection of the tomb, the Parliament’s opposition to the closing of the cemetery faded, as it seemed there was little they could do about it. However, if the goal of the Cardinal and Archbishop had been to crush the cult of François de Pâris and the convulsionnaires entirely, they soon realized that they had failed to accomplish it. Unable to perform their observances and experience their convulsions in the cemetery or in public, the cult of François de Pâris moved underground, meeting in whatever chapels would host them or in private residences. To avoid arrest, they were forced to become something of a secret society, addressing each other using codenames, and gaining entrance to their secret sessions with passwords. At these sessions, which often lacked any kind of clergy to lead them, a spirit of egalitarianism developed, with lay people delivering extemporaneous sermons to the rich and the poor alike, among men and women, none of whom held any position of power over any other. As before, they carried relics of François de Pâris, and dirt from his grave at Saint-Médard, in an effort to bring the presence of their unofficial saint into their sessions, and also before, through appeals for his intercession, miraculous cures were reported, often accompanied by convulsions. Indeed, it was only the ability to experience convulsions that seems to have afforded any status among the group. This convulsionism became more and more the focal point of these sessions, developing stranger, even supernatural qualities that drew even disbelievers to seek out these secret sessions as entertainment and to judge for themselves whether to believe the strange, seemingly paranormal events occurring there. In this way, the convulsionnaires were forerunners of the spiritualists of the 19th century. In fact, the French word used for a convulsionnaire session, was séance.

Depiction of convulsionnaires in the Bastille, via Wikimedia Commons

As the séances of the convulsionnaires gradually changed in character, the convulsions became more important in themselves, not as a medium through which miracles were performed, but as a kind of divine communication to the sect. More and more, those experiencing the convulsions appeared to or claimed to experience great pain from them, and then to indicate through gestures that they required some physical relief from others present in the form of some kind of bodily contact. This could be seen as an evolution from the earliest convulsions of Bescherand who asked that dirt from François de Pâris’s grave be rubbed on parts of his body, but among the convulsionnaires, this was taken to extremes. It was declared that they required injury to be done to them in order to achieve this secour, or relief. So convulsionnaires, many of them young women contorting themselves into indiscreet and even lewd positions, would be struck violently upon their bodies and appeared to gain physical pleasure from it. These blows eventually became known as petits secours, or small relief, for soon they graduated to grands secours, or even secours meurtriers, murderous relief. These convulsing women would be mercilessly beaten with blunt weapons, trampled upon, stuck with pins, and even stabbed with knives and swords! At the utmost extreme, it became rather common for convulsionnaires to be actually crucified before astonished audiences at their séances. And what is more astonishing, it was said that, not only did they derive relief or even ecstasy from these acts of violence, but they were said to have come through them unscathed, unbloodied and without a bruise or any other mark. It was said that, while convulsing, their bodies became invulnerable to harm, their skin impenetrable to blades.

Understandably, the evolution of the cult of François de Pâris to this bizarre convulsionism was decried, not only by Jesuits and constitutionnaires but by many Jansenists as well as a kind of fanaticism, or even as showing the influence of the Devil. First, these séances had a definite element of eroticism with the contorting young females moaning in pleasure upon being slapped and struck. But the crucifixions made it even harder to justify, and sometimes, during séances, convulsionnaires would feel compelled to commit blasphemies, like trampling on the Bible. However, many Jansenists were not ready to give up on the convulsonnaires, arguing that these acts represented a kind of tableau vivant, or living picture, that just needed interpretation to understand its symbolism. In this way, the crucifixions were said to be reenactments of Christ’s sacrifice, or more metaphorically, it was asserted that the painful convulsions represented the evil and the corruption in the church—specifically related to the papal bull Unigenitus, of course—and the secours, their violent relief, stood for the suffering that those faithful to true religion—the Jansensists—had to endure for the church to be redeemed. In this way, even trampling on the bible during convulsions could easily be explained as a representation of constitutionnaire apostasy or Jesuit heresy, and indecent exposure of female convulsionnaires could signify the licentiousness of the church. Still other Jansenists, unable to accept all that went on at these séances, argued that some discernment was required, and that, oddly, some of the acts of convulsionnaires were of divine origin while others were not, and it was up to leveler heads to distinguish which were which.

Depiction of a secouriste at work, via Wikimedia Commons

So what exactly is a modern, rational mind to think of the convulsionnaires? Really any view we might take of them was already entertained by some Englishtenment thinker of the day. What they may have called “hysteria,” we would otherwise consider a mass delusion, or a mania, encouraged by the power of suggestion and the desire to be part of a crowd and a shared experience. There is also the idea that some of these people suffered from genuine convulsions because of epilepsy, or even that many of them did. It is conceivable that, as experiencing convulsions became more and more associated with miracles and the divine, and as those who experience them were afforded some measure of respect in these circles, that people with epilepsy were drawn to these groups, or even recruited for their “gift.” As for their supposed invulnerability, this may have been a kind of parlor trick. The grands secours were administered by other members of the cult, so-called secouristes, who may have been careful not to hurt the convulsionnaires when they struck them and not to break the skin when they thrust the points of blades against them. It may have been more of a show after all, like televised wrestling, or more similar, like the séances of 19th century spiritualists. Other supernatural claims that were made about the convulsionnaires, such as that they exhibited clairvoyance or spoke in tongues or delivered elaborate sermons beyond their intellectual capability, could be as easily explained as many spiritualist tricks. We’re all well aware of the vague pronouncements that mediums and psychics use to fool people into thinking they have some preternatural knowledge. And glossolalia, or spontaneously speaking in an unknown tongue, by its very nature cannot be proven or disproven as genuine. As for the sermons, there were conflicting reports about this coming out of convulsionnaire séances. Some said they delivered elaborate sermons, while others described them as the rote repetition of statements obviously memorized beforehand. Likewise, reports from the séances contradict claims about convulsionnaire invulnerability. For every description of their being immune to harm, there are others describing young convulsionnaire women covered in blood and crawling on the floor as if in a trance. In the end, a sensible mind must dismiss the claims of supernatural acts as exaggerations amplified by Jansenist propagandists. 

Among those Jansenists bent on legitimizing the convulsionnaires in order not to lose the cult of François de Pâris as their principal claim to legitimacy and doctrinal truth in the schism, there were some who tended toward Millenarianism, the end-times philosophy that the current state of things would soon pass away, ushering in a thousand-year golden age for the church. From this view, the convulsionism in the cult of François de Pâris was but the last sputtering before rebirth, an apocalyptic sign of revolutionary change to come. As with most Millenarian thought, this meant the return of the prophet Elijah, who departed from our world in a whirlwind and a chariot of fire and was prophesied to return as a harbinger of the Messiah. Now in Christianity, some see John the Baptist as Elijah returned, though John denied it, and others look to Christ’s transfiguration, when Elijah appeared in the sky with Moses, like a force ghost out of Star Wars, and say that was Elijah’s return. Millenarians, however, believe Elijah will return at the beginning of the end to herald the Second Coming of Christ. Among Millenarian Jansenist apologists of the convulsionnaires, it was claimed that, surely, Elijah would appear from among these pious vessels of God’s miraculous work. In fact, an anonymous convulsionnaire author took it even further than this in a document called The Mysterious Calendar for the Year 1733 Exactly Calculated on the Apocalypse of John the Evangelist and on the Prophecy of Isaiah, which saw in the Book of Revelations references to the persecution of Jansenists by the Gallican Church. This work asserted that Louis XV was actually the Antichrist himself, for his name in Latin, Ludovicus, when translated into Roman numerals, added up to the number of the beast, 666, and through a couple similarly dubious proofs, settled on 1733 as the beginning of the end of the world. From this milieu, unsurprisingly, there emerged more than one figure willing to make claims that they were prophets of the end times. One was a convulsionnaire whose codename, or nom de convulsion, was Augustin. Frere Augustin, or Brother Augustin, declared himself to be the forerunner of the returned prophet Elijah, and he and his followers were said to consider themselves beyond good and evil, engaging in all kinds of blasphemous and licentious activities at their séances, though whether this is accurate or just the propaganda of constitutionnaires is hard to discern. Then there was Pierre Vaillant, a mild-mannered anticonstitutionnaire abbot and participant in convulsionnaire séances who actually declared himself to be Elijah returned, on a mission to convert the Jews. But Augustin did not confirm Vaillant as the Elijah he had foretold, so the movement just became more and more splintered.

Depiction of a convulsionnaire seance, from the book ‘Ceremonies et coutumes Religieuses…’ , by A. Moubach, 1727-1738. Out of copyright.

In the end, this is a story of schism upon schism, with one sect rising, only to have another sect born from its midst: the Jansenists, the anticonstituionnaires, the cult of François de Pâris, the convulsionnaires, the Millenarians, the so-called Augustinistes and the Vaillantistes. And these are just to name a few. I have actually simplified matter in this series, choosing not to define certain groups or movements like the appellants, the figurists, and the discernants just to try to make it more accessible. As this became more and more complicated, each group came to represent or contain some element that its predecessor could not stomach. So the Jansenists turned on the cult of François de Pâris when the convulsionism took over, and many of the followers of François de Pâris, who retained some sense of propriety and decorum, turned on the fanaticism and excesses of the convulsionnaires when they evolved to include the secours, and the convulsionnaires, many of whom still stuck to their conservative Jansenist theology, rejected the Augustinistes and Vaillantistes for their blasphemy and heresy. In the end, the outrageous doctrines of these sects actually did much to heal the divisions between the sovereign court, the Gallican Church, and the king, for none could stand behind a sect that called the king of France the Antichrist. So eventually, the Parliament of Paris abandoned the convulsionnaires as a cause celebre and worked with Cardinal Fleury to indict Frere Augustin and the worst of the Augustiniste fanatics. With the Parliament no longer countering their every move, ecclesiastical authorities moved to erase this modern age of miracles by officially denying all the cures attributed to François de Pâris, even the early ones that the Archbishop before Vintimille had previously confirmed to be genuine. A final story should serve to illustrate how entirely the power of the cult of François de Pâris and its convulsionnaires had waned. In 1737, after years of working on it in exile, the parliamentarian named Montgeron, whose conversion to convulsionism I mentioned in the beginning of this episode, completed a huge book compiling all the evidence in favor of the miracles attributed to François de Pâris, called The Truth of the Miracles Operated at the Intercession of Monsieur Pâris. Despite having previously been exiled, he dressed up in his finest clothes and strolled into the palace at Versaille, where he handed Louis XV his volume and urged him to read it. In response, King Louis had him tossed in prison for the rest of his life and ordered all copies of the book to be publicly burned.

Now this is not to say that the convulsionism of the followers of François de Pâris disappeared overnight. Their séances and sect persisted in ever dwindling numbers even long after Archbishop Vintimille and Cardinal Fleury and King Louis XV were gone. And it is completely reasonable to consider this entire affair as having made a definite contribution to not only the eventual French Revolution, but also to the emergence of Enlightenment thought and the modern world. While for the most part, the cult at Saint-Médard never expressed any revolutionary sentiment, the ecclesiastical and political struggles they exacerbated certainly seem to have weakened royal authority over the parliament, and likewise, parliamentary resistance to ecclesiastical authority created concrete rifts in the marriage of church and state. Additionally, the fact that the church and the sovereign court and the power of the throne all were forced to struggle with a group of pious commoners, and that even despite the exercise of power to destroy them, they persisted in secret, creating their own egalitarian religious organizations, speaks to the tendency in France at the time toward democratic ideals. Furthermore, and ironically, though this was a modern age of miracles, in the long run it had the counterintuitive effect of reducing the importance of miracles in the church. The lengths to which the church went to explain away the purported miracles, or to suggest they represented something diabolical, resulted in skepticism being the standard reaction to such claims. More than this, the fanaticism that appeared during this affair encouraged the philosophes of the French High Enlightenment in their attacks on religion and claims of the supernatural, helping to usher in the modern age of rationalism and materialism. Enlightenment philosopher David Hume pointed out this irony best when he suggested that the miracles at Saint-Medard were better attested to than those of Jesus Christ himself, and so in working so hard to undermine and disprove those miracles, the church had unwittingly provided skeptics with the arguments needed to refute even the wonders performed by Jesus.

Further Reading

Kreiser, B. Robert. Miracles, Convulsions, and Ecclesiastical Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Radner, Ephraim. Spirit and Nature: The Saint-Médard Miracles in 18th-Century Jansenism. Herder & Herder, 2002.

Strayer, Bryan E. Suffering Saints: Jansenists and Convulsionnaires in France, 1640-1799. Sussex Academic Press, 2008.

The Jansenist Miracles of Enlightenment France, Part One: The Thaumaturges

On the 24th of March, 1656, at Port-Royal Abbey in Paris, a young woman named Marguerite Perrier who boarded with the nuns there, knelt to kiss a relic that had recently been given to the abbey. It was a thorn claimed to be from the crown of thorns forced onto Christ’s head. Now young Marguerite Perrier had long suffered from an ulcerous sore in the corner of her eye, something the doctors called a lachrymal fistula, which caused her face to swell and a terrible smelling discharge to come from her eye and nostril. In kneeling to kiss this Holy Thorn, hopeful that this relic of Christ might do for her what medicine never could, she allowed the thorn to touch her disfiguring sore. Thereafter, Perrier claimed that she had been healed of her malady, and her claims were later upheld by doctors. This, in addition to a number of other cures associated with the Holy Thorn, resulted in an official recognition of the miracle and the relic by the Catholic Church, but also in great disagreement over what the miracle meant. Port-Royal Abbey was a stronghold of adherents to a Catholic sect known as Jansenists who had caused something of a doctrinal schism in the church. Indeed, young Marguerite Perrier’s uncle was Blaise Pascal, a Jansenist theologian who just three months before his niece’s supposed miracle had written a denunciation of the Jesuits, a principal enemy of the Jansenists. So, while the Jansenists viewed the Holy Thorn miracles as proof that God was on their side, the Jesuits and other enemies of Jansenism in the church argued that such a miracle could have happened anywhere the Holy Thorn might have been and testified only to the relic’s power, or alternatively suggested that God only sent miracles to intercede because of rampant sin, suggesting the Holy Thorn miracles occurred at Port-Royal because the Jansenists there were flirting with heresy. The Holy Thorn miracles would not be the only supposed supernatural phenomena associated with Jansenism to occur in Enlightenment France, and just as at Port-Royal, the way that these supposedly miraculous happenings were rationalized by skeptics and believers alike to support conflicting sides of ongoing ecclesiastical and political struggles offers fascinating insight into the significance of wonder-working in the popular and modern mind.

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In France, decades before the famous Holy Thorn miracles at Port-Royal, René Descartes commenced a career in philosophy that many consider the beginning of modern thought, and half a century after those miraculous healings, in the early 1700s, philosophes like Diderot, Montesquieu, Rousseau, and Voltaire would make France the epicenter of the High Enlightenment. And yet, at the very same time, amid this burgeoning modernity, the great awakening of logic and rational thought, a tumultuous conflict of fanaticism and mania and widespread claims of unexplainable prodigies threatened to drag France back to a darker age. These claims of the supernatural were raised in cults that worshiped magicians, but in a completely different sense than one might imagine today upon hearing those words. Rather than magician, the more appropriate word would be thaumaturge, from the Greek meaning worker of marvels or wonders. And when I say cult, I mean it in the oldest sense of the word, with roots in pre-Christian paganism, as a group that practices the veneration of one of these wonderworkers. In antiquity, these might have been living miracle workers, but as Christian traditions became established throughout Late Antiquity and the Middle Ages, the church managed to keep them focused more on the dead, venerating martyrs and saints at their tombs. But just because they were dead did not mean these thaumaturges could not work their wonders. Indeed, as I mentioned in my last new episode on Joseph of Cupertino, the posthumous working of miracles, typically healings, used to be a central requirement of canonization. So it was that the tombs of holy men were sometimes haunted by pilgrims not only paying homage but testing the waters to see if perhaps a miracle might occur, indicating they had a saint on their hands. These weren’t just any dead clerics, but rather those who were suspected to have died “in the odor of sanctity,” meaning in a state of grace and without sin, and sometimes more literally meaning that an actual smell emanated from their corpses, sometimes because of the stigmata, or wounds corresponding to Christ’s that were said to appear on the bodies of some saints. In early 18th century France, as with the Holy Thorn miracles, an unusual number of these cults sprang up around Jansenist figures, thereby further stirring the doctrinal disputes surrounding the group, and eventually leading to the most bizarre string of miracles in history, a dramatic conflict between church and state, and an upheaval of religious persecution and defiance of secular authority that contributed to the French Revolution.

Portrait of Marguerite Perrier kneeling before the Holy Thorn at Port-Royal Abbey, via Wikimedia Commons

In order to lay the groundwork for all the fantastical claims that would unfold in 18th century Paris, we must understand one of the most complicated doctrinal disputes of all time: the conflict between the Jansenists and the rest of the church, which began long before the Holy Thorn miracles and evolved through various subsequent ecclesiastical clashes. It arose during the counter-reformation, the revival of the Gallican or French Catholic Church in the early 1600s, among theologians and dogmatists, and can be seen as a reaction to or criticism of Jesuit theology, thus the Jesuit attack on Port-Royal and its Holy Thorn miracles. The name for this school of thought in Catholicism was taken from a Dutch theologian, Cornelius Jansen, whose deathbed treatise on the teachings of St. Augustine emphasized certain beliefs about original sin, grace, contrition, and predestination that did not conform to Christian doctrine as established at the Council of Trent. But more than that, the Jansenist movement represented a challenge to church authority and a democratizing influence in religion, for Jansenists believed that even the lay people should have some better understanding of doctrine and their salvation, whereas the church had always kept such theological finer points to themselves as the specialized knowledge that was their privilege. First Cardinal Richelieu, the powerful French statesman and clerical authority, and then his successor Cardinal Mazarin both waged a war of persecution on Jansenist clergy, locking them up and suppressing their views. As leading figures like Antoine Arnauld, writing from Port-Royal, defended their doctrines, they saw themselves condemned over and over by Pope Urban VIII, Pope Pius V, Pope Gregory XIII, and Pope Innocent X, who promulgated a constitution denying certain tenets of Jansenism. This resulted in the French church attempting to bring the Jansenists to heel by asking them to sign a Formula of Submission. Jansenists refused, deepening this schism. This was the context in which the miracle of the Holy Thorn took place and was, not surprisingly, promptly politicized. But it wouldn’t be the end of this controversy, or the last miraculous sign that had to be interpreted by both sides of the conflict.

After this Formulary Controversy, in which Jansenists refused to submit, the group found themselves at odds with both the church and the state, for King Louis XIV had been convinced that the Jansenists’ real crime was a denial of the church’s infallibility, which in turn was tantamount to defiance of his own authority as protector of the Gallican Church. The de facto leader of the Jansenists after Antoine Arnauld’s death, Pasquier Quesnel, ended up imprisoned for a time and then on the run in Amsterdam, and Louis XIV demanded that Pope Clement XI take action against Quesnel and his writings. In response, another apostolic constitution was promulgated, Unigenitus Dei Filius, which condemned 101 of Quesnel’s propositions as heretical, deepening the schism and cementing the factions into two camps, the so-called constitutionnaires who supported Unigenitus and the unrepentant Jansenist anticonstitutionnaires. Amidst all of this furor, Jansenists continually looked to miracles as proof that God was on their side. It had worked with the Holy Thorn, so why not again? Whenever some worthy Jansenist abbé or bishop expired, some miraculous healing or another was said to have transpired at their tombs. None of these ever truly took hold of the public imagination as had the Holy Thorn, however, and perhaps it was because the claims had come from among the circle of Jansenist insiders at Port-Royal, making them suspect. However, in 1725, a more public miracle claimed by a cabinetmaker’s wife gave them something stronger to tout. Madame Lafosse was her name, and while walking in the procession of the Holy Sacrament at the parish of Sainte-Marguerite in Paris, she claimed to be cured of a hemorrhaging condition and a partial paralysis that had long afflicted her. This miracle was authenticated by the church and said to be proof of Christ’s Real Presence in the sacrament—in other words, their wafers and wine must truly be Christ’s flesh and blood to have effected such a cure. But soon the Jansenists claimed the miracle as proof of God’s sympathy with their cause because the priest who had blessed this particular sacrament, it turned out, was an anticonstitutionnaire.

Pope Clement XI enthroned while portraits of Jansen and Quesnel are trampled and destroyed before him, via Wikimedia Commons

While this debate over the significance of Madame Lafosse’s healing raged on, numerous other miraculous cures began to be reported, all connected to the Jansenists in some way. Some miracles came from a certain church in the hands of Jansenist canons, while others were attributed to relics that had belonged to Father Pasquier Quesnel. Several were cured of afflictions at the tomb of a little known Jansenist priest named Sauvage. Also, a canon in the abbey of Avenay named Gérard Rousse passed away in the odor of sanctity yet because of his opposition to the papal bull Unigenitus had been denied last sacraments and burial on sacred ground; nevertheless, two people claimed to be miraculously healed at his burial place. These Jansenist thaumaturges were not just posthumous wonderworkers either. In early 1727, a Jansenist Archbishop Barchman gave his benediction to a woman in Amsterdam who, according to 170 witnesses, was thereafter healed of several maladies that doctors had deemed incurable, and a couple months later in Lyon, an anticonstitutionnaire father named Celoron was said to have restored the sight of a 3-year-old who had been blinded by smallpox. These miracles tended to draw only limited interest, however, and in some cases, such as Rousse’s, authorities in the church actually forbade pilgrimages to the tombs of Jansenists who appeared to be gathering a cult, thereby keeping any of these miracles from gaining the fame that would have really marshalled support to the anticonstitutionnaire cause. They would not be so successful, however, in trying to suppress the cult of another Jansenist thaumaturge: François de Pâris, whose posthumous miracles would finally bring the renown that Jansenists needed, but whose cult would eventually become something far different than expected, in the end doing more harm than good to the Jansenist cause.  

Most of what we know about the priest with the exceedingly French name François de Pâris comes to us from biography written after the emergence of his cult and so may be less trustworthy than we would like. It’s said that he came from a background of wealth, with his father involved in politics, but that he had been drawn to a life of piety at a young age. His family actually discouraged this, intending for their son to study law, which he did as a dutiful son before eventually joining the clergy regardless of the wishes of his family, who in retaliation partially disinherited him. At seminary, he was influenced by Jansenist theologians and developed a strong anticonstitutionnaire stance on the controversy over Unigenitus. Taking to heart the Jansenist teachings on austerity and charity, he took what was left of his inheritance and gave it to clothe the poor. Known to embody the meekness and asceticism espoused by Jansenists, he refused to be made a deacon because he felt himself too sinful and thus unworthy of the office, and instead chose to live out his days in squalid poverty and isolation, believing that his own suffering was done in penitence for the church at large, which had fallen into sin because of Unigenitus. He chose the poor Paris suburb of Saint-Marceau to seclude himself, and when not in isolation in his gloomy, unfurnished living quarters, he became well known in his community for giving away the woolen stockings he made and for cleaning the neglected streets. Thus he already had something of a saintly reputation when, in May 1727, due to declining health brought on by his fasting and physical mortifications, he died, the last words on his lips, supposedly, being a reiteration of his opposition to the papal bull Unigenitus. Almost immediately the beginnings of a cult could be observed as crowds of common folk came to see him in his simple coffin, wanting to press their rosaries to his corpse in order to imbue them with his sanctity or to cut off some relic such as a lock of his hair or even a fingernail. Some claimed that he did not appear to be dead, but rather retained the color of vitality in his face.

Portrait of François de Pâris, via Wikimedia Commons

In attendance on the day François de Pâris was buried in a little cemetery in the churchyard of Saint-Médard was an elderly widow whose arm had been paralyzed for 20 years. After kissing the feet of his corpse and praying for his intercession, she was immediately healed! Or so she claimed, six year later. However, certainly some miracle like the one this widow claimed to have received must have been rumored, for soon many afflicted people began traveling to François de Pâris’s graveside to pray for a miracle cure or take some relic for themselves. Within a year, he was no longer in a modest grave but rather entombed at Saint-Médard, in a black marble slab raised on stone pillars high enough for pilgrims to prostrate themselves and crawl beneath him. During summer the next year, after a dozen or so claimed miracles, the church began investigations for the canonization process. Especially convincing, it seemed, were the healings of Pierre Lero, whose ulcerated leg had troubled him more than a year; Marie-Jeanne Orget, who had been afflicted with a skin condition on her legs for thirty years; Elizabeth Loe, who had been dealing with a swollen breast for a year and a half; and Marie-Madeleine Mossaron, whose left side was paralyzed and whose other side suffered frequent convulsions. Although the bishop in charge of the investigations was inclined to declare the miracles authentic and thus to canonize de Pâris, the royal government, aware that this would become fodder for the Jansenists, pulled rank and made sure that de Pâris would never be consecrated a saint. This had little effect on the increasing numbers of pilgrims to his tomb, however, for most of the sick and devout visitors to François de Pâris’s resting place had little understanding of the ecclesiastical political turmoil roiling in the background. Eventually, however, the constitutionnaire forces who were troubled by the growing cult at Saint-Médard would take further action to quash their worship of this thaumaturge, and the supposed miracles of François de Pâris would be further politicized.

It took a while, but in the spring of 1731, just as church officials had feared, Jansenists began to exploit the ongoing miracles among the cult of François de Pâris at the Saint-Médard cemetery as proofs of the righteousness of the anticonstitutionnaire position. In the last couple of years, as the Saint-Médard cult was growing, the government had increased its efforts to impose the Unigenitus Bull by making it not only a judgment on Church dogma but also a binding law of the State, a maneuver many thought would finally stamp out Jansenist thought. However, magistrates in the sovereign court, many of whom had Jansenist leanings, objected to this royal declaration and frustrated its enforcement. Thus we already see how the political turmoil caused by this controversy may have helped place France on the path to revolution. Despite uncertainty over the validity of the royal decree in the court and pushback among magistrates, within the Church, it was treated as a mandate, and Cardinal Fleury, chief minister of Louis XV, as well as Archbishop Vintimille of Paris, began to purge the church of any parish priests they suspected of being Jansensists. One day, angered by the suspension of her priest, a woman by the name of Anne Lefranc traveled to Saint-Médard to pray for the intercession of François de Pâris. This old spinster had been partially paralyzed and blind in one eye for almost thirty years, a condition that doctors had called incurable, and she hoped that this thaumaturge’s powers could heal her, not so much because she desired to be healed but rather, as she explained it, so that she might “make manifest the justice of the cause of her legitimate pastor.” Within a few days of her visit to the tomb, she reported that her blindness and paralysis were entirely healed, which stood as proof, she asserted, that her priest had been unjustly removed from his position. The case of Anne Lefranc took the miracles at Saint-Médard and thrust them into the center of this political struggle, and in the process made them something of a sensation and a spectacle that all of Paris began to talk about.

A woman lies on the marble slab at M. de Pâris’s tomb hoping to be miraculously healed, from Wellcome Images, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International license (CC BY 4.0), as per Wikimedia Commons.

Once again, the debate over what a miracle signified ensued, like trying to decipher the language of God. Of course, anticonstitutionnaires saw it as a sign of God’s favor on not only the woman healed, but by extension the priest she had been praying for, and thus all those priests opposed to Unigenitus who had been wrongfully suspended from their parishes. To them, it was clear; the miracles at Saint-Médard were a message to the rest of the church that they were in error for persecuting Jansenists. On the defensive, the constitutionnaires objected to Jansenists declaring the Lefranc miracle genuine without the proper authority. Conducting their own investigation, Cardinal Fleury and Archbishop Vintimille came to the quite different conclusion that the Lefranc cure was a hoax. Doctors brought in to examine Lefranc declared that her paralysis should never have been called incurable, for it was a “hysterical” condition, related to “menstrual irregularity.” And far from being cured of it, she still afterward had difficulty walking. Moreover, Lefranc’s own brother and mother swore that she had never been blind in one eye. Then, in his written declaration, Archbishop Vintimille implied that a conspiracy was afoot, and that Jansenists had put her up to the charade, coached her, and afterward attempted to authenticate their fraud by soliciting and extorting witnesses. In return, the anticonstitutionnaires called Fleury and Vintimille’s own investigation a fraud, suggesting they had bribed doctors to say what they desired and bullied witnesses into recanting, omitting any testimony that did not fit their narrative. Where the truth lies is hard to discern, but the questions this episode raises remain intriguing.

Could Vintimille’s explanation of Lefranc’s claims actually provide a rational explanation for all of the Jansenist miracles, even as far back as Marguerite Perrier’s healing by the Holy Thorn at Port-Royal? Could the Jansenists have conceived of a scheme to stage miracles in order to bolster their cause? Was it really as simple as paying off or threatening witnesses to get their testimony? And later, realizing that they need not stage them, did they perhaps wait for claims of miracles that they might declare to be proofs of God’s favor for their cause, for whatever reason, even just that a Jansenist had previously ministered to one who later experienced a miracle? If so, how then to explain these miraculous cures that they only exploited after the fact? Vintimille’s assertion that Lefranc’s condition was “hysterical,” while reflecting the misogyny and poor knowledge of physiology of its day, might actually have a valid point. Today, rather than attributing a condition to “hysteria” or anything related to female anatomy or psychology, we would speak of psychogenic or psychosomatic conditions—afflictions without a physical cause that might have more of a psychological cause. Both of Lefranc’s conditions, partial blindness and paralysis, are sometimes known to be neurological symptoms, perhaps caused by a psychological trigger—what psychiatrists today might term a conversion disorder. If such symptoms can be triggered psychologically, it stands to reason that a sudden cure could also be psychologically triggered, and praying at the tomb of a thaumaturge said to perform miraculous healings might be just the suggestive trigger needed. Looking back, most of the Jansenist miracles appear to be the spontaneous healings of conditions that may have been psychological: the partial paralysis of Madame Lafosse in the sacramental procession, the blindness of the 3-year-old healed by Father Celoron, the partial paralysis of the widow that kissed François de Pâris’s feet, and the paralysis and convulsions of Marie-Madeleine Mossaron. And as the army of sick and pious pilgrims arriving at Saint-Médard grew in proportion with the expectation of miracles occurring, did this just increase the chances that people suffering from psychological conditions would show up and then convince themselves that they had been miraculously cured?

A depiction of the cemetery at Saint-Médard overrun with pilgrims, from the book ‘Ceremonies et coutumes Religieuses…’ , by A. Moubach, 1727-1738. Out of copyright.

In a further effort to curb the growth of François de Pâris’s cult so that no further miracles could be exploited by the anticonstitutionnaires, Archbishop Vintimille declared that further observances at Saint-Médard were forbidden. But this did nothing to stop the crowds that every day arrived with the expectation of miracles being performed. And they weren’t disappointed. In just that year, 1731, around 70 miracles were reported and assiduously recorded by Jansenists who wanted to do everything they could to authenticate the miracles taking place there. Some claimed immediate healing, and among these were complaints like blindness, deafness, and paralysis. Other afflictions were diseases or infections or cancers, but their healing was not always immediate, sometimes occurring gradually after their visit to the tomb, which raises the possibility that the illnesses may have simply run their course naturally. Perhaps the most unusual miracles that occurred at Saint-Médard, though, were the countermiracles, or divine punishments that it was believed the thaumaturge François de Pâris meted out to disbelievers and those who came to his tomb determined to fake a miracle and thereby discredit the cult. One woman faked paralysis to mock the supplicants and was actually struck down with a real paralysis. Of course, this too could be explained as a psychological trigger of a conversion disorder, but the result was that she became convert. Thus the numbers of the devoted swelled and swelled, a boon to nearby hotels and cafés, but a worry to the royal government, which responded by posting police around the cemetery. Now this supernatural flap of miraculous healings had become a social powder keg, and before long, it would ignite in the strangest fire imaginable.

Further Reading

Kreiser, B. Robert. Miracles, Convulsions, and Ecclesiastical Politics in Early Eighteenth-Century Paris. Princeton University Press, 2015.

Radner, Ephraim. Spirit and Nature: The Saint-Médard Miracles in 18th-Century Jansenism. Herder & Herder, 2002.

Strayer, Bryan E. Suffering Saints: Jansenists and Convulsionnaires in France, 1640-1799. Sussex Academic Press, 2008.

The Feat of the Flying Friar: St. Joseph of Cupertino

Today, when one thinks of a human being having the ability of unencumbered flight, being able to fly without the aid of a machine, one almost certainly thinks of it in the context of superhuman powers like those observed in the superhero characters that have dominated blockbuster cinema for the last decade. This is the easiest context into which one can place such notions, as the idea of a man flying has been associated with comic book characters since 1939, when Namor the Submariner first took flight. While Superman first appeared in 1938, it is a little known fact that he wasn’t actually depicted in flight until 1941. It is interesting to note, however, that neither of these iconic first flyers were exactly human: Namor was a mutant half-Atlantean, and Superman, of course, was a Kryptonian extraterrestrial. Soon, flying human superheroes became relatively common, but they seem always to come by their abilities of flight through some technology or magic or because of some chemical or radioactive accident or science-fictional mutation. To find stories of regular human beings who supposedly really could fly, we must look further back, to a time when superhuman abilities were thought to have been conferred on people by some deity. And even then, these powers of flight were possessed by people either considered heroes or villains, for it was thought they had been granted the gift of flight either by a benevolent god or a malevolent devil. The heretic Simon Magus, whose name indicates a Zoroastrian faith but whose legend claims he was the origin of Gnosticism and other heresies, is said in an apocryphal work, the Acts of Peter, to have “amazed the multitudes by flying.” Peter prayed to his god, beseeching him to make Simon Magus fall, which he did, breaking his leg in three places, whereupon the crowd turned on him and cast stones at him. But flight was not only seen as a matter of trickery or a feat performed by heretics who claimed to be god; it was also a feat performed by the most devout and faithful, such as St. Dunstan, St. Dominic, St. Francis of Assisi, Thomas Aquinas, St. Edmund, archbishop of Canterbury, Blessed James of Illyria, Savonarola, St. Ignatius Loyola, St. Philip Neri, and St. Peter of Alcantara, and it was seen to be a sign of saintliness comparable to the stigmata, or the spontaneous appearance of Christ’s wounds, another sign of divine favor said to have been bestowed on St. Francis of Assisi. Another saint, Giuseppe of Copertino, is said to have flown thousands of times and to have been witnessed in flight by thousands who would testify to the authenticity of his flights. What, then, is a modern, rational mind to make of such claims?

According to the apocryphal Acts of Peter, when Saint Peter saw Simon Magus flying in the Roman Forum, he prayed to his god to make him fall and thereby disprove his claims of divinity. However, interestingly, the text calls this an illusion that carried away or amazed those who witnessed it. Likewise, earlier miracles performed by Simon Magus are called “lying wonders,” such as conjuring spirits “which were only an appearance, and not existing in truth.” This causes one to wonder if ancient feats of flight might all have been faked as a kind of parlor trick. Of course, in modern times, we have all seen the levitation trick known as Balducci levitation, or some variation of it, practiced by street magicians like David Blaine and Criss Angel. While we might be astonished by it at first, a cursory search of the Internet reveals tutorials for performing the trick on Youtube and wikiHow, showing it to be a simple matter of perspective manipulation. Is it possible that Simon Magus and Saint Francis of Assisi and other saints, including the subject of this episode, St. Joseph of Cupertino, might have simply been fooling onlookers? There is a long history of levitation tricks among the more modern hucksters of late 19th- and early 20th-century spiritualism. Mediums like Kathleen Goligher, Eusapia Palladino, and Jack Webber appeared to make objects levitate, and Daniel Dunglas Home actually made a show of levitating himself, but their feats were debunked by skeptics and scientists as frauds. Can the same be said of these saints, and more specifically of St. Joseph of Cupertino, whose numerous flights are well-documented by diarists and Inquisition courts and corroborated by eyewitness after eyewitness? If so, how did he accomplish such a trick? And if not, how can such feats be explained?

A depiction of D. D. Home levitating, via Wikimedia Commons

Giuseppe Desa was born in 1603 in the village of Copertino, into a Kingdom of Naples occupied by the Spanish and under the thumb of the Spanish Inquisition. He was born into poverty, his father a debtor who fled the home rather than face the law, and his mother a strict moralist who raised him in the Catholic Church, offering him so little affection that Giuseppe considered her more of a nurse and thought of the Blessed Virgin Mary as his true mother. Physically abused by his mother and unwell for much of his youth, he focused his mind on his faith and on the stories he heard about St. Francis of Assisi, tales that surely included mention of that saint’s propensity to float in the air during prayer, sometimes higher than the treetops! Giuseppe, or as he’s called in English and as I’ll call him from now on, Joseph began to loiter around churches, acting as an ascetic, wearing hair shirts and was falling into reveries. Despite his clear devotion to the faith, he was more than once denied entrance to the priesthood on the grounds he lacked the dignity they required of their brothers. Eventually he was taken in as a lay brother at a Capuchin monastery, but because of his clumsiness, he was stripped of his habit within a year, leaving the monastery in shame and walking the 90 miles back to Copertino barefoot, where he took sanctuary in a nearby convent’s bell tower like some tragic hunchback. As a favor to his mother, the Conventual Franciscans there took Joseph in as a lay brother, and eventually as a novice. In 1628, at 25 years old, after years of quiet obedience among these Franciscan friars, he became ordained, entering the priesthood on a fluke: the bishop tasked with administering the test to the novitiates was unexpectedly called away, and having found the first few candidates he had tested satisfactory, he passed the rest without a test. On the assumption that this was divine intervention, St. Joseph of Cupertino is today considered a patron saint of students and is frequently prayed to by those who are dreading a final exam.

After his ordination, he sequestered himself in prayer for long stretches of time, and thereafter, his reveries became even more frequent, and he began to claim the first of his supernatural abilities, the gift of prophecy and of “scrutinizing the heart,” or peering into people’s souls to discern the quality of their characters and their hidden sins. Joseph often pronounced judgment on those he encountered and made predictions of what lay in store for them if they did not repent, and it got to the point that his brothers demanded he cease his pronouncements and seek to empathize with the sinners he met rather than denounce them. Thereafter, a new power presented itself; when he lapsed into a trancelike state, or an ecstasy as the friars would have called it, strange things began to happen. He was seen leaving the ground in a kind of levitation, and even taking flight “like a bird.” During Mass or on holy days of the liturgical calendar like Christmas, Easter, and Good Friday, he seemed to rise off the floor and float in place or he was observed leaping to some unnatural height where he would perch himself and remain in his trance until awoken, whereupon he would often need help getting back down. Almost always, his “flights” were preceded by a violent scream or shout from Joseph. Some witnesses have him floating up so that his toes just grazed the floor, while others have him shooting up several inches above the ground, or sweeping forward or backward, or high into the air, sometimes only for moments and other times for 15 minutes or a half hour. Once he is said to have flown up to embrace the feet of a statue that stood more than a man’s height above the ground, and another time he was seen to fly above a church’s main altar to its tabernacle, where he sat among the candles there. He often flew and perched like this. Once, while walking through an orchard and admiring the sky, he flew upward to the topmost branch of an olive tree and had to be helped down with a ladder. Another time, seeing tall crosses being carried in a procession, he became overwhelmed by the question of where he would touch Christ if he had been present at the crucifixion, and he suddenly flew more than three meters from the ground to sit on one of the crosses’ cross-beams and stayed there in a daze until sunset, when, being commanded by his superior to descend, he seemed to come out of his reverie and climbed carefully back down. Over the last thirty-five years of his life, these miracles are said to have persisted and even become more and more frequent and fantastical, with Joseph flying sometimes as high as thirty meters, as he is said to have done in order to admire a painting of Mother Mary, and even to have carried others into the air with him, specifically a mentally ill person, who was miraculously healed during the flight.

“A Miracle of Saint Joseph of Cupertino” by Placido Costanzi circa 1750, via Wikimedia Commons

The church seemed to have conflicting feelings about Joseph’s powers of flight. It seems that some of his superiors likely censured him for his levitation, for Joseph claimed that it caused him shame, and he turned more and more to asceticism and mortification of the flesh to punish his body, which he called “the Jackass,” for its stubbornness and seemingly uncontrollable tendency to fly. His church superiors certainly wanted to keep his levitations more quiet, and they encouraged Joseph’s sequestrations. However, one Father Antonio of Mauro, who had authority over some 60 convents in Apulia, seemed to see Joseph more like a show pony and insisted on taking the flying friar with him during his tour through the region, showing off his amazing displays of flight everywhere they went and building Joseph’s fame far and wide. However, along the way, certain figures in the church felt that Joseph was acting like some kind of messiah, and one finally composed a charge against him for displaying “affected sanctity” and “abusing the credulity of the populace.” Soon Joseph was summoned before the Holy Inquisition in Naples. While some in the tribunal insinuated that the flights were contrived or even satanic, for the most part, they took the reports of his levitation as proof that Joseph genuinely flew and focused on other concerns. After discerning that Joseph did not take pleasure from his levitation, was not proud of them, and could not control them, they pronounced him innocent. For the rest of Joseph’s life after the trial, he was shuffled around, moved to out of the way locations by the church and occasionally called back before the authority of the Inquisition for some further questioning before being maintained innocent and moved again to some place even further remote. In this way, the church treated him like a dirty little secret, much as they have treated confirmed child abusers in more modern times. Never did the Inquisition find him guilty of any crimes, and despite the mortal danger that it put him in, he is even said to have levitated or flew in front of the eyes of his Inquisitors! And as he grew old, hidden away by the church he loved so much, it is recorded that he flew more and more, even in the isolation of his room at a remote monastery in Osimo, where a fellow Franciscan claimed to have seen him float in the air thousands of times. And in the end, it’s said that Joseph knew his time was near, announcing that his body, “the Jackass,” had climbed the mountain and was ready to rest. He died smiling, and “Amen” was his final word.

Much of this story, though, reeks of the exaggeration of hagiography, for the lives of saints are immortalized and made larger than life as a matter of course. However, the process of canonization, at least at the time, also included a strict investigation, by a “devil’s advocate,” of the miracles performed by a saint to confirm they were authentic, with the additional requirement that further miracles occur after the beatified individual’s death, such as miraculous healings after prayer to the prospective saint. After three such posthumous miracles, Pope Clement XIII canonized Saint Joseph of Cupertino in 1767, more than a hundred years after his death. If one were to play the devil’s advocate in Saint Joseph’s case, one could find some support for the allegation that sent him before the Inquisition in the first place: that he was acting like a messiah, or, to take it much further, one might even find support for the notion that he truly was the Messiah come again, an idea that, if we allowed ourselves to credit it, would provide ample reason to believe that he truly did fly and prophesize and read the innermost secrets in the hearts of those he met, for it would mean he was God incarnate, or reincarnate, as it were. He came from a background of poverty, as had Christ, and indeed, much as Christ is said to have been born in a stable, there being no room at the inn where Mary stopped, Joseph of Cupertino too was born in a stalla, meaning in Italian either a stable, a shed, or some kind of lowly stall. Joseph’s father having been obliged to flee because of his debt, his mother had been turned out of her house by debt collectors, leaving her homeless when it was time to bear her child. An intriguing parallel, perhaps. Then there is the fact that, when he made his public debut on tour with Father Antonio, he was 33 years old, famously the age at which Christ was crucified. Indeed, the monsignor who first reported Joseph to the Holy Office in Naples had grown suspicious of him because he was performing miraculous feats and was 33 years old, which seemed itself to be a tacit claim of being the messiah. Now, if one is a believer in the faith, then one believes that Christ ascended with the intention of one day returning to mankind. How ironic would it be, then, if he did return in the 17th century and the Catholic Church hid him away, embarrassed of the miracles he performed. But after all, even if one were disposed to believe such a thing, the evidence is weak. So he was born in a stable; one wonders how many other poor, homeless mothers have sought shelter in stables when it was time to bear their children. Perhaps this was common. And the fact that he was 33 years old when one monsignor saw him fly means nothing if he had been flying since the age of 25.

Depiction of St. Joseph in flight, from the nave of Church San Lorenzo in Vicenza, photo by Didier Descouens, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license.

If one were to take the job title of devil’s advocate more literally, one might advocate for the extreme opposite view: that Joseph was not the Messiah but rather the Devil, or at least an agent of the devil. The latter seems far more supportable, that he took his power of flight not from a divine source but rather from Satan. Some of his inquisitors suggested as much, and it was certainly a widely held belief at the time that the Devil granted the ability to fly to witches who served him. One reading of his life and career could even be taken to support this story. This version would begin when Joseph was kicked out of the Capuchin Monastery at Martina Franca. Leaving on foot with no shoes or stockings, he later claimed to have been followed by dogs and bandits before meeting a stranger on the road that he believed was Malatasca, a nickname he had for the Devil that meant “Evil Pocket.” This account is extremely vague, but if we unpack it, it seems like the archetypal meeting of the Devil at the crossroads, an opportunity to sell one’s soul in exchange for rewards or good fortune, if you believe such things. One certainly doesn’t need to look far to see what kind of rewards Joseph might have reaped from such a Faustian bargain; after all, he survived the dogs and bandits on the road and soon managed to be accepted at the convent, where through some suspiciously fortuitous circumstances he was ordained a priest without even having to take the test. More than this, Joseph was known to receive gifts supposedly from wealthy relatives and even from mysterious patrons who showed up at his door, giving him new habits and luxury items like fine clothing, art, and watches. Beyond these gifts, there is the obvious gift of flight, and it is said that when he used his gift of “scrutinizing hearts” and of prophecy, that he did so rather more like a sorcerer than a holy man, predicting that sinners or people who had crossed him would suffer pains or afflictions, making it seem like he was cursing them using some kind of black magic. This perspective of Joseph and his abilities also breaks down under examination, though, for Joseph was ever an obedient priest, casting aside the luxuries he enjoyed and denying himself worldly comforts to make up for his sinful indulgence in them. Moreover, he seems only ever to have used his powers to encourage faith in the Catholic god, rather than to lead any of his flock astray. There are even stories of him confronting and condemning those who practiced sorcery. If he was an agent of the devil, he concealed it very well and seems to have never accomplished much for his diabolical patron.

Today the notion of a devil’s advocate is more of a rhetorical device, to entertain a critical viewpoint for argument’s sake. Therefore, let us return from our sojourn into religious views of this figure to the realm of science, skepticism, and critical thought to determine whether, as even some of his Inquisitors suspected, Joseph was perhaps a fraud. The loudest voice advocating a skeptical view of the saint comes, as is frequently the case, from noted skeptic Joe Nickell, who does a close reading of philosophy scholar and critic of the materialist worldview Michael Grosso’s book, The Man Who Could Fly: St. Joseph of Copertino and the Mystery of Levitation. Grosso’s book is also my principal source, as he did the important work of having old Italian works about the saint translated into English and therefore offers the most information on St. Joseph’s life. Nickell looks at the material Grosso presents and points out a few key passages as evidence that Joseph was conning everyone. First, he looks at descriptions of his levitation and suggests that when the priest was floating just above the floor in his robes or gliding forward or backward, he was likely creating an illusion by rolling back from resting on his knees to resting his buttocks on his heels, which would look like he was rising off the ground while kneeling. Furthermore, his higher flights can all be explained, according to Nickell, as leaps or bounds made by a clearly very athletic man, pointing out that every time he “flew” to a great height, he did not hover in the air but rather was obliged to grab onto and perch on something. He suggests that the fact Joseph cried out every time he supposedly flew was evidence that they were acts of athletic prowess, requiring great physical effort and eliciting a cry like that of a martial artist striking boards. And he even looks at some of the accounts of Joseph’s life that Grosso has included to suggest some acquaintances knew him for a fraud, such as a companion who had traveled with him for years eventually requesting to be sent away, or Father Antonio, the prelate who had taken Joseph on tour, saying nothing about his ability to fly when asked about Joseph years later. Altogether, it is a very convincing argument, but as with many skeptical arguments, it has serious flaws that a sincere skeptic probably should have acknowledged.

Saint Joseph of Cupertino (Copertino). Engraving by G.A. Lorenzini. Credit: Wellcome Collection. Attribution 4.0 International (CC BY 4.0)

Among the biggest problems with Nickell’s reading of the facts is that so very many people witnessed and gave clear testimony about Joseph’s ability to fly. Thousands saw his feats, and the written records in court depositions, biographies, letters, and diaries are numerous. Perhaps some of these could be dismissed as poor observers taken in by an illusionist, but could all of them? None record any detail to cast doubt on his flights, and in fact, many describe him not as seeming to float or leaping high, but rather soaring like a bird. Indeed, it is the skeptic Joe Nickell who appears to be dismissing great swathes of the testimony on the assumption that they were fooled or moved by faith and the power of suggestion to give the reports they gave. Moreover, if Joseph were the skilled illusionist that Nickell suggests he was, that would have made him an ingenious and extremely deceptive charlatan, and that just simply isn’t the character we see in what survives of his life story. He appears to have been meek and dutiful with his superiors, and to have preferred isolation. Rather than reveling in his displays, they seem to have caused him great distress. Moreover, he seems to have been far too weak of intellect to have maintained such a deceit for so long. Growing up, he was certainly believed to be stupid, even having earned the nickname “gaping mouth” for the way he always went about with his mouth hanging open. As previously discussed, he became the patron saint of students only because he was so terrible in his studies and only lucked through exams. Could such a dullard have possibly made fools of everyone he encountered? And if he was truly so secretly clever, why on earth would he have persisted in pretending to fly even in front of his Inquisitors when he would have known that it put his very life in danger?

The skeptic Joe Nickell would further have us believe that Joseph accomplished his illusions by sheer physical prowess, exerting the bodily control of a yogi in balancing just so beneath his robes, or by displaying the strength and grace of an acrobat in leaping to great heights and balancing on precarious places. In truth, it seems that Joseph of Cupertino was not so physically gifted as this. As a child, he was bedridden by a growth the size of a melon on his behind. After it was eventually removed by surgery, he had a difficult time walking, let alone bounding and leaping, and because of this, he grew into a remarkably clumsy young man. In fact, it was this oafishness that led to his being stripped of his habit by the Capuchins: on kitchen duty, he knocked over boiling water when he put wood on the fire, and he broke many dishes. As if this weren’t enough, he even punished his body with his ascetic practices. A hair shirt wasn’t enough for penance, he thought, so he put the broken pieces of the dishes he dropped inside his shirt to cut his skin. Such behavior would continue throughout his life, as he devised unique ways to rend his own flesh, building his own scourge with needles and pins and sharp pieces of steel, and he wore a chain with spurs tight over his shirt throughout the day. He distressed his superiors by covering his body with lacerations in this way. Once he even knelt praying for so many hours that his knees became infected, and Joseph decided to cut the infection from his own flesh with a common knife, which of course led to another lengthy convalescence like in his youth. This simply does not sound like a man with the physical strength to accomplish the feats of acrobatics that Nickell suggests he pulled off, like leaping some six feet into the air to grasp the feet of a statue and through massive upper body strength hold the rest of his body out parallel to the ground. But some may be inclined to disagree, suggesting his illnesses only made him stronger and asserting that his mortification of the flesh bespeaks a great strength of mind. In that case, consider this: his levitations and flights are said to have continued to the end of his life, when he was a 60-year-old man sequestered in a remote monastery with only a few fellow priests there to impress. Even if a 60-year-old could pull off these tricks, what would have been the point?

Yet another 18th century depiction of San Giuseppe da Copertino, via Wikimedia Commons

In the end, as devil’s advocate, I find it hard to advocate for any argument thus far. I cannot accept that he was a black magic sorcerer or that he was imbued with some godly power, yet neither do I find the rationalist skeptic’s explanation convincing. And what are the alternatives? One could claim that his legendarium is a result of a massive conspiracy by the church to produce a saint who would be used to propagandize, but this is untenable—as are all massive conspiracy claims—and easily disproven by the facts of how the church actually treated him. Or is it possible that all of this is a huge misunderstanding due to mistranslation and historical distance preventing our understanding of the idiom of the time? Many of the reports of Joseph’s flights don’t use the word for flying or flight, using instead the word ecstasy, which as I mentioned before is meant to indicate the reveries during which Joseph was said to have flown. The word ecstasy refers to being outside of oneself, displaced from the body in a trance of exaltation. It derives from Ancient Greek  ἐκ, or “out,” and ἵστημι (hístēmi), “to stand,” so literally being beside oneself, and use of the word may explain another supposed superhuman ability of saints, bilocation, or being in two places at once. It is tempting to suggest that the use of this word, which only referred to being in a rapturous stupor, has led to the misunderstanding that Joseph was flying around. His Inquisitors, after all, questioned him about his moti, the movements of his body, which seems like it could just as well refer to any movement he made during a trance. But this explanation too would be a weak refutation only capable of convincing someone who wanted to believe the saint to be a fraud. It is a simple thing to cast doubt on the work of experts, like the translators of historical documents who have provided us so much clear first-hand testimony of Joseph’s supernatural abilities of flight. That is the practice of a denialist. I cannot double check their translations, and others who know better have done so. Thus I find myself scratching my head, actually wondering if it’s possible that a man could fly. After all, we have examples of seemingly superhuman feats from people in other monastic traditions, like Tibetan monks who raise their body temperature in order to withstand great cold. If science can accept the mind’s ability to influence the body, then will it someday accept that this influence could go so far as to enable the body to break the laws of physics? As Sherlock Holmes said, “[W]hen you have eliminated the impossible, whatever remains, however improbable, must be the truth”… but what happens, I wonder, when the impossible can no longer be eliminated?

Further Reading

Nickell, Joe. “Secrets of ‘The Flying Friar’: Did St. Joseph of Copertino Really Levitate?” Skeptical Enquirer, vol. 42, no. 4, July/Aug. 2018. Skeptical Enquirer, skepticalinquirer.org/2018/07/secrets-of-the-flying-friar-did-st-_joseph-of-copertino-really-levitate/.

Grosso, Michael. “Evidence of St. Joseph of Copertino’s Levitations.” Esalen, www.esalen.org/sites/default/files/resource_attachments/Ch-1-Supp-Joseph.pdf.

Grosso, Michael. The Man Who Could Fly: St. Joseph of Copertino and the Mystery of Levitation. Rowman & Littlefield, 2015.

In the Footsteps of the Wandering Jew: Anti-Semitic Canards in the Coronavirus Era

The ongoing global health crisis arose quickly, with clusters of unusual pneumonia cases in Wuhan, China, in December of 2019. By early January, they reported their first death, and a little later that month, other countries began to confirm cases of their own. Before the end of that month, the World Health Organization declared a global health emergency. Here in the United States, as early as the beginning of March, comparisons were being made between the novel coronavirus epidemic and the terror attacks of September 11th, 2001. At first, similarities were noted in the effects of these two tragedies on airlines and that industry’s need for a federal bailout. Very quickly, then, it became a touchstone. There have been numerous articles holding up the death toll of this novel coronavirus to that of 9/11, and as the number of casualties surpassed those of September 11th, more articles have appeared that contrasted that tragedy and the current one. Some opinion pieces have argued that the two should not be equated, being that 9/11 was a deliberate attack and was only theoretically preventable while the spread of the coronavirus was an act of nature (unfounded conspiracy theories about virus engineering notwithstanding) about which we had definite foreknowledge, suggesting that, at least in the U.S., but also in other countries, high death tolls are far more incontestably attributable to the inadequate response of governments. In some ways, the comparison to 9/11 may have been inevitable, as not since then has such a sudden and devastating phenomenon changed U.S. and global cultures so drastically. Indeed, an article in the Atlantic declared that the 9/11 era has concluded, and that we have entered the COVID-19 era, making the comparison apt insofar as they are both era-defining calamities. And there is a further comparison to be made, although it may not have been as apparent at first. After 9/11, many conspiracy theories emerged as to who was responsible for the attacks, and of course we have already seen something similar with coronavirus. Self-proclaimed 9/11 “truthers” make numerous arguments about who was behind the 2001 attacks, many unsupported and irrational and others more denialist in nature in that they seem academic but are convincingly refuted by experts. Among these conspiracy theories are that the attacks were orchestrated by the government, a claim that we see mirrored in conspiracy theories that the coronavirus was engineered as a biological weapon and was perhaps purposely released in China. But there is another, more despicable conspiracist claim that unites these two catastrophes, as well as many others. During the years after 9/11, far right extremists in the U.S. as well as Muslim and Arab hate groups claimed that Jews were actually responsible for the attacks of September 11th. And now, already, similar conspiracy theories blaming the novel coronavirus on Jews have reared their ugly head, conforming to a long tradition of attributing major tragedies to a worldwide Jewish conspiracy.

In late April 2020, as the coronavirus pandemic continued ravaging the world, the Kantor Center for the Study of European Jewry published its annual report on global anti-Semitism, which reported a sharp rise in anti-Semitic speech related to the pandemic. Some of this hate speech was perhaps not surprising, considering its sources, such as far-right preacher and fake news purveyor Rick Wiles suggesting that coronavirus was spreading in Israel as a punishment for rejecting Christ, or white supremacist groups encouraging the infected to purposely transmit the virus to Jews. Numerous memes encouraging such intentional spreading of the virus among Jews and characterizing its spread among them as divine retribution continue to circulate on anonymous and encrypted social networks known for their far-right user bases, like 4chan, Telegram, and Gab. The “jokes” made in these memes range from talking about using the Israeli flag as an alternative to toilet paper to suggesting that Chinese struggles to cremate the remains of COVID-19 victims prove the Holocaust didn’t happen. Here we see the age-old claims of a Jewish World Conspiracy rearing its hideous head once again. We saw the medieval origin of this conspiracy claim in the blood libel, the myth that Jews conspired to ritually murder Christian children in every country of the diaspora, which I discussed in depth a few years ago, and we saw it take more definite and modern form in the dissemination of the plagiarized forgery The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion, which I discussed in a follow-up episode. Thus, when white supremacist leaders and anonymous internet denizens spread the claim that the pandemic has been orchestrated by Jewish conspirators, much as they did after 9/11, they are taking part in a long tradition of hate, falling into a predictable pattern of racist conspiracism and scapegoating that in many ways is perfectly embodied in another medieval legend, that of the Wandering Jew, a figure that can be taken to represent wildly different views of the Jewish people, depending on one’s prejudices and knowledge of history.

A 1934 imprint by the so-called "Patriotic Publishing Co." of The Protocols of the Elders of Zion, possibly a propaganda product of Nazis operating in the USA, via Wikimedia Commons

The legend of the Wandering Jew serves as a metaphor for many of the baseless conspiracy claims about Jews that we see on the rise again today, for it was an inherently Anti-Semitic myth from the beginning. It is a spinoff from the story of the Passion of Jesus Christ, much like the story of Veronica and her veil, which I have discussed in a patron exclusive podcast episode, it tells of an otherwise unrecorded encounter with Christ on the Via Dolorosa, or Way of Suffering. It tells us that, while bearing his cross, Christ stopped to momentarily rest on the doorstep of a local Jewish man, a shoemaker who told Christ to move on. In response, Christ said he was on his way but asserted that this Jewish shoemaker would wait for his return. And that, so the legend says, was the moment the shoemaker became cursed to live until the Second Coming. According to some versions of the legend, the shoemaker felt compelled to follow Christ to Golgotha and felt compassion for his suffering and horror at the cruelty inflicted on him. Forever after, this Jew was said to wander as a devout witness to the truth of Christ’s divinity and sacrifice. It was clearly a piece of propaganda meant to affirm the Christian faith and cast the Jews in a negative light. In one version of the legend, in fact, the shoemaker had been a vocal opponent of Christ, among the first to call for his crucifixion. Here we see the persistent theme that Jews are to blame for the death of the Christian Messiah, and in fact, in some tellings, the shoemaker is even said to have struck Christ for loitering at his door, portraying the Jews and not the Romans as torturers of Christ. Therefore the tale of the Wandering Jew stands as an allegory for the notion that Jews deserve eternal punishment for their treatment of Jesus, a hate-filled claim we see endlessly repeated, even from supposed leaders of religion like Rick Wiles when he paints the coronavirus outbreak in Israel as divine punishment.

As with the legend of Veronica’s Veil, this encounter is not mentioned in the gospels. The closest thing that can be found would be Christ’s words that “there be some here who shall not taste death till they see the Son of Man coming in His kingdom,” but that has traditionally been thought to refer to the Beloved Disciple, whose mysterious identity I have discussed in another episode, for he had elsewhere said of this nameless disciple, “If I will that he remain till I come, what is that to you?” So the canonical scriptures are silent on the existence of this shoemaker cursed by Christ to wander the Earth until the end of the world. The first record of the legend is from the 13th century, in the writings of Matthew Paris, who recorded it thirdhand from the chronicles kept at the Monastery of St. Albans, which told of a visiting Archbishop from Armenia who claimed to have met a man that said he was this Wandering Jew, although in this earliest version, he was a porter serving Pontius Pilate rather than a cobbler. Lest one think this Armenian bishop invented the tale, the account indicates that he shared his encounter after having been asked if he had ever heard of the Wandering Jew character, “a man of whom there was much talk in the world.” Curious then that we see no further records of the legend until almost 300 years later, when stories of him appear in the Middle East and across Europe during the 16th and early 17th centuries, with encounters in Persia, Hungary, Moscow, Bohemia, Poland, Sweden, Finland, Denmark, Spain, Italy, France, England, and Scotland. The figure’s story may have changed in some particulars but remained largely the same. Even then, some of these figures were suspected of being frauds, or even madmen, and today it is tempting to accept this as an explanation for the origin of the legend. Perhaps one vagabond discovered that he could dine out on the tale, and as it spread, other drifters took it up, with the mentally ill among them perhaps even beginning to believe the imposture.

A depiction of the Wandering Jew drawn by the nineteenth-century American cartoonist Joseph Keppler, via Wikimedia Commons

Over time, though, as the legend evolved through its many tellings, so too did its interpretation. Among many, the coming of the Wandering Jew was seen as a portent of calamity, for it was believed that he brought flood, famine, and disease with him. In France, for example, the coming of a storm was popularly attributed to the Wandering Jew passing through their neighborhood. This conception of the figure as a harbinger of doom likely grew out of the notion that he was cursed to suffer ceaselessly. Think of him with a cartoonish miniature storm cloud fixed over his head. Or there is the idea that he wandered in search of the death that God denied him, which would suggest he was drawn to places that would soon be visited by death. Some versions of his story even have him fighting in every war he could find, endlessly chasing after the sweet release of being killed. Many believed him an apocalyptic figure, since it was said he would survive until the end of the world. Thus, in Russia, they expected his arrival in 1666, the year when it was believed the Anti-Christ would rise. When pogroms in Russia sent Jewish refugees into France, however, the figure of the Wandering Jew was seen more and more as a metaphorical embodiment of the Jewish diaspora, forced to wander as a nomadic people—an aspect of their history since the periods of Assyrian and Babylonian exile. This archetype of the Jew as perpetual exile was folded into other anti-Semitic stereotypes. For example, early psychiatrists liked to suggest that Jews were more prone to neurological disorders, like nervousness and psychopathy. When one psychiatrist managed to find a Jew who suffered from “travelling insanity,” which today psychologists might characterize as a fugue state, he found the perfect literalization of the Wandering Jew motif, and thus it was claimed that Jews have a psychological predilection toward itinerancy and the legend of the Wandering Jew was tied into false notions of Jewish constitutional inferiority.

So the figure of the Wandering Jew evolved from being a piece of Christian propaganda to becoming a symbol of the Jewish people themselves, and as such, notions of the Wandering Jew clearly parallel the false allegations historically made against the Jewish people. Almost all the claims about a Jewish World Conspiracy can be boiled down to the assertion that Jews are responsible for most catastrophes, from war to economic collapse to the spread of disease. Anti-Semites believe not only that disaster follows them as it does the Wandering Jew, but that they orchestrate it for their own benefit. However, some fictional depictions of the Wandering Jew characterize him as blameless and even mournful about the catastrophe that dogs his heels, such as in Eugène Sue’s novel of that name, which has the Wandering Jew bemoan, “A solitary wanderer, I left in my track more mourning, despair, disaster, and death, than the innumerable armies of a hundred devastating conquerors could have produced.” In Sue’s novel, the figure realizes that cholera strikes wherever he goes, much like he brought the bubonic plague with him during his wanderings hundreds of years earlier. But of course, the Wandering Jew by this time had come to represent Jewry as a whole, and the notion that Jews spread disease, not passively but purposely, was a longstanding pernicious claim being incorporated into the symbolism of the Wandering Jew. The truth is that even before the folklore of the Wandering Jew came to include the notion that his appearance presaged disaster, Jews had been blamed for spreading what was arguably the worst plague in history: the Black Death.

Medieval illustration depicting Jews engaging in ritual murder and poisoning wells, from Karenett at Hebrew Wikipedia, licensed under Creative Commons CC BY-SA 3.0

Recently, out of Turkey and Iran, some variations on a conspiracy theory theme arose, asserting that, rather than the Chinese, International Jewry and their American allies were responsible for engineering the virus in order to wipe out Muslim populations. Likewise, when Israel announced progress in the development of a vaccine, hatemongers online immediately suggested that they had the cure first because they were behind the virus, even though all the Israel Institute of Biological Research actually announced was the identification of a potentially useful antibody, not a working vaccine, which will of course take them time to test just like every other major medical research center racing to develop one. Even more troubling than the obvious falsehood and misrepresentation in these anti-Semitic claims, however, is their similarity to historical accusations of Jews poisoning wells. The phrase “poisoning the well” may be very familiar to students of rhetoric as a logical fallacy, a kind of smear tactic that inserts irrelevant negative claims or implications to predispose an audience against an opponent. It is an appeal to hate, and we could certainly find examples of it in anti-Semitic speech, but in this case, we mean something far more literal. When the bubonic plague struck Europe in the mid-14th century, Jewish communities were accused of causing the plague by poisoning wells, rivers, and food supplies. While today we better understand what caused the plague, at the time, layperson and doctors alike had little idea of what the plague’s origin might be. They blamed an angry god, a sinister alignment of heavenly bodies, apocalyptic floods of toads and snakes and mysterious many-legged worms whose terrible odor caused disease, and even supernatural weather in the form of a black snow that could melt a mountain to the ground. Perhaps it’s not so surprising, in this time of uncertainty, that Europeans also looked for a scapegoat on whom to blame the plague, and that, as happens again and again throughout history, they chose the Jews. Between 1348 and 1351, in cities across Europe, thousands upon thousands of Jewish men, women and children were herded into public squares, tortured into confessing, and burned alive. Records of these false confessions under duress were dispatched from one region to another, providing false evidence that could thereafter be used in another pogrom. This was itself a holocaust, prefiguring the Holocaust 600 years later, and even then, there were some who denied its occurrence, such as in Frankfurt, where one chronicler asserted that the entire Jewish quarter of the city had burned to the ground because of an accident rather than a massacre.

The history of Western Christians using Jews as scapegoats and accusing them of outrageous acts is long.  After the murder of William of Norwich, the accusations of ritual murder as a way to reenact the execution of Christ led to the absurd claim that Jews regularly conspired to steal blessed eucharist wafers from Christian churches in order to desecrate them. As this sacramental bread was believed to literally “host” the body of Christ, it was claimed that Jews just couldn’t refrain from driving their sharpened daggers into it. Imagine hating and fearing a group so much that you’d believe they wanted nothing more than to stab bread just to defile your god, even though this would mean that they actually believed a central tenet of your faith, the conversion of the eucharistic elements into Christ’s body and blood, and by extension acknowledged his divinity. This conspiracy claim made of Jews a people defined by unrepentant evil. Therefore it would require no stretch of the imagination to think of them inciting war and revolution for their own nefarious purposes, an anti-Semitic conspiracy that flourished with the rise of Communism and Bolshevism, which were commonly blamed on Jews, as seen in the Protocols of the Elders of Zion forgery. And accusations of Jews poisoning and spreading disease has recurred numerous times as well. In the early 1950s, Stalin made baseless accusations that a group of Jewish doctors was actually a poisoning network that planned to assassinate Soviet officials. In the late 1980s, an extremist anti-Semitic sect of the Black Hebrew Israelites spread the claim that Israel and South Africa engineered the AIDS virus in order to wipe out Africans, and a few years after that, the Nation of Islam published a book entitled The Secret Relationship between Blacks and Jews, which portrayed Jews as the perpetrators of pogroms and holocausts, rather than the victims, asserting with no evidence that Jews ran the trans-Atlantic slave trade and that Jews spread smallpox to Native Americans with infected blankets. Even as recently as 2016, Palestinian president Mahmoud Abbas repeated a debunked claim about rabbis urging Israelis to poison Palestinian water supplies. Thus current rumors of Israelis or Jews in general creating and intentionally spreading the novel coronavirus fit clearly into the historical tradition of a long disproven accusation. Even as far back as the days of the Black Plague, the obvious logical problem with these accusations was seen and pointed out by Pope Clement VI in a papal bull: Jews themselves were dying from the plague just as much as Christians. The same sad fact offers a simple refutation for claims about Jews spreading AIDS and the novel coronavirus.

A depiction of the burning of Jews during the Black Death epidemic, 1349, via Wikimedia Commons

Some historians have argued, however, that the burning of Jews during plague outbreaks had little to do with the notion that they were poisoning wells, that such accusations were not actually believed and were only made as a rationale for massacring Jews. These historians argue the burning of Jews in this time had more to do with class unrest and social conflict. By their reckoning, these were popular uprisings against Jewish people because the poor resented their wealth and the usurious practices of Jewish moneylenders. However, Samuel Cohn, in his article “The Black Death and the Burning of Jews,” makes a convincing argument that this view is itself based on stereotypes and assumptions rather than evidence. According to his extensive research of primary source material, most pogroms during plague outbreaks appear to have been initiated by the elite, by patricians and noblemen rather than poor townsfolk and peasants. In fact, the debtors of Jewish moneylenders were typically aristocrats, not the peasantry, and none of the many recorded confessions of well-poisoning extracted under torture mention anything about usury. In fact, it would seem that Jewish moneylenders typically offered loans at lower rates than Christian moneylenders, such that in some places where Jews had been expelled, the populace demanded that they be allowed to return. Thus, the true reason for blaming the plague on Jews seems to have been simple hatred, as evidenced by the fact that on some occasions other common targets of public hate were also accused of poisoning wells, such as the poor and other foreigners. However, this assumption by historians certainly does speak to the prevalence of another anti-Semitic canard, that Jews control the world economy through their dominance of global banking and finance systems.

As the modern plague of COVID-19 continued its spread, the famously racist KKK figure David Duke claimed that Jews had planned the pandemic in order to destabilize the global economy. Jewish involvement in finance goes back to the Middle Ages and the fact that, barred from many occupations, they were frequently obliged to work in fields that Christians held in disdain, like pawn brokerage, tax and rent collection, and moneylending. Such occupations were often considered unethical and immoral, creating something of a self-fulfilling prophecy with regard to the general estimation of Jewish people’s character. Among the only occupations available to them were those considered dishonest or parasitic, leading to widespread views that Jews were dishonest and parasitic, as proven by their gravitation toward those occupations. The fact that some Jewish families managed to make their fortunes in those trades should have been a credit to their work ethic and business acumen, but instead spawned resentment over their wealth and power. 12th century England provides a useful example of this. William the Conqueror had invited Jews into the country in hopes their services would be a boon to the economy. The murder of William of Norwich started the spread of the blood libel and the Crusades whipped up religious fervor, but anti-Semitic violence was kept minimal until Jews began to rise to prominence and become as affluent as their white Christian counterparts, with Aaron of Lincoln, a Jew, becoming the richest man in England. When King Richard I was crowned and wealthy English Jews paid him homage, the resentment reached a boiling point and violence erupted, with bloody pogroms thereafter in London and York. In 1218, Henry III issued an edict requiring Jews to wear a badge identifying them as Jewish, and in 1290, Edward Longshanks expelled them from the country, both of which events should ring bells as being similar to the eventual actions of the Nazis.

13th century English depiction of “Aaron, Son of the Devil,” a caricature of the Jews, seen wearing a badge identifying his Jewish heritage, via Wikimedia Commons

With the establishment of the Rothschild banking dynasty in 19th century France, this resentment of prosperous Jewish individuals and affluent Jewish families evolved into the fear over an international Jewish cabal bent on economic supremacy, an idea expressed clearly in The Protocols of the Learned Elders of Zion forgery: “We shall surround our government with a whole world of economists…. Around us again will be a whole constellation of bankers, industrialists, capitalists and—the main thing millionaires, because in substance everything will be settled by the question of figures.” Thus the fear of Jewish influence in banking, industry, and finance evolved from a resentment that this marginalized group managed, historically, to succeed despite limited opportunities. And today, as the name of the Rothschilds is still breathlessly mentioned by conspiracy theorists alongside more modern figures like George Soros, we still commonly see claims that Jews control every lucrative industry, from Hollywood to the food industry, which they are said to profit from through a “Kosher Tax” that doesn’t exist, and that they even control the stock market by dominating the Board of Directors of the New York Stock Exchange. But of course, as antiracist essayist Tim Wise has pointed out, this supposed domination of boards of directors is misrepresented, with any number of Jewish directors being seen as over-representation even when they are in the minority, representing perhaps nine to thirteen percent of a given board’s membership. And after all, even if Jews did represent the majority of a board of directors, Wise shrewdly notes that this doesn’t make the wrongdoings of the company attributable to Jews generally any more than the wrongdoings of a tobacco company can be blamed on Christians generally because its board is dominated by Christians.

Fundamental logical flaws like this are characteristic of many anti-Semitic arguments. It has been pointed out that nearly every accusation made against the Jews is contradictory. They are said to be exploitative capitalists but also communist revolutionaries, accused of being inciters of war but also pacifists and cowards, of holding themselves too separate from society but also of intermingling too much, of being too secular and materialistic but also too religious and spiritual. Somehow they are criticized for being bold schemers at world domination and simultaneously for being nervous, timid, and inferior. The cognitive dissonance boggles the mind, and as with the other images of Jewish people embodied in the legend of the Wandering Jew, so too is this contradictory nature. In nearly every telling of the Wandering Jew’s tale, he is given a different name, a sure sign that it is mere folklore or myth. He is called Cartophilus, Ahasverus, Buttadeus, Isaac Laquedam, and Juan Espera en Dios, along with numerous permutations of those. Livia Bitton, in an article on the topic for Literary Onomastics Studies, sees a contradictory tradition in the etymological development of these names. Some, such as Cartaphilus, which means “well loved,” would seem to identify the Wandering Jew with the Beloved Disciple, often believed to be John, whose grave, according to another Christian legend, was found to be empty. The first name John likewise corresponds to some other first names given to the Wandering Jew, like Juan, Johannes, and Giovanni. However, the name Buttadeus seems to refer to the Wandering Jew striking Christ, making him the “God-batterer.” Therefore, the Wandering Jew was either beloved of God or a cursed enemy of God, and in some cases both, as some accounts combined the names, as with the Latin Johannes Buttadeos. So the legend of the Wandering Jew even reflects the dichotomy of views about Jews as either chosen people or villains. It can be seen as an allegory for all the traditions of anti-Semitism whose paths can be traced throughout history and which seem to have swelled again during this Coronavirus Era. It depicts hatred for and fear of the Jews as unending, going on and on and on, just as the Wandering Jew is said to continually march through history, eternally suffering and feared by others. But there is an alternative interpretation of the legend, one that makes of the Wandering Jew more an allegory for all humanity, his suffering and his search for peace universal. This is the meaning we must take from the legend, for this, after all, is what anti-Semites and racists of every stripe fail to recognize: that they are the same as the people they hate, that they share the same struggles, seek the same comforts, and fear the same cruelties.

“The Wandering Eternal Jew,” a Nazi propaganda poster, via Wikimedia Commons

Further Reading

Baring-Gould, Sabine. “The Wandering Jew.” Curious Myths of the Middle Ages, Roberts Brothers, 1867, pp. 1-29. Project Gutenberg, http://www.gutenberg.org/files/36127/36127-h/36127-h.htm#chap01.

Bitton, Livia. “The Names of the Wandering Jew.” Literary Onomastics Studies, vol. 2, no. 1, 1975, pp. 169-80. The College at Brockport: State University of New York, digitalcommons.brockport.edu/los/vol2/iss1/13.

Cohen, Seth. “Israel Announced A Major Coronavirus Antibody Breakthrough. Here’s Why That’s Reason To Be Optimistic.” Forbes, 5 May 2020, www.forbes.com/sites/sethcohen/2020/05/05/israel-just-announced-a-major-coronavirus-antibody-breakthrough-heres-why-thats-reason-to-be-optimistic/#218d2e645ba4.

Cohn, Samuel K. “The Black Death and the Burning of Jews.” Past & Present, no. 196, 2007, pp. 3–36. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/25096679. Accessed 7 May 2020.

Estrin, Daniel. “New Report Notes Rise in Coronavirus-Linked Anti-Semitic Hate Speech.” NPR, 21 April 2020, www.npr.org/sections/coronavirus-live-updates/2020/04/21/839748857/new-report-notes-rise-in-coronavirus-linked-anti-semitic-hate-speech.

Goldstein, Jan. “The Wandering Jew and the Problem of Psychiatric Anti-Semitism in Fin-De-Siecle France.” Journal of Contemporary History, vol. 20, no. 4, 1985, pp. 521–552. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/260396. Accessed 6 May 2020.

Perry, Marvin, and Frederick M. Schweitzer. Antisemitism: Myth and Hate from Antiquity to the Present. Palgrave Macmillan, 2005.

Ravid, Barak, et al. “Abbas Repeats Debunked Claim That Rabbis Called to Poison Palestinian Water in Brussels Speech.” Haaretz, 23 June 2016, https://www.haaretz.com/israel-news/abbas-repeats-debunked-claim-that-rabbis-called-to-poison-palestinian-water-1.5400188.

Russell, W. M. S., and Katharine M. Briggs. “The Legends of Lilith and of the Wandering Jew in Nineteenth-Century Literature.” Folklore, vol. 92, no. 2, 1981, pp. 132–140. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1259465. Accessed 6 May 2020.

Secter, Bob. “Blacks’ AIDS Fears Fuel Anti-Semitism.” Los Angeles Times, 10 June 1988, https://www.latimes.com/archives/la-xpm-1988-06-10-mn-5148-story.html.

Sue, Eugene. The Wandering Jew. George Routledge and Sons, 1889. Project Gutenberg, www.gutenberg.org/files/3350/3350-h/3350-h.htm.

Wise, Tim. “When Paranoia Meets Prejudice: Debunking the Notion of a Jewish Conspiracy.” TimWise.org, 19 Aug. 2003, http://www.timwise.org/2003/08/when-paranoia-meets-prejudice-debunking-the-notion-of-a-jewish-conspiracy/.

Cocoliztli: The Mystery Pestilence

In 2018, a hundred years after the start of the worst pandemic in history, the Spanish Flu, numerous articles appeared marking the anniversary and asking whether the world is ready to fight another pandemic. This year, with the advent of the novel coronavirus and the respiratory disease that it causes, COVID-19, these questions are being answered, for better or for worse. Shortly after the spread of this coronavirus became known, a conspiracy theory arose from an infographic on social media that suggested the appearance of this pandemic fits a historical pattern. This meme pointed to the Spanish Flu a hundred years earlier, and cholera a hundred years before that, and finally, the bubonic plague a century prior to that. This claim that the appearance of pandemics fits a predictable pattern, and the concomitant implication that they may be planned or intentionally spread, is absurd. The meme cherry picks only the pandemics that fit its pattern, excluding, for example, SARS in 2003, HIV/AIDS beginning on the 1980s, and the Asian Flu of 1957-58 that claimed more than a million lives,  not to mention any pandemic before the 18th century. Ridiculously, it places the bubonic plague in 1720, referring to an outbreak in Marseille, France that claimed 100,000 lives rather than the Black Death of the 14th century that claims as many as 50 million. Then there’s the fact that the years are all wrong, with the first cholera epidemic starting about 1817 and the Spanish Flu in 1918. In truth, since they were counting the Great Plague of Marseille, which was more of an epidemic than a pandemic, they might have been able to extend their false pattern back even earlier, to any major outbreak that occurred in any region about 20 years after the turn of a century. During the early 1600s and 1500s, there are no end of these to be found because of the Columbian Exchange, that rough intercourse of cultures, technologies, species, and diseases between the Old World and the New. For example, around 1620, a major outbreak of what was called “Indean Fever”—what today we recognize as Leptospirosis—killed an estimated 90% of coastal Native Americans on the east coast of North America, making colonial occupation far less complicated. And a hundred years before that, Cortés’s taking of the Aztec stronghold Tenochtitlan had been facilitated by an epidemic of smallpox that wiped out about 40% of their population. But these epidemics of 1520 and 1620 were not the only ones to appear with European invasion. Indeed, another, far deadlier disease would contribute to the collapse of the Aztec population about 25 years later, and as with COVID-19, there has been much speculation and disagreement about this disease’s nature and origin, debate which has lasted for centuries.

After the 1519 landing of the Spanish on mainland New Spain, or Mexico, the indigenous populations were decimated by an outbreak of smallpox that killed some 8 million. This disease was very familiar to the Spanish, and the reason why it had been previously unknown in the New World and spread so virulently is today well-understood. While at the time, smallpox was a disease transmitted from human to human, scientists believe that it originated as a zoonotic disease, that is, a disease transferred from animals to humans. This is, of course, something that is often brought up regarding the novel coronavirus, as it is believed to have been a zoonotic transmission from bats, which are known to act as reservoirs for more than one virus that may be transmitted to people, including the closely related SARS. Baseless conspiracy theories regarding the human engineering of the viruses notwithstanding, the consensus is that the current novel coronavirus was first transmitted to a person in the environs of a Chinese wet market, where live animals that would not normally be around each other are kept caged in close proximity to one another. Evidence points to the virus passing from bats to humans through some intermediate species like a civet or raccoon dog. Likewise, commonly known diseases spread to human beings in the distant past from animals, measles, for example, having first been a kind of canine distemper, and smallpox originally being a cowpox. The reason that diseases brought over to the New World spread so quickly and destructively was because the populations had never encountered them before due to the fact that the animal species that acted as a vector of contagion to humans simply didn’t exist in that part of the world. There had been no dogs there prior to the Columbian Exhange, and so no measles, no cows and so no smallpox. Likewise the leptospirosis that wiped out coastal Native Americans in the 17th century was spread by rat urine, most common species of rats being, once again, new to the shores of the Americas, introduced by Europeans, on whose ships the rodents had stowed away. When one considers the death toll that leptospirosis and even smallpox had on native peoples in the New World, however, the numbers are dwarfed by another plague, cocoliztli, which in 1545 decimated the Aztec population in Mexico, causing somewhere between 5 and 15 million deaths. Cocoliztli was long assumed to have been a zoonotic illness carried to the New World by the Spanish, but now we’re not so certain. Unlike smallpox, cocoliztli was not like anything Europeans had ever seen before, nor is it a disease we are more familiar with today. Thus, scientists and historians have been forced to dig for clues as to just what this devastating plague actually was.

Detail of a painting by Diego Rivera depicting the arrival of Cortez, via WIkimedia Commons

Contemporary Spanish accounts called it a great plague or epidemic, depending on the translation, but native writers used the Nahuatl word cocoloztli, meaning “pest” or “pestilence,” thereby giving it something of a biblical weight. And firsthand descriptions of its devastation certainly make it seem as if a god had smitten New Spain. From the onset of symptoms, the disease ran its course in only three or four days, usually concluding in the victim’s death. By the second or third day, it was said the sufferer often had a mental break, going sometimes entirely insane. According to the personal physician of King Philip II, Dr. Francisco Hernandez, it began with a fever and an insatiable thirst, after which the tongue would turn dry and grow dark. Next, the urine would grow dark, becoming green and sometimes even black. The patients’ pulse weakened, and they suffered a jaundice, their entire bodies and their eyes turning yellow. As neurological symptoms set in, including delirium, and even seizures, painful nodules emerged behind the patient’s ears, hard and full of fluid, and the patients complained of great pain in the abdomen and chest. Some kind of necrotic lesion then appeared around the mouth and genitals, like gangrenous ulcers. Dysentery was common, and by the end, copious amounts of blood poured from the sufferer’s anus, vagina, mouth, nose, and ears. Even talking about this gives me anxiety, like PTSD, having experienced sudden hemoptysis, or coughing up blood, during my bout with pneumonia a year and a half ago. It is terror-inducing, but perhaps, with any mercy, the sufferers of cocoliztli were already too delirious to feel this mortal fear. While Dr. Hernandez does mention some recoveries, for the most part, “Vital energy was consumed quickly.” A Franciscan historian named Juan de Torquemada called the pestilence “a great mortality” and described the results of a cocoliztli epidemic decades later, writing, “It was so big that it ruined and destroyed almost the entire land. The place we know as New Spain was left almost empty. It was a thing of great bewilderment to see the people die. Many were dead and others almost dead, and nobody had the health or strength to help the diseased or bury the dead. In the cities and large towns, big ditches were dug, and from morning to sunset the priests did nothing else but carry the dead bodies and throw them into the ditches without any of the solemnity usually reserved for the dead, because the time did not allow otherwise.”

In order to understand the true nature of this disease, we must first reconcile our primary source descriptions with our understanding of disease theory at the time in order to discern how trustworthy these reports may be. Based on Dr. Hernandez’s description of treatments that primarily focused on stopping the dysentery and attempting to stanch the bloody flux and letting the purulent fluid out of the nodules behind the ears, it may be that he and others dealing with this epidemic were still operating under the Hippocratic Theory of the Four Humors, which asserted that most disease was a result of an imbalance in bodily substances like phlegm, bile and blood, treatable by letting some of these humors out or preventing their loss in order to reimpose a balance. Hernandez indicates that when they managed to stop the prodigious blood flow from the nose, those patients were most likely to survive. However, he also states that some were allowed to bleed out, and that “the blood was expelled by some without severe disease,” so really, this appears to tell us nothing reliable. As for how the disease was spreading, the vector of transmission, as we’d called it today, it is discernible as well that doctors were laboring under incorrect notions. For almost two millennia, the miasmatic theory of disease had remained the consensus among healers and natural philosophers. This theory posited that diseases spread because of noxious emanations, or bad air, called miasmas, usually wafting from the rotting vegetation of some swamp or from the decomposing remains of some creature. These miasmas came to be known as “night air,” as it was believed that miasmatic emanations were more common after dark, prompting many to seek shelter indoors with their windows closed, when in fact, as we know now, sharing the stuffy air of an enclosed space with others, especially those who might be carrying an infectious illness, is far more likely to lead to the spread of diseases. Indeed, even the name of the disease malaria means “bad air.” Slowly, all the way through the 19th century, this came to be replaced by the contagion theory, that disease is spread through physical contact, and eventually with modern germ theory. However, even today, there remain some artifacts of this belief in our culture. Every time someone tells you that you’ll “catch your death” by being out in cold or wet weather, they are working under the same kind of misapprehensions as ancient quacks and sawbones. When Dr. Hernandez writes in his report that “[t]he weather was dry and quiet, and disturbed by earthquakes, the air was impure, filled with clouds but without resolving into rain,” he appears to have been suggesting a miasmatic vector of transmission. And his autopsies didn’t do anything to dissuade him of this. He noted “yellowish liquid” and bile as well as black blood, all of which was likely interpreted through the lens of the Four Humors theory, and he found the lungs in a state of putrefaction, which could have been attributed to the bad air of a miasma.

A historical depiction of miasmas spreading diseases, via Jezebel

Even the geographical spread of cocoliztli might have been seen as reinforcing the miasmatic theory. As Hernandez noted, the disease spread to a greater degree in the cold highlands, and less so in the lowlands, which could have been seen as some indication of bad airs circulating in that vicinity. However, there were other peculiarities of its spread that could not then be accounted for. For example, it appeared to infect and kill younger people at a great rate than older people, which seems counterintuitive. Hernandez also notes that the disease attacked regions where native populations lived more than others, only eventually attacking the Spaniards themselves. While Hernandez sees this in geographical terms, today we would understand it more in terms of the vulnerability of the native population. The fact that it ravaged one area more than others was simply because the oppressed natives were concentrated in that area, like a ghetto. At least one government official, Cristobal Godinez, acknowledged that the rampant spread of the disease among the natives may have had something to do with their treatment of them. “The reason so many Indians die of the pestilence is a God secret,” he says at first, hinting at likely pervasive beliefs that it may have been a divine punishment against them for their heathenism, but he quickly changes his tone. “I do not find any better answer than that in the past the Indians were not as badly mistreated and oppressed as they are today with heavy workloads. They are skinny and delicate, the disease finds them overworked and without resistance, so they are finished.” Certainly unhealthy living conditions and malnourishment could contribute to a disease’s spread, but with our current understanding of the indigenous peoples’ especial vulnerability to zoonotic diseases of the Old World, one might be tempted to suggest cocoliztli was also zoonotic and spread more widely among natives for this reason. Therefore, one of the first suspects was a hantavirus, commonly spread by rodents and their urine. However, the illness does not appear to have developed pulmonary symptoms, which would seem to rule out a so-called New World hantavirus. Another would be that it was an outbreak of the bubonic plague, which we know to have been associated with rats but borne by fleas, and cocoliztli victims’ high fever, low blood pressure, and sub-cutaneous nodules that appeared behind the ears, like the buboes of the plague, have all been interpreted as indications that this was the Black Death. However, the jaundice and the extreme bleeding from orifices do not appear to correspond with the bubonic plague. In fact, the profuse bleeding would seem to point to some kind of hemorrhagic fever.

Viral hemorrhagic fevers come in a variety of forms. Some forms have been known to originate from hantaviruses, spread by rodents, resulting in abdominal pain, fever, low blood pressure and bleeding, but as I said previously, a hantavirus seems unlikely based on the lack of pulmonary symptoms among cocoliztli patients. Hemorrhagic fevers can also develop from arenaviruses, another zoonotic virus with rodents as its natural reservoir. These fevers, like Lassa fever, typically come on more slowly, with death occurring within about 14 days of becoming symptomatic, a far longer duration than cocoliztli, which killed within days. In such hemorrhagic fevers, we see the same chest pain, diarrhea, low blood pressure, and bleeding from orifices, but we don’t see the jaundice or the nodules behind the ears. Then there are the hemorrhagic fevers caused by the filovirus, one example being Ebola, but again, the absence of one of Ebola’s tell-tale features, a rash on the upper arms and legs, seems to eliminate this as a candidate for cocoliztli as well. Finally, there are hemorrhagic fevers caused by the flavivirus, transmitted by mosquitoes, the most well-known being dengue fever and yellow fever. For a long time, in fact, yellow fever seemed to be the best explanation for cocoliztli, as it presents with sudden fever and body aches and concludes with jaundice and bleeding. Indeed, even the strange nodules behind the ear have been interpreted as the inflammation of the parotid salivary glands that is sometimes seen in severe cases related to yellow or dengue fever, and the unusual combination of a fever with a slow pulse is seen as a case of Faget’s sign, often seen in yellow fever and Typhoid fever. However, like leptospirosis, which was another possible candidate, yellow and dengue fever outbreaks in the Gulf of Mexico in the 17th century always spread in coastal regions, whereas cocoliztli ran rampant in the highlands. Moreover, physicians in the 17th century, who would have been familiar with cocoliztli, did not believe it the same as yellow fever, and during later outbreaks of cocoliztli, they did not think it to be yellow fever. And on and on it goes, through the lists of known diseases, always with some reason to cast doubt on cocoliztli being an identifiable disease. Bacteriologists have gone back and forth with numerous other illnesses, such as influenza, diphtheria, and pertussis, all of which were eliminated based on the descriptions of cocoliztli symptoms, especially because of the lack of respiratory complications. Perhaps the most debated was typhus, which even the Nobel prize winning French bacteriologist Charles Nicolle argued could have been the culprit. However, it has been convincingly argued that the Spanish physicians who described cocoliztli would have been familiar with typhus and therefore would have called it by its Old World name when writing about it. Additionally, as with Ebola, typhus’s tell-tale rash covering the entire body was conspicuously absent in the cocoliztli epidemic.

16th century Aztec drawing of smallpox victims, Wikimedia Commons

There has been much debate about whether typhus was an Old World import or existed already in the New World prior to European contact. One vector of typhus transmission is via lice, and it has been suggested that lice had been prevalent in Aztec culture long before the arrival of the Spanish. One story tells of an officer of Cortez seeing bags full of lice in the palace of Montezuma and learning that the poorest of the Aztecs would collect the insect to offer as tribute, since they had no wealth to offer. However, other scholars have suggested that these were not lice but rather cochineal insects, known for being used to produce a red dye, which the Spanish, being unfamiliar, mistook for lice. Nevertheless, it has been proven that North American flying squirrels are a reservoir of typhus, lending at least some credence to the notion that typhus was already in the New World. However, ignoring the inconsistencies, if cocoliztli were a typhoid fever outbreak endemic to Mexico, this offers no explanation for the selective immunity of the Spanish colonists, who one would assume, being new to that side of the world, would have fewer immunities to a strain of disease peculiar to that region. However, Rodolfo Acuna-Soto et al., in their 2002 article “Megadrought and Megadeath in 16th Century Mexico,” provide further reason for believing it to be an indigenous disease. First off, as indicated, the Europeans had never seen anything like it, which would seem to support the notion that they hadn’t brought it with them. Second, cocoliztli seems to have been mostly absent from the coastal plains, which goes against the pattern of Old World disease importations. Using dendrochronological or tree ring evidence, they proved that outbreaks of cocolioztli consistently occurred after periods of severe drought. Citing established outbreak dynamics, they reason that the virus spread among native rodent populations because of reduced resources and increased aggression, and thereafter spread to the native populations when infected rodents invaded homes and farms after the drought subsided. Thus, the highlands were more affected, being the agricultural region, and the over-worked and poorly-fed native population that cultivated the region to enrich their colonial rulers were the principal victims, being that it was they who came into contact with the rodents.

What remains would be to identify what virus the rodents were spreading. Still no single candidate seems to fit the description of cocoliztli’s symptoms. In 2018, a clue as to the identity of the real culprit was uncovered by a group of archaeologists and biologists who published the results of their study in Nature Ecology & Evolution. These researchers managed to find a plague cemetery in Mexico where victims of cocoliztli were buried. Taking the teeth of 11 people buried there and extracting DNA from the pulp protected by the enamel, they detected the presence of Salmonella enterica, known to cause paratyphoid fever, an enteric fever distinct from typhoid fever. They then confirmed their findings by comparing this with the DNA extracted from the teeth of persons buried in cemeteries known not to be in use during the epidemics, in which they found no salmonella. This, along with the fact that salmonella is known to proliferate among the poverty stricken living in crowded conditions, and the finding that people buried in the same plague cemetery whose graves indicated they had died before European contact had no sign of salmonella in their dental pulp, would seem to lay the blame for the collapse of the Aztec population once again squarely at the feet of the Spanish invaders. Paratyphoid fever would seem to explain a lot of cocoliztli symptoms, including fever, abdominal pain, slow heart rate, and diarrhea, and is even known to cause parotitis (or inflammation of the salivary glands) during the septicemic stage, accounting for the nodules behind the ear, as well as jaundice from deranged liver function and bleeding because of ulcers in the digestive system. However, these last three are not common, and the bleeding is usually internal, in the intestines, rather than expelled by the mouth and nose and ears. Therefore, there is still some question of whether a paratyphoid fever really provides a final explanation. One possible alternative explanation might be a mixed epidemic, that in the wet conditions following the end of a megadrought, circumstances aligned for a simultaneous outbreak of paratyphoid fever and some unidentified hemorrhagic fever. If that’s the case, though, and this was not one disease but rather a combination of them, it is surprising that this “perfect storm” recurred again and again over the next century.

The 16th-century population collapse in Mexico, as depicted in a figure published with the work of Acuna-Soto, et al. (public domain)

Could cocoliztli have been a disease that remains unknown to medical science today? If so, what are the chances that it could reappear? After killing millions and millions in 1545, cocoliztli showed up again in 1576 to wipe out half of the remaining population of indigenous peoples in Mexico. And beyond these two major outbreaks, there were eleven more, lasting throughout the first half of the 17th century. Today, as we fight this new form of coronavirus, we dread the idea of outbreaks of the disease COVID-19 recurring over and over in years to come, but history teaches us that we should expect it. And as all reasonable people have come to take this threat seriously, changing their daily routines and lifestyles drastically in order to make a difference and prevent worst case scenarios, it seems to me that it is also time for all of us to give more thought to how we might change our lives in order to fight the even greater threat to world health: global climate change. Not only does the future of our world look bleak in terms of more and more severe weather patterns, resulting in catastrophes like we’ve recently seen in California and Australian wildfires. It also portends an economic calamity, which it seems is one of the foremost concerns of those who would rather ignore the current health crisis. Economic collapse, of course, means poverty and famine. As we’ve seen in the story of cocoliztli, poverty and famine contribute to the spread of disease. And if that weren’t enough, the story of cocoliztli also shows us the direct link between climate and disease, with megadroughts contributing to the spread of zoonotic diseases. And if there is one thing we can expect far more of as global temperatures rise, it is drought, and with these climatic disruptions, disease. Listeners, I am sorry to be such a doomsayer here. To be clear, I am an optimist when it comes to the novel coronavirus. This is something we can weather, so to speak, and next year, with the production of a vaccine, something we can beat. But if we don’t put all of our considerable efforts into halting the bigger threat of global climate change, I see greater disaster on the horizon.

Further Reading

Acuna-Soto, Rodolfo, et al. “Large epidemics of hemorrhagic fevers in Mexico 1545-1815.” The American Journal of Tropical Medicine and Hygiene, vol. 62, no. 6, June 2000, pp. 733-739. National Center for Biotechnology Information, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pubmed/11304065.

—-. “Megadrought and Megadeath in 16th Century Mexico.” Emerging Infectious Diseases, vol. 8, no. 4, April 2002, pp. 360-362. National Center for Biotechnology Information, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2730237/.

—-. “When half of the population died: the epidemic of hemorrhagic fevers of 1576 in Mexico.” FEMS Microbiology Letters, vo. 240, no. 1, Nov. 2004, pp. 1-5. Oxford Academic, https://academic.oup.com/femsle/article/240/1/1/536409.

Baldwin, Peter C. “How Night Air Became Good Air, 1776-1930.” History Cooperative, https://historycooperative.org/journal/how-night-air-became-good-air-1776-1930/.

Gunderman, Richard. “How smallpox devastated the Aztecs – and helped Spain conquer an American civilization 500 years ago.” The Conversation, https://theconversation.com/how-smallpox-devastated-the-aztecs-and-helped-spain-conquer-an-american-civilization-500-years-ago-111579.

Huynh, Jeremy, et al. “Evidence Supporting a Zoonotic Origin of Human Coronavirus Strain NL63.” Journal of Virology, vol. 86, no. 23, Dec, 2012, pp. 12816–12825. National Center for Biotechnology Information, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC3497669/.

Johnson, Madeleine. “The Pilgrims Should Have Been Thankful for a Spirochete.” Slate, 20 Nov. 2012, https://slate.com/technology/2012/11/leptospirosis-and-pilgrims-the-wampanoag-may-have-been-killed-off-by-an-infectious-disease.html.

Kannadan, Ajesh. “History of the Miasma Theory of Disease.” ESSAI, vol. 16, no. 1, pp. 41-43. Digital Commons @ College of DuPage, https://dc.cod.edu/essai/vol16/iss1/18/.

Marr, John S., and John T. Cathey. “New Hypothesis for Cause of Epidemic among Native Americans, New England, 1616–1619.” Emerging Infectious Diseases, vol. 16, no. 2, Feb. 2010, pp. 281–286. National Center for Biotechnology Information, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC2957993/.

Marr, John S., and James B. Kirakofe. “Was the Huey Cocoliztli a Haemorrhagic Fever?” Medical History, vol. 44, no. 3, July 2000, pp. 341-362. National Center for Biotechnology Information, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC1044288/.

Qureshi, Adnan I. “Ebola Virus Disease Epidemic in Light of Other Epidemics.” Ebola Virus Disease, 2016, pp. 36-65. National Center for Biotechnology Information, https://www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7149723/.

Vågene, Åshild J., et al. “Salmonella Enterica Genomes from Victims of a Major Sixteenth-Century Epidemic in Mexico.” Nature Ecology & Evolution, vol. 2, no. 3, March 2018, pp. 520-528. Nature, Springer Nature Limited, 15 Jan. 2018, https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-017-0446-6.

Zinsser, Hans. Rats, Lice, and History. George Routledge & Sons, 1935. Internet Archive, https://archive.org/stream/in.ernet.dli.2015.19163/2015.19163.Rats-Lice-And-History1935_djvu.txt.

Drake's Plate: A Brazen Plot

In the summer of 1579, Sir Francis Drake, an English privateer on a secret mission for Queen Elizabeth, made landfall on the other side of the world. He had embarked with five ships in 1577, tasked with sailing around South America to the Pacific and capturing Spanish treasure galleons off of Peru and up the coast of the Americas. After much attrition, with his fleet reduced to one ship, the Golden Hind, he struck out north in search of the Northwest Passage, a much theorized route through the Arctic Ocean that not only would have taken him back to Europe but also would have proven to be a valuable trade route. Turning back due to inclement weather, he landed in 1579 in a beautiful place that he dubbed Nova Albion. This port was somewhere on the coast of modern day California. He encamped there for five weeks, gathering provisions and repairing the Golden Hind in preparation for circumnavigating the globe. Before their departure, he erected a small monument, a plate of brass declaring the land property of Elizabeth I, asserting that the natives of the region had freely given up rights of ownership to Her Majesty, and affixing a coin within a hole in the plate so as to leave there a picture of the queen. The details of this secret mission were kept confidential for more than 10 years, and eventually all the first-hand reports of his voyage would be lost in a fire at Whitehall Palace in 1698. But second-hand reports and Drake’s own later mention of this brass plate affixed to a post somewhere in California, evidence of the earliest English landing in America and their first contact with Native Americans, have long tantalized historians, making it a McGuffin to rival any that Indiana Jones ever pursued, and the story of its eventual discovery is a saga all its own.

In the Introduction of this paper, I’d certainly want to thank all the investors and supporters of the academic study, especially the new contributors, like so-and-so. I’d especially like to thank Karen, who after my recent announcement that I’d be suspending the billing of my patrons during the pandemic chose to bankroll the project with a generous one-time donation on my website. Thanks again, Karen. [Hi Patrons! In the next episode] In this episode, I tell a story that I wanted to include in my episode on E Clampus Vitus, but which was too big to encompass in a mere paragraph at the end of the episode. It involves some prominent members of the Yerba Buena Chapter Redivivus, which was responsible for reviving E Clampus Vitus in the 1930s. This group’s rank and file was full of professional historians, officers of historical societies, journal publishers, and artifact collectors. One among these was the famed historian of the American West, Herbert Eugene Bolton, the originator of an entire theory and school of American historiography whose principal tenet was that U.S. history can only be properly understood in context with the history of all colonial powers and other American countries influenced by colonialism. He spent most of his career at the University of California, Berkeley, where he helped to establish the Bancroft Library as a major center for research. It was here that he held forth in classes of up to a thousand students about the legendary lost artifact of English colonialism that haunted him: the brass plate reportedly left behind by Sir Francis Drake at his landing place in California. It was a mystery he had always hoped to solve before the conclusion of his long and lauded career, and he regularly urged his students to search for it, marshalling them to his cause like his own personal expeditionary force. Thus it perhaps did not come as much of a surprise when, in February 1937, someone came to him with an artifact that appeared to be the very plate of brass he had so long yearned to hold in his hands. And what better person to scrutinize such a find and verify its authenticity? Surely he, of all experts, was best equipped to detect a fraud. But could the desire for it to be genuine have clouded even this eminent scholar’s shrewd judgment?

Herbert Eugene Bolton in 1905, via Wikimedia Commons

In the summer of 1936, one Beryle Shinn, employee of an Oakland dry goods store, was driving along a road near Corte Madera Creek, not far from San Quentin Prison in the Bay Area, when his tire went flat, forcing him to coast over to the shoulder. As a Clamper version of the story would later tell it, he then felt the need to defecate, so he went in search of a secluded spot to relieve himself. Through a fence he went, and up a ridge to a rocky outcropping where he enjoyed a gorgeous vista while emptying his bowels. It was then, as he groped about for something with which to wipe his posterior, that his hand came to rest on a blackened sheet of metal. He carried the plate back to his car, not because he believed it to be valuable, but because he thought it might be useful in repairing his car, which besides a burst tire apparently also had a hole in its cabin. It was months before he decided to try his hand at fixing his vehicle using the metal plate, though, and when he looked at it again, he saw that it bore some kind of inscription. Scraping and wiping off the soiled surface, he saw a date etched onto its face: 1579. Shinn then showed the plate to a co-worker at his store who just happened to be a UC Berkeley student. Recognizing the name “Drake” in the plate’s inscription and being aware of Professor Bolton’s longstanding search for Drake’s plate, this co-worker urged Shinn to take the artifact to Bolton. Herbert Bolton was, of course, ecstatic at the sight of it. He was 67 years old at the time and believed that the discovery of Drake’s Plate could serve as the culmination of his already impressive career. Right away, he brought in Allen Chickering, President of the California Historical Society, hoping to raise the money to buy it from Shinn before the clerk realized how much the item might actually fetch at auction. The two of them went out to the place where Shinn claimed to have found it, and afterward, they made an offer of $2,500 to buy it. At this point, Shinn started playing hard to get and even gave them a scare by taking the plate back home and going incommunicado for most of a week. Chickering, worried about losing the find, went all in, offering $3,500 and writing up a statement that took sole responsibility for the plate if disputes of ownership were raised or even if allegations of fraud were made. Shinn took the deal, leaving both Bolton, Chickering, and the Historical Society financially invested in a historical find they had yet to test for authenticity.

These parties were not the only ones concerned about proving the find genuine. Robert Gordon Sproul, the President of UC Berkeley, was also growing concerned, wary that Bolton may have blundered in rushing to acquire the object. The place it had been found, after all, was far from Drake’s Bay, where it had always been thought that Drake had landed. Bolton reassured him, though, that the appropriate tests would of course be performed. However, after performing no further tests beyond comparing the text inscribed on the plate with the surviving descriptions of the historical plate, he published a work and declared to the public that the plate had “apparently” been found, asserting that “[t]he authenticity of the tablet seems to me beyond all reasonable doubt.” The plot thickened, however, a few days after the news of the find spread, when a chauffeur named William Caldeira came forward to say that he had seen that plate back in 1933. According to him, he had driven his client, another member of the California Historical Society, out to Drake’s Bay to do some hunting, and while he waited, he poked around the car and found the plate. He had wanted to show it to the Historical Society member whom he was driving, but it was too dark to examine it, so he just stuck it in his car door pocket. A couple weeks later, while cleaning out his car, he decided it was garbage and tossed it out on the side of a road near San Quentin. This account resolved the issue of the plate’s discovery so far from Drake’s Bay, where it had long been agreed Drake had landed. But there still remained the mystery of how it had gotten from the roadside to the ridgetop. Further testimony emerged, however, to account for this discrepancy as well. One Joseph Cattaneo, apparently a convict returning to the prison at San Quentin, saw the plate on the side of the road in 1936 and carried it up to the hilltop to conceal it for later retrieval. This seemed to explain everything… except there was another claim, by one Florence Schatti, that she and her friend had seen the plate on the hilltop where Shinn would find it two years before Cattaneo claims to have carried it there. Someone appeared to be mistaken or lying.

San Quentin Prison, as it appeared in the 1930s, via These Americans

Suspicions lingered, and when a manuscript specialist named Henry Haseldon wrote a paper in September questioning the plate’s authenticity, Bolton and Chickering were quick to defend the artifact and the honesty of both Shinn and Caldeira. To answer any further criticism, the University and the Historical Society engaged a respected metallurgist named Cohn Fink to perform electrochemical tests on the plate. For seven months, he and his team completed a battery of tests on the artifact, and their report affirmed that the composition of the alloy and the patina all stood up to scrutiny as originating from the time of Sir Francis Drake. To protests that the plate was actual brass, as in an alloy of copper and zinc, whereas the Old English word “brasse” as used on the plate actually referred to bronze as only alloys of copper and tin were made in England at the time, their explanation was that the plate itself must have been of Spanish origin—an acceptable explanation since Drake had been seizing Spanish goods and treasure throughout his voyage. As for why the plate lacked the green oxidization known as verdigris that would be expected on a brass plate of such age, their simplistic answer was that it must have been because California’s climate was so mild. Despite the lameness of these defenses, their report was generally accepted. By the end of that same year, the plate was a centerpiece of the Golden Gate International Exposition, and in the years to follow, it would be featured as the authentic Drake plate in numerous textbooks, histories, and magazines, including National Geographic. Copies were given to Lady Bird Johnson when she was the First Lady and more than once to Queen Elizabeth II. Nevertheless, whispers behind the scenes continued, suggesting the find was a fraud, and even hinting at inside knowledge of who had perpetrated it. And eventually, in the 1970s, the truth became known. The plate of brass was indeed a hoax, one perpetrated by members of Bolton’s own roisterous chapter of E Clampus Vitus, and they had given him every opportunity to realize it and save himself from the disgrace of ending his career as the butt of a joke.

The members of Chapter Redivivus of course knew of Professor Bolton’s preoccupation with the Drake Plate, and so, being diehard pranksters, they saw a perfect opportunity to play a joke on their fellow Clamper. George Ezra Dane, who had co-founded Chapter Redivivus and resuscitated the Order of E Clampus Vitus along with Carl Wheat, was responsible for initiating the prank. He asked fellow Clamper George Barron, curator of San Francisco’s de Young Museum, to design the plate, which he did, writing the inscription based on the account of the plate written in Drake’s The World Encompassed. He didn’t bother much to get the orthography and phraseology historically accurate, since the hoax, it seems, was never meant to do any more than vex Herbert Bolton. Mostly, he just replaced U’s with V’s. He bought the plate itself, a piece of rolled brass, from a ship chandlery in Alameda and had his neighbor, an artist, inscribe it using a hammer and chisel. The letters were all caps, not Elizabethan at all, but again, this was just a silly joke, they thought. In fact, the artist who inscribed it even left a signature, a large C with a little capital G inside it, for George Clark. And to top it off, before planting it somewhere they hoped it would be found, they actually daubed the back of the plate with the letters ECV, for E Clampus Vitus, in fluorescent paint, so that under certain light, the identity of the pranksters would be revealed. Imagine their delight when, according to plan, it was discovered and brought to Bolton and he fell for it! Then imagine their unease when Bolton convinced the President of the California Historical Society, on whose board of directors George Ezra Dane sat, to invest an enormous sum in buying the plate and accept responsibility for it. Finally, imagine their dread when expert after expert appeared to confirm the plate’s authenticity, explaining away all the obvious problems with it. It’s an alloy that the English didn’t make? Well, it must be something Drake picked up along the way. No verdigris? California has a miraculous climate that causes no rust, I guess.  Even George Clark’s signature, the G within the C, they explained as being a title of Drake’s, Captain General, although this was not a title in use at the time. And the hammer marks all along the edges of the brass, applied to hide the signs of its commercial shearing, and on the surface of the plate, where Clark had attempted to flatten lettering that had been raised by his chiseling method? Those had clearly been made by the poor wretch tasked with attaching the plate to the “great post” Drake had described. Surely that poor man’s thumbs had been much abused by the errant hammer that day. But perhaps most shocking was the fact that a team of scientists failed to notice the fluorescent confession painted on the back of the plate.

The supposed Drake Plate pictured with the hammering plate used by its counterfeiters to planish it, licensed by a Creative Commons International Attribution-ShareAlike license from creator Robert Stupack, via Wikimedia Commons

Dane and the other Clampers in the California Historical Society could not easily come forward once the hoax had gone that far, so instead they tried to nudge Bolton into a realization of the fraud. In May, the month after Bolton’s initial pronouncement of its authenticity, his Clamper friends dedicated a plaque near Tuoloumne City that was itself a brass plate with chiseled lettering that replaced U’s with V’s. This one was dedicated by Chief William Fuller of the mi-Wuk tribe, and it revoked the grant of land supposedly surrendered to Sir Francis Drake and Queen Elizabeth so long ago. Clearly, at least in part, the stunt was meant to show Bolton how a similar plate could easily be manufactured, but Bolton appeared not to take note, as he was more concerned by the scholarly challenges to the plate’s authenticity that had begun to appear. Then in September, one Clamper of the Yerba Buena Chapter sent a letter to Bolton purporting to be from “Consolidated Brasse and Novelty Company,” hinting at the modern manufacture of the plate by saying, “I am sure you will be interested in our special line of brass plates. These plates have a beautiful finish. We make them in all sizes and shapes and in a variety of scripts and dates. We have a very attractive Elizabethan line….” Bolton either failed to understand the letter or assumed the letter was itself a prank and continued in his course seeking evidence of the plate’s authenticity. Finally, his Chapter of the Clampers release a new book of tall tales about the exploits of ancient Vituscan brothers, and the first entry in this anthology was all about the newfound Drake plate. In it, they detailed its discovery as well as its testing, carefully pointing out every reason to doubt its authenticity. It featured a frontispiece drawing of the ancient chief Hi-Oh of the Mi-Wuks who was said to have given his tribe’s land to the English and in their version was said to have used the plate as a piece of jewelry after Drake departed. Around his neck in the sketch he wore the plate, on which can be seen the letters ECV, a hint at the invisible signature on its backside, and in their account, it even indicates that these letters can be seen using ultra violet fluorescence or infra-red light. According to their fanciful version of Drake’s account, the plate had been inscribed by Drake’s chaplain, a member of E Clampus Vitus, and so, cleverly, the story ends with the confession, hidden in plain sight, that the plate was “the rightful property of our ancient Order.”

But as we have seen, none of their efforts were successful. Professor Herbert Bolton was so intent on this artifact being the real deal that he made sure it was found to be so, and he was aided in his endeavor by many a scholar and scientist who likewise wanted to believe. Dane and the other Clamper perpetrators of the fraud simply gave up and let their prank become accepted history, thereafter only discussing their part in the hoax in whispers. Eventually, long after Bolton went to his final rest satisfied with the plate’s legitimacy, these whispers caused other scholars to look closer and to discover the fraud, and so today this is no longer a Blind Spot. However, enough unanswered questions remain that some continue to have doubts. When did the Clampers create the plate, and where did they plant it? It seems impossible that they would have planted it anywhere other than Drake’s Bay, so had they been disappointed when their fake plate disappeared and then surprised when it appeared again all the way over by San Quentin and still made its way to their mark, Bolton? Or was Shinn working for them? If so, what about Caldeira and the others with their conflicting testimonies? Some have even suggested that there were two plates, that which had been found in Drake’s Bay and lost again years earlier, and that which had been brought to Bolton. Could one of them have been the real Drake Plate? Or is the real plate lost forever, a missing piece of our past? Or was there never a plate to begin with, as some have suggested, and was the whole story of a monument marking a land deal with the natives concocted by Drake to strengthen English colonial claims to the New World? These are questions we may never answer, unless some sharp-eyed Californian manages to dig up the genuine plate of brass left by Sir Francis Drake in Nova Albion.

Clamper plaque recreating their handiwork in the supposed Drake Plate, via Find A Grave

Further Reading

E Clampus Vitus: Anthology of New Dispensation Lore. Edited by Thomas Duncan, Lulu Press, 2009.

Von der Porten, Edward, et al. "Who made Drake's plate of brass? Hint: it wasn't Francis Drake." California History, vol. 81, no. 2, 2002, p. 116+. Gale General OneFile, https://link-gale-com.libdbmjc.yosemite.edu/apps/doc/A104669394/GPS?u=modestojc_main&sid=GPS&xid=442e7652. Accessed 2 Apr. 2020.

The Unbelievable History of the Ancient and Honorable E Clampus Vitus

In the spring of 1930, lawyer and historian Carl Wheat made a visit to some old mining camps in California for the purposes of researching life during the Gold Rush. His focus came to rest on the practice of a secret society among the miners, one with an apparently long and storied past. Mr. Wheat was no stranger to fraternal societies himself, being a member of San Francisco’s Bohemian Club, whose annual retreat for the rich and powerful at Bohemian Grove serves as popular fodder for many conspiracy theorists. But in the secret order that flourished among miners in the 19th century, called E Clampus Vitus, Carl Wheat saw something more than an organization for the elite. He saw a society for the everyman, for the lover of history both obscure and preposterous, and he came to believe it was a tradition worth reviving. He and some fellows of equally high CQ--an attribute like unto IQ, but measuring instead their degree of “Californiosity”--got together not long after, in a Yerba Buena lunchroom, to form once again a lodge dedicated to the traditions of this bygone order, about which they actually knew very little. Not long after forming their Chapter Redivivus, however, a mysterious stranger telephoned Wheat, claiming to have been, in his youth, the last Noble Grand Humbug of the last practicing lodge. Building from the knowledge of this Clampatriarch, as they called him, the New Dispensation of E Clampus Vitus began, and its fantastical history could finally be written. 

*

I will commence with a discussion of the rather successful revival of a secret society that died out with the end of the California Gold Rush of the 19th century. This fraternal organization, reborn in the 1930s, today boasts that their members number in the tens of thousands in more than 40 chapters scattered across the Western United States, but by far their numbers are highest in my home state of California, where much of the order’s history takes place. While the math on the aforementioned membership does not quite seem to work, unless every chapter has initiated thousands of members, nevertheless the chief occupation of the Clampers, aside from merrymaking, does seem to indicate that they are widespread. This historical drinking society--though some argue it is more a drinking historical society--proves its historical bonafides by placing historical plaques across the American West. About a decade ago, they had put up more than a thousand historical markers, and by now that number is far higher. What I appreciate is that the members of E Clampus Vitus don’t concentrate on memorializing well-known history, or “rich old man’s history” as they call it, but rather the little known facts of the state. As an example, in the quaint town of Murphys, they have a plaque that preserves the memory of the saber-toothed tiger that prowled the neighborhood in the distant past, and in the town of Volcano, they celebrate the invention of Moose Milk, a cocktail composed of bourbon, rum and heavy cream that was popular among Gold Rush miners. To illustrate better the playfulness of their plaques, consider the strange upside-down house built by silent film star Nellie Bly in the town of Lee Vining, which they commemorate with an upside-down plaque. While these plaques are good fun and demonstrate the society’s preoccupation with history, none of these monuments record the secret mysteries behind the founding and evolution of the order. For this, we must delve into the hard-to-find documents published by the first members of the Chapter Redivivus, who revived the order and learned its lore from an old man who was around when it was still being practiced in the 19th century.

In determining when the society of E Clampus Vitus began and who started it, it is necessary to consider its name. Some theologians trace the society back to Moses, who is claimed to be an early Noble Grand Humbug or Clampatriarch, for one of the hypothesized source documents of the Torah, called the Elohist, is more commonly referred to as E, corresponding to the beginning of the order’s name. Others, however, trace the beginning of the order all the way back to the beginning of time and creation, naming Adam as the Clamprogrenitor, as it were. This is suggested by the fact that the word Vitus is said by some to derive from the Greek phitos or begetter, referring to Adam as the father of humanity. By this reckoning, the word Clampus derives from the Greek kleptos, to steal, because after receiving the knowledge by eating of the tree in the Garden of Eden, Adam smuggled out the secrets of the order so that he could pass them down to all mankind. If one finds it hard to credit such ancient origins of the order, alternative etymology suggests E Clampus Vitus to be a Latinate phrase, with E meaning “out of,” Clampus being a combination of clam, or “ignorance or darkness,” and pos, meaning “after.” Finally, Vitus would be vita, or “life,” making the entire translation “out of darkness, after life,” as in seeking after life. No matter what one makes of the meaning of the order’s name, it cannot be denied that its central figure was Saint Vitus, after whom Sydenham’s chorea, or St. Vitus’s Dance was named, that malady being one suspect for explaining the notorious Dancing Plague I have discussed in the past. St. VItus is known to have exorcised a demon from Emperor Diocletian’s son, or as the more scientific might suggest today, somehow cured the boy of some neurological or psychological condition. In return, since St. VItus refused to attribute the miracle to pagan gods, Diocletian tortured him to death. It is said that before his unfortunate end, St. Vitus was in the process of writing the great history of E Clampus Vitus, but had only managed to write out one line. 

Saint Vitus, from the Nuremberg Chronicle, 1493, via Wikimedia Commons

Despite St. Vitus’s death, the order survived as a monastic tradition carried on by the Vituscan brothers. Their form of the phrase was the Latin Ecce Lampas Vitae, meaning “Behold, the Light of Life,” and how this phrase became corrupted is truly a remarkable tale. A 20th century discovery in the Vatican Library tells the tale in the form of a letter by one Heliodoricus, himself a Vituscan. In his letter, Heliodoricus describes a long and arduous journey of four years that he took with nine fellow Vituscan missionaries all the way to the Far East. Only two others survived the journey, Stomachus, and Bellicosus, whereupon they gained an audience with Chinese emperor Hee Sing Li. Heliodoricus describes the great success they had at converting the Chinese, introducing the customs of their order halfway around the world. It is the Chinese, he says, who in mispronouncing their motto Ecce Lampas Vitae coined the modern name E Clampus Vitus, a revelation that caused much stir among the aforementioned theologians who had developed so many theories about the phrase and its implications for the origins of the order. After this historic Vituscan mission to China, it appears the traditions of E Clampus Vitus, as they called it, flourished for generations. The truth of this is attested in another historic discovery, made by one Rev. Dr. Shaw of New York City, in 1890 during his own mission to China. Of course, by this time, the practice of E Clampus Vitus could be observed in California, and Dr. Shaw’s discovery explains at least part of the story of the order’s roots in my state. Shaw came across a Chinese manuscript that, astoundingly, indicates a Chinese navigator by the name of Hee Li discovered America, and more specifically California, as early as 435 CE, making the Chinese claim of discovery even earlier than the claims of Pre-Columbian transoceanic contact by Vikings. According to the story, Hee Li’s vessel was blown out to sea by a storm, and by some cosmic mischance, a cockroach-like beetle had gotten into his only compass, misaligning the needle and dying inside, out of sight. Hee Li relied entirely on this broken compass, following it ever eastward, despite never finding the shores of his homeland. When a member of his crew pointed out the sight of the rising sun to prove they were headed the wrong direction, Hee Li threw the mutineer overboard. Eventually, upon making landfall at what is modern day Monterey and finding the dead bug in his compass, Hee Li, himself a dedicated Clamper, declared the new land Gumshaniana, or Gum Shan, and set about instructing its native inhabitants in the traditions of E Clampus Vitus.

Hee Li eventually managed to make a return journey from Gum Shan after having established Clamperism there, and his discovery of this far off land we today call California was well known among his countrymen. Indeed, his adventure would inspire another expedition many years later, this one more purposeful and also less successful. This voyage was undertaken by one of low birth, the son of a servant woman who cleaned the privy chambers of the Empress. Due to a peculiarity of his anatomy, he was known among the women at court as Lo-Hung-Whang. One night, the Empress relieved herself into a chamberpot and fell in. Enraged at the man responsible for leaving too large a chamberpot in her room, she had the foul toilet forced onto the man’s head. Lo-Hung-Whang gave this poor soul sanctuary and helped him remove the pot, and in return, the man helped smuggle Lo-Hung-Whang out of the palace in another, even larger chamberpot. Thereafter free to pursue his dream life as a sailor, Lo-Hung-Whang always kept that massive toilet with him to remember his deliverance. After establishing himself as a capable navigator and having made some explorations of his own, he set out to organize a colonial expedition to Gum Shan after hearing of Hee Li’s discovery. In addition to his crew, he brought three hundred fertile slave girls, with the intention of peopling Gumshaniana with their descendants. These poor women were subjected to terrible abuses, and if they dared raise their voice in protest, they were silenced by having a handful of red pepper powder thrown in their faces. One among these women, Lo-Hung-Whang’s own concubine, Hop Mee, proved to be stronger and more clever than the men anticipated, though. She arranged for the eunuchs guarding the other girls to be drugged, and once free, the former slave women took control of the vessel, throwing any who resisted them to the sharks. Upon finally landing at Gum Shan, somewhere near modern day Mendocino, Hop Mee decided that she would be the empress of this new land, and it is said that she is the true Amazonian warrior woman whose legend inspired the fictional character Calafia, after whom California is named. 

Mural depicting Califia, fictional Amazonian queen for whome California was named, via Wikimedia Commons

The branch of E Clampus Vitus descending from the Chinese chapter established by the Vituscan missionaries, however, has not the only claim to being the origin of Clampers in the New World. Indeed, there was another monastic order originating from the teachings of St. Vitus, this one established by his disciple Dumbellicus, himself also a martyr killed by Emperor Diocletian. Dumbellicus was an ascetic soul, known to deny himself pleasure and excess, and so, as an especially cruel torture, Diocletian gave Dumbellicus to the priestesses of Venus, who chained him naked upon a flower-strewn altar and took from him his chastity. However, Dumbellicus resisted, biting off his own tongue and making himself pass out, so that he retained, in theory, his purity. His was a “moral martyrdom,” for he did not lose his life. Afterward, he spoke only in signs, and his followers sought his canonization as a saint. However, sainthood was denied him, for it was suspected that he never actually bit his tongue off, and that perhaps he did not resist his altar-bound intercourse as much as his legend claims. The church likely came to this conclusion based on the behavior of his followers, the Dumbellican Brotherhood, who received the nickname the Frollicking Friars due to their licentious behavior. It was this so-called “breechless brotherhood” that added to the original Vituscan directive to care for widows and orphans the clarification that it was “especially the widows” that they sought to comfort. It was they who introduced the central Clamper symbol, the Staff of Relief, a decidedly phallic image. The Frollicking Friars did much to spread their order, for it’s said they expanded on the notion of widowhood, applying the Staff of Relief even to women who they said had been “widowed” by their husbands’ neglect, and therefore they frequently were obliged to flee from one place to the next. Thus with the discovery of the New World, many of the Dumbellican Brotherhood were only too eager to leave the old world behind and joined the ranks of armies led by such famous conquistadors as Pizarro and Cortes, who made plenty of widows for the breechless brothers to comfort. 

The question then becomes whether it was the particular Chinese brand of E Clampus Vitus passed down through the native progeny of Hop Mee, Empress of Gumshaniana, that was practiced by the miners of Gold Rush California, or whether it was the form spread by the Frollicking Friars during their rapacious journeys through the New World. Of course, it may have been a combination of both. There is one tale that tells of these two branches of Clamperism meeting. The last of the Dumbellican friars are said to have encountered a band of Native Americans calling themselves Clampas in Arizona. These Clampas gave some of the ancient signs of their order, which the friars recognized. However, rather than finding themselves hailed and well met, they instead found themselves under attack by the Clampas. These Native Americans brandished their own staffs, but these would bring the friars no relief. The unusual anatomy of these Clampas indicates that Lo-Hung-Whang survived Hop Mee’s mutiny and managed to father children, or perhaps was kept as a sex slave himself as he had previously kept Hop Mee, for the peculiar trait that gave him his crude sobriquet was observed by the Frollicking Friars in the naked Clampas who charged at them. Indeed, these natives appeared ready to use their formidable weapons against the Dumbellican Brothers. Though they wrapped their robes about their loins like diapers to better facilitate their flight, the Frollicking Friars could not escape their awful fate. Clampers have since marked the site of their massacre with a plaque that reads: “Here fell the last of the Frollicking Friars. They could pass it out, but they couldn’t take it.”

Persecution by Emperor Diocletian, via WikiArt.org

And that is where the unbelievable history of E Clampus Vitus might end, if it were not for the fact that this episode releases just before April 1st and is an April Fools Day joke! I am sorry to say that none of this is real history! Well, to be fair, it does appear that Gold Rush miners had a fraternal organization called E Clampus Vitus, and it is true that Carl Wheat revived it in the 1930s, but all of the lore I just shared with you was fiction playfully concocted by the New Dispensation under the Chapter Redivivus. Perhaps this was obvious from the ridiculous and frankly racist names of its central characters as well as its bawdy subject matter. The fact that it is not meant to be taken seriously would have been even more apparent had I shared with you the one line that St. Vitus was said to have put into writing about E Clampus Vitus before he was martyred: credo quia absurdum, I believe because it is absurd. This has become the motto of this historical drinking society. Imagine a gathering of overeducated history buffs drunkenly regaling each other with the most ridiculous false histories they could think of. This was the beginning and the foundation of the modern day Clampers, although today, as I understand it, it is more of a plain old drinking society that enjoys to play pranks. And this may be even closer to the E Clampus Vitus of the Gold Rush Miners. Many of the surviving stories suggest that in the 19th century, E Clampus Vitus was just a way to put one over on outsiders. Travelling salesmen entering the mining camps could find no patrons, and entertainment troupes could not fill their audiences, until they agreed to join the ranks of the society, to be “taken in,” as it were, which meant the miners would be able to drink on their dime for the night. Thereafter, the miners gladly patronized these newcomers to their town, so it was essentially an initiation into the community. But there is no evidence that the rough and tough miners of 19th-century California touted any such colorful beliefs about the origins of their little club.

In fact, there is something of an origin story for E Clampus Vitus to which we might give more credence. It appears to have begun in West Virginia, dreamed up by a blacksmith and tavern keeper named Ephraim Bee sometime during the early 1850s. Bee had political aspirations and fancied himself something of a folksy storyteller. At the time, secret societies were all the rage. There were the Sons of ‘76, the Independent Order of the Odd Fellows, and the Order of the Star Spangled Banner, that nativist fraternity that I devoted a patron-exclusive episode to discussing, and even the Freemasons had made a comeback after the Anti-Masonic movement of decades earlier had reduced their numbers. What Bee established, however, was a burlesque of the well known secret fraternal organizations. The other secret societies all seemed to take themselves and their rituals far too seriously, and they were full of “stuffed shirts,” so Ephraim Bee founded a kind of parody of them, with nonsensical rituals, and a name that sounded Latin but was not… that’s right, E Clampus Vitus means nothing. It is Dog Latin, simply an imitation of the dead language. In fact the seeds for the elaborate lore that would later spring up around the order were planted by Ephraim himself, for he said he had learned the secrets of the order from Caleb Cushing, a Massachusetts statesman who had visited China and brought back the mysteries of this Confucian brotherhood that was widespread in the East. Ephraim Bee’s E Clampus Vitus grew a bit in West Virginia and elsewhere, but it faded away during his lifetime. One enthusiast named Joseph Zumwalt, however, brought the order with him from Missouri to California during the Gold Rush… or so they say. The timeline doesn’t seem to jibe, though, for how could Zumwalt have brought E Clampus Vitus to California in 1849 and established the first chapter here in Calaveras County in 1851 if Ephraim Bee was only just forming the first chapter in West Virginia in 1853? Considering all the false and absurd history told by the Clampers, in the end, it’s hard to believe anything you read about them. And perhaps that’s just the way they like it. 

Supposed image of Ephraim Bee circulated on the Internet by Clampers… who knows if it’s really him…

Until next time, I’ll leave you with a wonderful quotation shared by Thomas Duncan as an epigraph on his book E Clampus Vitus: Anthology of New Dispensation Lore, which ended up serving as my principal source on this episode mainly because all the other works on Clamper history seem to be held hostage in the Special Collections rooms of California libraries, and the few available at my local library, I discovered, have been stolen. The epigraph is from Alexander Stille’s The Future of the Past: “The past is only the memory or residue of things that now exist in the present moment, a mental construction that—cleaned up or embellished—often serves the needs of the current moment instead of corresponding to any ‘historic’ truth.”

Further Reading

E Clampus Vitus: Anthology of New Dispensation Lore. Edited by Thomas Duncan, Lulu Press, 2009. 

Mckinley, Jesse. "Promoting Offbeat History Between the Drinks." New York Times, 14 Oct. 2008, p. A12(L). Gale OneFile: Business, https://link-gale-com.libdbmjc.yosemite.edu/apps/doc/A186882569/GPS?u=modestojc_main&sid=GPS&xid=9c61987e. Accessed 19 Mar. 2020.

Gnostic Genesis

In 312 CE, while locked in a desperate struggle for control of the Roman Empire, Constantine I is said by such chroniclers as Lactantius and Eusebius of Caesarea to have had a vision sent to him by the god of the Christians, a sect that had lately been persecuted in the eastern regions of the empire. According to the legend, Constantine placed the sign of their god on his soldiers’ shields--the chi-ro, being the first two letters of Christ’s name in Greek. After going on to victory at the battle of Milvian Bridge and consolidating his power as the sole emperor, Constantine converted to Christianity, and he involved himself a great deal in the affairs of his new church. In 325 CE, it was Constantine who organized the first Ecumenical Council at Nicaea, in what is modern day Turkey, bringing together bishops from across the world to address controversies in Christian doctrine and reach a consensus. While variant forms of Christianity had for years been debated and denounced as heresy, this council marks the beginning of an official process of canonization, settling once and for all the contours of orthodox Christian belief. The process would not conclude for quite some time. The best milestone we have for the final settling of canon comes in 367 CE when the bishop Athanasius of Alexandria dispatched his customary Festal letter to establish the date of Easter and decided to throw in a list of which books were to be accepted as true Scripture, a list that reflects the canonical New Testament as the church accepts it today. But what were the so-called heretical beliefs that church fathers suppressed? What stories did these banned books of the bible have to tell? And did they have any better claim to inclusion in the Scriptures than those that remain?

In this installment, we focus on the Christian apocrypha of Gnosticism, since Gnostic thought is of such importance to so many topics I’ve covered. Notions regarding Gnostic heresy came up in my very first Halloween Special, the Specter of Devil Worship, and again just recently in my patron exclusive episode on the accusations made against the Knights Templar. Indeed, we will certainly see it come up again in future entries of my Encyclopedia Grimoria on the history of magic. But there are many traditions and doctrines to choose from when considering the apocrypha, for early Christianity was exceedingly diverse. There were the Ebionites, whose name is a mystery in that they may have been named after a person or after the Hebrew word for “poor.” These were Jews who accepted Christ as the messiah, but only as their savior, arguing that one needed to be Jewish to be saved by him. Then there were the Marcionites, who were certainly named after their founder, a second century teacher who conversely taught that true Christians must reject all things Jewish, even going so far as to suggest that the God of the New Testament was a different deity, come to undo the cruelties perpetrated by the God of the Jews. Then there was Arianism, a heresy that led directly to the convening of the Council of Nicaea. Arianists followed the teachings of Arius of Alexandria, who denied that Christ was one and the same as God but was rather one of God’s creations, in opposition to the Homoousian concept that the Son and the Father were the “same in essence” and the docetic doctrine that Christ’s physical human body was merely an illusion.  Nor was this diversity of conflicting doctrines peculiar to Christianity. Judaism had its own centuries-long process of doctrinal dispute and settling of canon and therefore has its own apocrypha as well. During their periods of domination under the Persians and then the Hellenistic Kingdoms and under Roman rule and across the Diaspora, different forms and sects of Judaism gradually developed, some with their own texts that came to be considered apocryphal, with specific movements in the Second Temple period being the Sadducees, the Essenes, and the Pharisees, the latter being the group whose beliefs eventually became the basis of mainstream, Rabbinic Judaism. However, in and among many of these sects and doctrines, Jewish and Christian alike, can be discerned strains of that belief system Gnosticism, which might be depicted as an alternate interpretation of established doctrines, as a sort of philosophy intertwined with religion, as a mythical expansion of theological concepts, complete with its own creation myth and detailed cosmogony, or, as it is usually characterized, as heresy.

The Council of Nicaea, via Wikimedia Commons

At this point, it becomes necessary to clarify some terminology. In these sessions, we may often throw around terms such as heresy, orthodoxy, canon, pseudepigrapha, and of course, apocrypha. It is essential that these labels not be misunderstood, so we shall begin with the term canon. The word “canon” derives from a Greek word having to do with measurement, literally a rod or straight edge used to measure, but in its religious and literary sense, it came to be associated with some standard, specifically in regard to the judgment of texts. Thus if something is “in the canon” or “canonized,” it means that it has been deemed to conform to certain norms or to meet some discerning standards. This term is necessarily used in conjunction with the term “orthodox,” which comes from the combination of the Greek orthos, meaning true or correct, and doxy, opinion or belief, thus literally “correct belief.” Texts deemed worthy of canonization are those that espouse beliefs that are “correct,” and here we see the subjectivity of this notion, for what measuring rod could possibly be used to determine which beliefs are correct in matters of faith? Who can be so discerning as to decide which ideas are orthodox, or right, which simply heterodox, or different, and which heretical? The term heresy itself is harder to pin down. It appears to derive from the Greek word for choice, indicating some purposeful decision to believe wrong things, but of course, those deemed heretics never really think that what they believe is wrong, so it is only a label placed on minority beliefs, i.e. any beliefs that deviate from consensus or the norm. Some of these divergent beliefs are associated with specific apocryphal texts, as we shall see, but the term “apocrypha” does not necessarily denote heresy. The word is derived from the Greek apokryphos, meaning hidden or obscured, and thus secret, but this term doesn’t really apply to many so-called apocryphal texts, which were never significantly suppressed. Indeed some apocrypha have even been accepted as “deuterocanonical,” meaning they are part of a second canon. Thus, for some, the secret or hidden element of the term refers to works written by an author whose identity is unknown, but as mentioned in my episode on Zoroaster, there is another term for these, “pseudepigrapha,” and this definition of apocrypha doesn’t work in all cases either, for there are numerous canonical books of the Bible that scholars argue were not written by the people by whom they claim to have been authored, such as 1 and 2 Timothy, 2 Peter, and Titus, and there are still others whose authorship remains a mystery. I discussed one example of this in my episode on the authorship of the Gospel of John and the identity of the Beloved Disciple. What exactly does it mean to refer to a text as an apocryphon? Only that the work is considered non-canonical, with at least some implication that it contains false teachings or doubtful claims about the past. But this too cannot be considered a standard evaluation, as there are different canons, among different religions and sects, some of which include works excluded by others. 

Essentially any Christian canon, however, would certainly exclude works espousing apparent Gnostic doctrine, for it was long viewed as an insidious heresy, prompting the church to undertake extensive efforts to root it out, which meant destroying the books that promoted it. Unlike other heretical sects, Gnosticism appears to have grown within more orthodox communities of believers, shared by one initiate with another like a kind of secret society in the heart of traditional Christianity. Gnostic beliefs emphasize the special power of knowledge, or gnosis, hence the name given to them, and when one became initiated into Gnostic circles, they imparted some rather complicated and astounding ideas that must have seemed like a true revelation about the spiritual world. It seems very much like Masonic initiation that way, a secret society that promises “more light” with each further step into their mysteries. And also like Freemasonry, for a long time we didn’t have much in the way of concrete knowledge regarding what they believed. Everything we had received was from writings denouncing them as heretics and criticizing their doctrines as false, for the Gnostic texts themselves had disappeared due to efforts at stamping out this heresy. That all changed in 1945, though, when only a year and a half prior to the Dead Sea Scrolls’ discovery, one Mohammed Ali, leader of a group of bedouin fieldhands, discovered a human skeleton and a large earthenware jar while digging for fertilizer along the Nile. Ali and his men did not want to open the sealed jar at first, fearing that it contained a jinn, or evil spirit, but their curiosity, which tantalized them with dreams of treasure, eventually got the better of them. Opening it, they discovered a trove of leatherbound volume that has come to be known as the Nag Hammadi library, after the town nearest its discovery. Ali tried to divide the books like treasure among the group, even tearing some of them to more evenly distribute them, but since his men refused to take them, he kept them all himself and carried them home. Still with only an inkling that they might be worth money, he left the priceless artifacts in an animal pen, except the pages that he allowed his mother to burn as kindling. The ancient codices would not come into the hands of someone who truly knew their worth until a month later, when after brutally murdering a man he believed had previously killed his own father, Ali gave them to a priest to prevent them from being seized by authorities when they inevitably searched his home. The priest’s brother-in-law, a History teacher in local parochial schools, took a volume to Cairo to sell it, and because of this, the find eventually came to the attention of the Coptic Museum there, and because of subsequent study and translation, we have numerous Gnostic treatises that had not been previously known to exist.

One Gnostic codex found at Nag Hammadi (The Apocryphon of John), via Wikimedia Commons

The codices contained in the Nag Hammadi library have been dated to around 348 CE, which goes a long way toward explaining why they were buried in the first place. Recall that the letter of Athanasius establishing canon was sent about twenty years after that. It has been suggested, then, that monks at a nearby monastery in Nag Hammadi, after having been told not to use these Gnostic texts, chose to bury them, perhaps because they valued their teachings too much to simply burn them and wanted to preserve them for posterity. However, the presence of a skeleton beside them does raise the further question of whether they had been deposited as part of some common burial ceremony, perhaps laid to rest with some Gnostic believer because he treasured them, or perhaps even tossed like so much garbage into the grave of a heretic who had been put to death. This we will never know. The 4th century CE date of the codices also cannot tell us anything about the origins of the Gnostic beliefs forever preserved inside, for just because the books were made after 348 CE does not mean the texts it contains are only that old. Indeed, aside from the Gnostic works, there were others present in the jar that are known to have been written far earlier, such as Plato’s Republic, which was composed sometime in the 4th century BCE. So when did Gnostic thought first show up? Orthodox Christians through the centuries, especially heresiologists, have suggested that it, along with all Christian heresies, originated with one very famous heretic: Simon Magus. In the Book of Acts, a magus, meaning a sorceror, is said to have dwelled in Samaria, deceiving people through his dark arts into believing he was divine. Seeing the miracles of the Apostles, he attempted to bribe them, that he might have their power, but was chastised. Outside of this canonical account, the story of Simon Magus was further fleshed out by early Christian writers Justin Martyr, who suggested that Simon Magus continued in his ways, passing himself off as God through his displays of magic, and Irenaeus, who explicitly claimed that Simon Magus originated Gnosticism with the claims that he was a the divine bringer of the secret knowledge needed for salvation, and that he had brought with him to the earthly realm the “Primal Thought,” an essence of the true God personified in a woman named Helen, whom Irenaeus explained was merely a prostitute that Simon Magus traveled with. This is really the only narrative explanation for the origin of Gnosticism, and it is itself entirely apocryphal. 

In order to comprehend some of the claims attributed to Simon Magus as well as to reach some further understanding of Gnosticism’s origins, we must examine its central tenets. The knowledge revealed to Gnostic initiates appears to have come in the form of an alternate cosmogony that can be summarized as follows. Gnostic texts describe, or rather fail to describe, the one true eternal deity, who is ineffable, indescribable, incomprehensible. From this original god, sometimes called the Monad in correspondence with Pythagorean philosophical notions, there generated divine essences, called Aeons. Here again the influence of Greek philosophy can be discerned, for the concept appears to be that the one god could not be the only thing in existence, since as this god pondered, its thought also existed and so became a thing unto itself, and since this god lived, its life existed, etc. So the Aeons were emanations of the one ineffable god. Different systems of Gnostic thought had it that these Aeons combined in male and female pairs thereafter generating their own emanations, all of which coexisted in the divine realm called the Pleroma, or the Fullness. Eventually one of these later generation Aeons, called Sophia, or Wisdom, created an emanation without her male counterpart--a kind of virgin birth. This offspring was aberrant and imperfect, prompting Sophia to hide it from the other Aeons in a lower plane of existence. It is this being, whom she named Yaldabaoth, that would become the Judeo-Christian God of the Bible, his name very similar to Yahweh, Lord of Sabbaths. Thus according to Gnostic teaching, this abortive spirit Yaldabaoth creates evil emanations of his own, demonic forces called Archons or Rulers, and thereafter, creates the material world. As the creator, he is sometimes called the Demiurge, again showing some crossover with Greek philosophy and cosmogony, which in some schools of thought conceived of an artisan deity who was separate from God proper and responsible for crafting the physical universe. More importantly, though, in explaining why Gnosticism was considered heretical, it asserted that the God of the Old Testament was in fact not the one true God but rather a lesser being.

A diagram of Aeons in the Pleroma, via Wikimedia Commons

Indeed, a retelling of the story of Genesis laid out in two texts discovered at Nag Hammadi, The Hypostasis of the Archons and an untitled treatise commonly referred to as On the Origin of the World, make it clear that Yaldabaoth was not just a lesser deity. Rather, he was like a reckless and jealous child, and along with his demonic emanations, the Archons, was the source of all evil. Having glimpsed the one true God, Yaldabaoth creates the first man, Adam, in his image, but he is a mere lifeless model. Sophia sends her daughter Zoe to breathe a spark of divinity into him. Zoe is also called Eve, thus the Eve of Gnostic mythology is herself divine. The Archons, furious that Eve has made mankind superior to them, plan to rape her, but Eve disappears into the tree in the Garden of Eden, leaving only a likeness of herself behind with Adam. Eve entering and dwelling in the Tree of Knowledge identifies her with the serpent of the Garden of Eden myth. This may sound misogynistic, taking the orthodox view that Eve corrupted Adam to a further extreme, but in the Gnostic story of Genesis, the serpent is wise above all creatures and the knowledge it imparts is not evil. Indeed, elsewhere in these Gnostic texts it is stated that Sophia herself became the Serpent and entered the garden so that she could instruct Adam and Eve. Therefore the dialogue that appears in canonical Genesis to be an insidious manipulation of the first man and woman into disobeying their Creator in Gnostic mythology becomes the heroic act of Sophia in awakening Adam and Eve to the truth that their Creator may not know what is best for them and may even be keeping the truth from them. Here we see the central tenet of Gnosticism writ large: mankind’s ascendance beyond the material plane and out of the power of the evil Archons that trouble us and the foolish god that created us requires knowledge. Gnosticism suggests that we have divinity within us and need only the knowledge, or gnosis, of our divinity to save us. 

Now the purpose of Gnostic theology can be discerned, even if its point of origin cannot. All of Gnosticism, though taking Judaism as its premise, rejects Judaic doctrines, inverting them. Why is that? What would prompt this simultaneous acceptance and repudiation? It can be seen as a natural progression, the next step in the evolution of a worldview. As my principal source, Lost Christianities by Bart Ehrman points out, Judeo-Christian religion has always been a response to the suffering of mankind, a way to explain why it happens and how we might overcome it. From the beginning, in the Exodus narrative, it is clear that the Israelites were chosen by God and that God would intervene when they needed His help most, even parting the seas for them if need be. The problem, then, was to explain why God did not intervene at other times to prevent their suffering. Originally, Judaic thought held that they suffered as a direct result of their sin. Of course God did not intervene to reduce their suffering then, for it was His punishment meted out from on high. This explanation worked, until the people were doing God’s will, keeping his commandments, and still suffering. To account for this, another power was needed, a source of evil that could be blamed for the bad that happened. Enter, the Devil. This figure is not present throughout all the Hebrew scriptures, contrary to popular belief, but rather appears to have developed as a revisionist doctrine, explicated most clearly in Job, as a way to explain the suffering mankind endures. By this view, God created the world and might intervene, but his adversary was free to trouble us during our time here, and God might or might not intervene, whether because of our sin, or because of a desire to test our faith, or because of more mysterious reasons. However, this view, further developed by prophets and by Christ himself, presented an apocalyptic conclusion, assuring that while this may be the case presently, it would, before long, reach its conclusion when God redeemed the world. Bart Ehrman in Lost Christianities suggests that, when the end did not come, when this imminent conclusion to their earthly suffering never arrived, some sought yet another explanation. Thus Gnosticism focuses on the material world that Yaldabaoth created and trapped mankind in as the true cause of suffering. Living in these physical bodies, in this physical existence that Gnostics called “the chaos,” is suffering, and our creator, the god of the Old Testament, does not intervene because he is the author of our suffering, who keeps us “imprisoned in that dwelling place of endless calamities.” Rather than seeking some reprieve from suffering, the Gnostics found a way to accept it as the status quo. 

The Devil bargains with God over Job's faith in Duomo, by Bartolo di Fredi, photo by Livio Andronico, licensed under the Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license

While this may sound bleak, it must be remembered that the Gnostics too kept a view to a better existence in the divine realm, among Aeons in the Pleroma, at the forefront of their minds. Only they, who held the gnosis, or knowledge, of their true state would ascend, making this existence little more than a waiting period they had to suffer through before their ascent. The Gnostic view of the material world as evil and their human bodies as corrupted vessels good only for suffering led to much of the criticism leveled at them. It was claimed that, because they felt only knowledge was important, it did not matter what they did with their evil fleshly bodies, and so they engaged in lascivious orgies. We see similar allegations all the way into the Middle Ages, during the persecution of neo-Gnostic sects like the Bogomils and the Cathars. However, most evidence indicates the opposite, that Gnostics, believing their physical bodies to be corrupt and evil as part of the physical world, were fundamentally ascetic, denying themselves the pleasures of the world and the flesh. But the orthodox never let a little thing like accuracy get in the way of stamping out points of view that disagree with theirs. Think, for example, of the most famous proponent of heterodox beliefs: Jesus Christ. In his time, the Pharisees were the keepers of orthodoxy, and they viewed his teachings as not just different, but dangerous, even heretical. For his part, Christ suggested that these keepers of orthodoxy belonged to the devil, calling them a “brood of vipers.” Yet today, the teachings of Christ are orthodox for Christians and those of the Gnostics are dismissed as heresy. It makes one wonder how things might have changed, and how organized religion would look today, if another version of Christianity had won out and been accepted as canon, and another version of Christ, who in some apocryphal gospels espouses decidedly Gnostic teachings, had been passed down to future generations.  

Further Reading

De Lange, Nicholas. Apocrypha: Jewish Literature of the Hellenistic Age. Viking, 1978.

De Silva, David. Introducing the Apocrypha: Message Context, and Significance. Baker Academic, 2003.

Ehrman, Bart D. Lost Christianities: The Battle for Scripture and the Faiths We Never Knew. Oxford University Press, 2003.

Glazer, Brian. “The Goddess with a Fiery Breath: The Egyptian Derivation of a Gnostic Mythologoumenon.” Novum Testamentum, vol. 33, no. 1, 1991, pp. 92–94. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1561200. Accessed 5 Mar. 2020.

Layton, Bentley. “The Hypostasis of the Archons, or ‘The Reality of the Rulers.’” The Harvard Theological Review, vol. 67, no. 4, 1974, pp. 351–425. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1509048. Accessed 5 Mar. 2020.

Lewis, Nicola Denzey, and Justine Ariel Blount. “Rethinking the Origins of the Nag Hammadi Codices.” Journal of Biblical Literature, vol. 133, no. 2, 2014, pp. 399–419. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.15699/jbibllite.133.2.399. Accessed 4 Mar. 2020.

Sumney, Jerry L. “The Letter of Eugnostos and the Origins of Gnosticism.” Novum Testamentum, vol. 31, no. 2, 1989, pp. 172–181. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/1560701. Accessed 5 Mar. 2020.

Zoroaster, the First Magus

Circa 77 CE, the great natural philosopher Pliny the Elder published the first 10 volumes of his encyclopedic masterwork, Naturalis Historia, or Natural History, a work with a scope no less grand than that of all Creation, to record all knowledge of everything. In it, between lengthy treatises on all known arts and technology, he writes witheringly of “the most deceptive of all known arts, [which] has exercised the greatest influence in every country and in nearly every age.” This sinister practice he calls “the magic art,” and he goes on to reveal “when and where the art of magic originated [and] by what persons it was first practised.” According to this renowned encyclopedist, “There is no doubt that this art originated in Persia, under Zoroaster, this being a point upon which authors are generally agreed.” But who was this Zoroaster, or Zarathustra as the Persians called him? A simple wise man as Friedrich Nietschze would eventually characterize him? A holy man who brought the true god’s faith to humanity, as Zoroastrian scriptures remember him? Or a sorcerer whose elite class of priestly adepts spread his magical craft across the world? 

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In this episode, we begin another ongoing series, in which I invite you peer into the darkness of Western esotericism and its many strange stories. We begin with Zarathustra and the priesthood of supposed sorcerers that followed his teachings, the Magi of Zoroastrianism, because of the claim that the practice of magic originated with them. Certainly we know that the word “magic” is derived from the Latinized ancient Greek word for them, as is the term “mage,” synonymous with wizard, taken from the singular for one of these Zoroastrian priests, a “magus.” Now you may recognize this word specifically from the nativity story celebrated every Christmas, as part and parcel of that legend is the story of the Three Kings or wise men, also referred to as Magi, who followed a star to witness the birth of Christ. I may save my examination of that particular legend for this year’s Christmas Special, but it illustrates clearly the notion that these figures were respected in ancient Greece as bearers of uncommon wisdom. More than that, though, the Magi were seen, at least by the time of the Roman Empire when Pliny the Elder wrote of them, as the founders of an insidious tradition of sorcery. In this series, I want to look at the many and various stories throughout history about the occult and the arcane, about alchemy and theurgy and necromancy, about secret societies and spellbooks. I hope you enjoy the first volume of my Encyclopedia Grimoria, in which, counterintuitively, I begin with an entry under Z, for Zoroaster, the First Magus. 

The most famous of the magi: the three wise men who adored the Christ child, via Wikimedia Commons

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Before we undertake a history of magic, it proves necessary to provide a definition of the word. In its original sense, magic would mean the wisdom of the Magi. That definition is useful to the discussion at hand, but proves inadequate when considering the wider history of magic. And defining magic is no easy task; it has been widely debated among anthropologists and historians, with the final result that it is more and more viewed as a useless or meaningless term inappropriate as a descriptor in scholarly works, and the very act of defining it has been called “maddening” by one of those scholars, Owen Davies, who has written much on the subject. It’s argued that the term “magic” brings with it many cultural connotations that may not be applicable in every case. For example, in its Western usage, the term conveys a sense of otherness or transgression, indicating practices outside of social norms or acceptable boundaries, when that may not always be the case. Likewise, a sense that the practitioners of magic might be considered primitive because of assumptions about the term, and the implication that they might actually be capable of producing supernatural effects when they are not and would not themselves consider their practices out of the ordinary, all have led most scholars to abandon the term. But I will endeavor here to walk that tightrope in order to clarify my use of the term. First, I differentiate magic from the art of illusion, meaning the performance of illusions for the purposes of entertainment, as observed on Las Vegas stages and at children’s birthday parties. Second, I would clarify that, much that has been called magic in the past is recognized today as medical or physical science. However, its explanation today does not preclude it’s being considered a magical practice in the past. The first criteria for considering any practice magical would be that it ostensibly seeks by some obscure means--whether that be through something as acceptable to the modern mind as chemistry or something as anathema to rational thought as spellcraft--to uncannily influence, manipulate, exert power over, or gain a preternatural understanding of the natural world. The second working criteria would be that, due to the very obscurity of these means, and/or their uncanny effects, the practice at least appears to partake of the supernatural. This definition, one might acutely discern, does not rule out frauds, provided they purport to be accomplishing some magical effect over the natural world through appropriately arcane practices. 

With this working definition in hand, we can already see that magic in some form preceded the Magi, for beyond the term “magic” the ancient Greeks had further words to denote such activities, such as nekuomanteia, or necromancy, referring to communication with the dead, and pharmaka, from which we derive the word pharmacy, which in antiquity also meant the preparation and use of drugs, but also poisons, with the implication of what modern fiction would call potions. Another ancient Greek word for a magical art was goēteía. This word seems to have been used to refer to sorcerers, but it may have derived from the sound its practitioners made, a low wailing, which has led some to believe that the term referred to ritual mourners bemoaning the dead. There is much written about goētic magic asserting that it is the practice of summoning demons to answer questions or do the magician’s bidding, putting it at the other end of the spectrum from another magical art called theurgy, which summons beings less dark for much the same reasons. According to the lore that has grown up around the term, goētic arts were developed not by mankind but by a mythical race, the Dactyls, who also invented metallurgy and founded the Olympic games. Nor was this the only version of history suggesting that magic, rather than originating from Zoroaster, was given to mankind by another race of beings. For example, one text appeared in the 4th century CE, attributed variously to Clement of Alexandria or Bishop Clement of Rome, who would become Pope Clement I, which claimed that fallen angels had taught humanity magic. This corroborated another apocryphal text from a century earlier, The Apocalypse of Enoch, which tells of these fallen angels’ dalliances with human women, essentially the story of the Nephilim from Genesis 6, with the further addition that these so-called Watchers tutored their consorts in sorcery. However, these tales arrived far later in history and were spread through books of dubious reliability written by authors that took false names. This we will find to be a typical hurdle in critically evaluating the history of magic; much of its provenance is problematic, with entire traditions about ancient history based on spurious claims asserted by anonymous authors centuries and sometimes even millennia later. 

Illustration of angels being cast out of heaven, via Wikimedia Commons

The same is true even of the association of the term Magus or Magi with Zoroastrianism, which was a prominent religion in Persia long before it was associated with magicians in Greece. When the term Magi is first seen in ancient Greek texts, it is not in reference to the followers of Zoroaster. The magi were certainly considered crafty and alien, their rituals strange, but their clear identification with the Persian traditions promulgated by Zarathustra did not happen until the 4th century BCE. Before that, Zoroastrians were depicted more as fire worshipers than conjurers or spellcasters, and the Magi were decried for their human sacrifices and their incest, none of which are related to Zoroastrian belief or ritual. In fact, another point against them was the way they sang in suspiciously low voices, which seems to suggest that these Magi were actually practicing goēteía, the “howling art.” Could these have been two very different cultural practices, perhaps both foreign to ancient Greeks and therefore confused for each other? Certainly by the Roman era, all the other words for magical practices like goëtia, necromantia, etc., were routinely folded into the term magia, so some conflation or syncretism seems likely. The result is that today our universal term for all sorcerous arts remains the word “magic.” 

What we can say with some certainty is that certain magical arts attributed to Zoroaster could not have been invented by him. I am speaking now of the practice of astrology, which today we might not think of as magic but which was certainly considered magical in antiquity, and by my definition may still be considered a magical art, whether or not you believe it to be bogus. Astrology is one of the magical arts specifically ascribed to Zoroaster by Pliny the Elder, and indeed, the name Zoroaster even means “star-priest” or “star-diviner,” which appears to describe an astrologer. However, to credit him with inventing the zodiac and the art of divining the future based on the stars, one has to rely on a problematic timeline. The oldest archeological evidence we have of the practice of astrology appears to be from the 3rd millennium BCE in ancient Mesopotamia. More specifically, these were lists of omens in the sky and astral predictions compiled for Akkadian and Sumerian kings. Ancient Mesopotamia may have encompassed or at least abutted the region from which it is said Zarathustra came, but all accounts point to him being born many years later, which would seem to disprove at least the claim that he invented this one magical art. You see, Zoroastrian tradition holds that their central prophet was born in the 6th century BCE, some two millennia after the first known use of astrology in Mesopotamia, and his original Persian name, Zarathustra, had nothing to do with the stars and everything to do with a practical, earthly profession, its meaning having something to do with handling or caring for camels. His placement in the 6th century BCE derives from numerous texts indicating that, for example, there were 258 years between his appearance and the age of Alexander the Great, or that he was known to have met with and taught Pythagoras, who lived from around 570 to 490 BCE. However, many scholars cast doubt on this timeline, suggesting it was invented by Magi looking to cement their prophet in a historical context like Christ, or that it was a fabrication of Greek thinkers who wanted to minimize the claims that Greek philosophy was derivative of Eastern philosophy. For example, there are numerous earlier claims that Plato was influenced by the teachings of the Magi, and that Zoroaster had lived some 6000 years before Plato. Plutarch agrees with this placement of Zoroaster in the far reaches of prehistory when he declares that Zoroaster lived 5000 years before the Fall of Troy. If this were the case, then one supposes he could have invented astrology, but through linguistic analysis of the language used in the Avesta, the oldest of Zoroastrian scriptures, modern scholars propose that Zarathustra lived sometime between 1200 and 900 BCE, once again making him far younger than the art of astrology.

Zoroaster depicted sharing astronomical or astrological knowledge in “The School of Athens",” via Wikimedia Commons

Many of the passages in ancient Greek texts that mention Zoroaster further confuse matters by indicating he came from Bactria in Eastern Iran or Media in Western Iran, or referring to him not as a Persian, but as Zoroaster the Chaldaean or Zoroaster the Assyrian. This has led to speculation, since the name Zoroaster or Zarathustra or something similar was likely popular among adherents, that perhaps some of the Zoroasters recorded by Greek writers were different men living in different times and places. Indeed, even Pliny the Elder concedes that “whether there was only one Zoroaster, or whether in later times there was a second person of that name, is a matter which still remains undecided.” Then there is the further problem of Christian writers in antiquity identifying him with biblical figures, arguing variously that Zoroaster was the same person as Adam and Eve’s descendant Jared, or Noah’s cursed son Ham, or Ham’s grandson, the king, Nimrod, or the Babylonian prophet Ezekiel, all of whom lived in different times and places. To clarify, then, we must return to the Zoroastrian scriptures, to the Avesta, or more specifically the oldest portions of it, in the Yasna, which includes a series of hymns said to have been written by Zarathustra himself, called the Gathas. As the author of these Gathic texts, Zarathustra is the founding figure who brought this religion to mankind. However, scholars have pointed out that since different points-of-view are used throughout, sometimes first-person and sometimes third, the Gathas should be considered the product of an oral tradition to which many priestly figures like Zarathustra may have contributed. Nevertheless, when the Gathas mention Zarathustra, they accord him the role of forerunner, the first proponent of the faith, so Zoroastrians, like Christians, have come to think of him as a prophet or messenger, bringing to mankind the words authored by their conception of god, a being named Ahura Mazda.

Zoroastrianism presents a clearly defined cosmogony, or theory of the universe, complete with a detailed eschatology, or end times and afterlife scenario. According to the teachings of its scriptures, all of reality is divided in a dualistic conflict between two principles, characterized as good and evil, life and death, light and darkness, illness and health, order and chaos. These principles are embodied in two spirits, the omniscient god Ahura Mazda and its dark and evil counterpart, Angra Manyu. The conflict between these two deities led to the creation of the world of living beings, our world, which has an expiration date. It would only last 12 millennia, during which time the conflict between Ahura Mazda and Angra Manyu would play out here, among the divine sustainers of order and the demonic agents of chaos, and among the mortal men and women who were created thereafter. Upon death, these mortals’ souls would be subject to judgment, weighing their good and evil thoughts and thereby deciding whether, when they crossed to the afterlife, the bridge they took would grow as wide as it was long and lead them to the “best existence,” or whether it would narrow to a razor’s edge and cast them into a place of torture. The souls thus damned would only be redeemed at the end of the world, when after an apocalyptic age of disasters, the dead are raised and the dragon of the heavens sets the earth ablaze, purifying mankind. 

Now, if some of this sounds familiar to you, that’s because it is very similar to numerous later traditions. Indeed, there appears to have been extensive borrowing from Zoroastrian belief systems in the establishment of other religions. For example, the Roman mystery religion of Mithraism took its central figure from Zoroastrian myth, as Mithra was one of Ahura Mazda’s divine figures on Earth. And many have looked to the Zoroastrian dualistic conception of coequal spiritual forces as the origin of other dualistic cosmogonies that see good in the spiritual and evil in the material, such as Manichaeism and Gnosticism. The similarities abound when it comes to Judeo-Christian traditions. Beyond the obvious parallels--the creation myth, the resurrection of the dead at the end of the world, and the judgment of their souls before being granted entry to paradise or being consigned to hell--there are even further connections. Mankind originates from a first man, like an Adam, Gaya Maretan, whose descendant, Yima, is directed by Ahura Mazda to preserve different forms of life in a bunker during the cataclysmic floods Mazda sends, much like a Noah. Even the figure of a savior prophet like Christ is present, in that Zarathustra imparts to all mankind the true revelation of God, thereby kicking off the final three millennia before the end of the world, and like Christ, he would return. In Zarathustra’s case, he will return three times, at intervals of a thousand years. His return will be in the form of a son born miraculously every thousand years to a virgin who bathes in a sacred lake that has preserved his semen. Each of these sons will act as a “Revitalizer,” the third and final son helping to bring mankind toward the “Perfectioning” at the end of all things. All of which, while fundamentally spiritual and in places decidedly mythic, gives no indication of the practice of ritual magic among the religion’s adherents. 

Why, then, is Pliny the Elder so adamant in naming Zoroaster as the originator of magic? In the way of sources, he names one Ostanes, a supposed sorcerer who accompanied the Persian king Xerxes during his invasion of Greece, as “he who first disseminated, as it were, the germs of this monstrous art, and tainted therewith all parts of the world.” The problem is there doesn’t appear to be any surviving historical evidence of this person having ever actually existed, let alone writing major works on magic that Pliny says were “still in existence.” So we look to the principal source that Pliny cites on all things magical, Democritus, a contemporary of Socrates who Pliny states developed the art of magic through his writings during the time of the Peloponnesian War. Since many lost writings are preserved only in other writings that reference them, we may assume that Pliny’s understanding of the lost magical writings of Ostanes came from the magical works of Democritus. And here we begin to see the central obstacle to tracing the origin of magic to the Zoroastrian Magi. These works about magic attributed to Democritus do exist, but they are believed to have been written by someone else, an Egyptian by the name of Bolus of Mendes who lived some two centuries after the real Democritus. It is thought that Bolus attributed his work to Democritus specifically because of his association with Pythagoras, who, if you recall, was said to have studied under the Magi. Thus, Democritus would have a better claim to magical knowledge. This is typical of Hellenistic thought, which believed true wisdom and esoteric knowledge predated the Greek philosophers and had come from the East. Thus, numerous works on magic also appeared during the Hellenistic period that were attributed to Ostanes and even to Zoroaster himself, all of which have been definitively proven to be pseudepigrapha, or works spuriously attributed to famous figures in order to lend them an authority they might not otherwise have.

In 1938, French scholars Joseph Bidez and Franz Cumont published their seminal work on the subject of Zoroastrian pseudepigrapha, The Hellenic Magi, presenting in exhaustive detail all known texts and fragments and asserting that their contents do not correspond with Zoroastrianism, proving their false attribution. However, citing certain elements of the texts that did seem authentically Persian in origin, they argued that they had been written by “Maguseans,” authors with Zoroastrian beliefs who lived in the Roman empire at such a geographical and chronological remove from the heart of Zoroastrian belief that they had developed an unorthodox form of the religion. However, this conclusion has been challenged as recently as 2006 by a Quack… that is, by a German Egyptologist with the unfortunate name of Joachim Friedrich Quack. Building on theories that were put forward as early as the 1960s, Quack goes through example after example to show how works by pseudo-Zoroaster on herbalism, amulets, and astrology and works by pseudo-Ostanes on demonology and alchemy all show decidedly Egyptian influence rather than reflecting Persian traditions. To illustrate both this Egyptian influence and the hopeless confusion caused by the mysterious authorship of these texts, we’ll look at one of Quack’s examples: the Greek alchemical text Physica et Mystica, in which Democritus is initiated into the mysteries of alchemy by Ostanes. In the text, this initiation takes place in Egypt. We know that the book was not written by Democritus, but rather by the aforementioned Hellenized Egyptian author Bolus of Mendes. Still, one might be tempted to imagine despite the spurious authorship that perhaps Ostanes had lived in Egypt, but the fact that the story goes on to introduce Ostanes’s son, who is also named Ostanes, makes even one disposed to believing the myths wonder just how many Ostaneses and Zoroasters there might have been.

Quack concludes his study by theorizing that the authors of these Magusean texts were Persians, but that they had for generations since Alexander the Great’s conquest of the Achaemenid empire been living in Egypt, their religious beliefs soaking up Egyptian esoteric thought. However, it seems just as likely that Egyptian esoteric writers, steeped in the magical traditions of that culture, which itself is long and varied, may have cloaked their writings in the guise of Eastern wisdom in order to introduce it to Hellenistic Greece, which was so enamored of ideas that originated in the Orient. In this way, the Hellenistic Greeks might be considered analogous to those in the Austro-German New Age movement that I discussed in my series on Nazi Occultism last year. Indeed, the mythical homeland of the ancient Persians recorded in the Zoroastrian Avesta is referred to as the Aryan Expanse. The word “Aryan” originated in Zoroastrian scripture, clearly as a cultural group, but eventually it would be twisted into a racial designation by those seeking to justify their feelings of superiority over others. Similarly, it seems Zoroaster and the ancient Persian religion that honors him may have been misappropriated in antiquity and used to put the more respectable face of the Magus on practices the Magi did not pioneer, creating perhaps the biggest misnomer in history, forever after attaching their name to dark arts that may in fact have come from ancient Egypt. 

Further Reading

Dannenfeldt, Karl H. “The Pseudo-Zoroastrian Oracles in the Renaissance.” Studies in the Renaissance, vol. 4, 1957, pp. 7–30. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/2857138. Accessed 12 Mar. 2020.

Kingsley, Peter. “The Greek Origin of the Sixth-Century Dating of Zoroaster.” Bulletin of the School of Oriental and African Studies, University of London, vol. 53, no. 2, 1990, pp. 245–265. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/619232. Accessed 12 Mar. 2020.

Rose, Jenny. Zoroastrianism: A Guide for the Perplexed. Continuum International, 2011.

Skjaervo, Prods Oktor. The Spirit of Zoroastrianism. Yale University Press, 2011.

Quack, Joachim Friedrich. “Les Mages Égyptianisés? Remarks on Some Surprising Points in Supposedly Magusean Texts.” Journal of Near Eastern Studies, vol. 65, no. 4, 2006, pp. 267–282. JSTOR, www.jstor.org/stable/10.1086/511102. Accessed 12 Mar. 2020.

The End of Edward II, Part Two: The Hermit King

Following the mysterious death of Edward II, recently deposed King of England, a group of monks from Westminster Abbey addressed the now truly widowed Queen Isabella. They asked that Edward be laid to rest beside his mother and father and grandfather in the royal mausoleum, a request they likely assumed would be granted. However, Isabella denied them. Instead, St. Peter’s Abbey Church at Gloucester would receive the royal corpse. Isabella may have insisted on this for numerous reasons: because its abbot was related to her nefarious advisor Roger Mortimer, because she feared a mob demonstration if Edward’s body were carried too far across the kingdom, or because there was, indeed, precedent for a deposed king not being buried at Westminster: Edward’s ancestor John, another failed monarch who had been laid to rest at Worcester. Today the tomb of Edward II at Gloucester is a grand edifice, with an alabaster effigy above it depicting him still wearing his crown and 28 statues of angels weeping round his marble sarcophagus. The tomb became so grand that eventually pilgrims to the abbey began to venerate him as a saint. However, all of this was a result of the abbots investing in their monastery as a pilgrimage site. Isabella never encouraged it to be a place of pilgrimage, and she never gave the church any money to improve the tomb. While this may be understandable, for her, what’s more strange is that his son, King Edward III, who would eventually go to great lengths to investigate his late father’s murder, also never patronized the tomb, leading some historians to ask why Edward II’s resting place was left forgotten by those closest to him.

Among the first signs that something was odd about Edward’s supposed death was the fact that his funeral was so long delayed. Edward’s corpse stayed unentombed at Gloucester for nearly two months. This delay could ostensibly be blamed on the continuing war with the Scots, or it could be explained by Isabella and Mortimer not wanting to seem too anxious to bury the former king, perhaps because they had something to hide or because they knew many believed they had something to hide. But what was it they were hiding? Their involvement in Edward’s death? If even the worst claims about Edward’s manner of death were true, there were still no visible marks upon his body to indicate murder. Why, then, did they not want anyone to view the corpse? Great care was taken to guard Edward’s body, which was common enough, but when crowds came to Gloucester to see him and were not permitted to view the body, a wooden likeness of him had to be hastily carved to appease the visitors. And many would later comment upon how far away from the open tomb they had been kept during the actual funeral, such that it was exceedingly difficult to actually examine his remains. Years later, as Edward III investigated his father’s murder and rumors abounded that Edward II had actually survived and gone into hiding, this odd funeral arrangement began to seem more and more suspicious.

The tomb of Edward II at Gloucester, via Wikimedia Commons

Immediately after the death of Edward II, Queen Isabella and Roger Mortimer went about the business of ruling the kingdom on behalf of the fifteen-year-old king. They sought a settlement with the Scots and prepared for Edward III’s marriage to Phillippa of Hainault, an arrangement Isabella had made in exchange for aid from Flanders during her coup. While this match pleased many, for young Queen Phillippa was well liked, not everyone was happy with the rule of Isabella and Mortimer. The earls whose alliance had ensured the success of her coup began to resent her. Some viewed Mortimer as yet another favorite, like Gaveston and Despenser before him, monopolizing the benefits of the throne, and the fact that many would lose lands in Isabella’s treaty with Scotland kindled further resentment. Her dealings with Scotland also ended up angering her son, the new king, who resented that she had given away his sister Joanna in marriage to Robert the Bruce’s son. When Isabella directed him to return to the Scots their sacred Stone of Scone, an artifact used in coronation ceremonies that legend identified as the Stone of Jacob, consecrated by that biblical figure after having a vision while using it as a pillow, Edward III made his disapproval clear, and taking a cue from their young king, rioting crowds prevented the artifact’s return. While the king might have coyly defied them, though, the earls dared not, for Isabella empowered her favorite Mortimer as the Earl of March, and together, having learned from Edward II’s mistakes, they put down any baronial opposition before it threatened them. Mortimer even began to claim descent from Brutus of Troy, the mythical son of Aeneas who supposedly discovered the British Isle, defeated the giants who inhabited it, and founded Britain, which was named after him, its first king. Mortimer’s hubris only worsened from there, and he started ruling without the young king’s decree, as if he himself were regent. Matters came to a head after Mortimer moved against the young king’s uncle, Edmund, the Earl of Kent, on charges of treason. Mortimer acted as prosecutor at the trial, producing letters that Edmund had penned that showed the Earl of Kent had been scheming to free his brother, Edward II. Edmund confessed that it was all true. The odd thing was, however, that he had been plotting to free Edward after Edward was dead and buried at Gloucester. 

As the trial unfolded, it became clear that the Earl of Kent believed his brother was not dead but was in fact being held captive at Corfe Castle in Dorset, which would mean, of course, that someone else had been buried in King Edward II’s place. Edmund had been sharing this information with numerous bishops and barons, which had only aggravated opposition to Isabella and Mortimer’s rule. Indeed, it appeared that Edmund had even convinced Pope John XXII of his conspiracy theory and received approval for his plans to free his brother from captivity. Strangely, according to the court proceedings, Edmund had learned of his brother’s survival through the black magic of a Dominican friar. Wildly, this evil monk had supposedly received the incendiary information from a demon he had summoned. Of course, this tidbit made the Earl of Kent’s claims impossible to credit, making him seem delusional. However, Edmund had sought confirmation of this information first, and multiple informants had approached him to confirm that Edward II was alive and well at Corfe Castle. Some even claimed to act as go-betweens to establish communication between the brothers, thus the letters produced at trial. These were likely agents of Isabella’s or Mortimer’s, entrapping the former king’s brother into a treasonous plot. The fact is, there does appear to have been a rumor going around about Edward II’s death having been faked, and the trial of the Earl of Kent seems to have been Isabella and Mortimer’s way of discrediting the rumor, a kind of disinformation campaign. Judging from the profile of the people who had supported Edmund in his plot, including the Pope himself, it would seem the rumor had been far more believable than the details of the trial made it seem. Thus the story that it had originated with a demon-summoning friar might have been “fake news,” as it were, embellished in the trial to make the idea seem ridiculous, and the fact that Isabella and Mortimer had the Earl of Kent summarily executed, bribing a drunk dung-collector to cut off his head, further served to discourage those who might want to look into the possibility of Edward II’s survival. 

The ruins of Corfe Castle, where the Earl of Kent believed Edward II was in hiding, via Wikimedia Commons

No matter the true motives behind the entrapment of Edmund, Earl of Kent, whether it was to punish treason, to remove another possible claimant from the equation, or to squelch the rumors that Edward II had survived, King Edward III, reaching his majority and ready to take the reins of power himself, resented the execution of his uncle. Though his mother had a hand in it, he appears to have laid blame squarely on Roger Mortimer, who had overstepped his position and usurped the king’s authority. However, his power was limited and he was surrounded by spies. All he could do was carefully lay plans, gathering those loyal to him one at a time, and establishing a secret channel of communication with the Pope. Eventually, it became clear that the king was moving against Mortimer, and Mortimer responded by accusing the usual suspects, such as the Earl of Lancaster, of plotting against him, and seeking to constantly reaffirm his authority in the council. It was during this time, as factions were squaring off and edging toward conflict, that Mortimer was first publicly accused of ordering Edward II’s murder at Berkeley Castle. Mortimer responded by launching an official inquiry and interrogating some of Edward III’s men who had made the accusation. During the course of these interrogations, when Edward’s men stated that they only followed the orders of their king, Mortimer declared that the king’s authority only extended so far as it agreed with his own commands. When this presumptuous and treasonous declaration was reported to Edward III, or as legend has it, when he learned that his mother might actually be pregnant by Mortimer and that the child could be a rival for his throne, the king finally resolved to act. It was the evening of October 19th, 1330, and his mother and Mortimer were holed up at Nottingham Castle at the time, in a meeting plotting to arrest those loyal to her son. Meanwhile Edward III had bribed the castle’s constable to let him and some two dozen men into the castle by a secret entrance, a tunnel thereafter called Mortimer’s Hole. The meeting broke up in a panic when cries of “Treason!” resounded through the castle, raising the alarm over Edward’s attack, and Mortimer’s men met the king’s men in a stairwell, clashing with swords and daggers. Eventually, Edward broke through a barred door behind which his mother and Mortimer were hiding, and as Isabella begged her son to take pity on her lover, Edward III arrested Roger Mortimer, the great traitor. 

King Edward III had mercy on his mother, ever afterward portraying her as the victim of the manipulative Roger Mortimer. None truly know how accurate this characterization of the Iron Virago might have been. Certainly she was not remembered well. Only a few years after he coup was welcomed by much of the kingdom, her downfall was equally well received. Her reputation is perhaps best illustrated by the immortal verse of Thomas Grey in the 18th century, who depicted her unsympathetically when he wrote: “She-wolf of France, with unrelenting fangs,/That tear'st the bowels of thy mangled mate.” Clearly, though, Edward III thought more highly of his mother and therefore took from her only her power and wealth, leaving her her freedom and keeping her in comfort for the rest of her days, never laying the crime of his father’s murder at her feet. However, Roger Mortimer he would execute the very next month, and thereafter, Edward III sought to make those accused of murdering his father answer for their crimes. These, of course, were Thomas Berkeley and John Maltravers, his jailers, and William Ockle and Thomas Gurney, his supposed assassins. All save Berkeley had fled after Mortimer’s arrest, and the king offered rewards for their capture or their heads. However, Edward III made some odd distinctions here that indicate more may have been going on behind the scenes, and even hinting that the king may not have been so certain about the circumstances of his father’s death after all.

In this 19th century image Isabella pleads with her son for Mortimer’s life, via Wikimedia Commons

Thomas Berkeley, who had been most responsible for Edward II’s safekeeping, strangely got off scot-free. He claimed that he had not been present in the castle on the day in question, and moreover, he bafflingly claimed that he didn’t even know Edward II was dead, that he only learned of it just then, as he was being questioned. Of course this was preposterous, and more than a little disrespectful, yet Edward III released him on bail and then cleared him of any charges. Why this was so seems a mystery, unless, as Paul Doherty postulates in my principal source Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II, you consider his statement to be a pointed message. Perhaps Berkeley, by saying it was the first he’d heard of Edward II being dead, was really indicating to the king that as far as he knew the king’s father hadn’t died in Berkeley Castle, a kind of winking hint that the rumors of Edward II’s survival were true. Also curious is the fact that John Maltravers, Berkeley’s brother-in-law who had been at the castle on the night of the murder, was also not charged with regicide and instead was only charged for his part in the later conspiracy against the Earl of Kent. Additionally, evidence suggests that while Maltravers was in hiding in Flanders, the king knew where he was and did not arrest him. Indeed, Edward III eventually allowed him to return to England and come and go as he pleased. Doherty points out that, after arresting Mortimer, the king had more than five weeks to torture and interrogate Mortimer and his men before he eventually ordered the arrests. Who knows what information he learned during that time that convinced him Berkeley and Maltravers were not responsible for the murder of his father. Only William Ockle and Thomas Gurney were declared wanted for regicide, and the reward was set far higher for their capture than for their heads, indicating perhaps that the king believed there was still something to learn from them. Ockle vanished, but the king’s agents pursued Gurney for more than 2 years before he was taken in Naples. According to some of the great chroniclers of the age, such as the dubious Geoffrey le Baker of Swinbrook, whose credibility I questioned in the last episode, claim Gurney was beheaded in custody while on a ship bound for London, to prevent him from naming names, presumably Isabella’s or perhaps those of some barons who had managed to remain in the king’s good graces and did not want to be implicated. However, as Doherty points out, since Gurney could have been executed abroad before even boarding the ship, it seems likelier that Gurney died of an illness while on his way to face justice in England, as was the story told by the knight tasked with bringing him back. Curiously, after this knight reported back to King Edward III, likely telling the king everything he had been able to learn from Gurney before his death, Edward III ceased searching for those responsible for murdering his father, yet five years later, he seemed bent on hunting down a living man rumored to be his father. 

In 1338, when King Edward III was leading his armies in the Low Countries, he heard about a man called William the Welshman who was in Cologne and had been telling people that he was Edward II. The king spent a significant amount of money having this person brought to face him in Antwerp. We don’t know anything about the meeting between Edward III and the man who claimed to be his father. Doherty suggests that this was actually William Ockle, whom the king had given up on finding and who might have escaped justice forever if he hadn’t been pretending to be Edward II, but this is speculation. What this does show with a certainty is that, years after Edward III had seemingly resolved the matter of his father’s murder by tracking down his assassin, he seems to have taken a great interest in the possibility of his father still being alive, indicating he may have had secret doubts at the very least or even that during his investigation five years earlier he had discovered proof that his father was still among the living somewhere. The other possibility, of course, is that he did not believe William the Welshman was his father but nevertheless took the claims of pretenders seriously. Indeed, this was not the first time someone had pretended to be Edward II. The first time had been when Edward II was still alive. In 1316, while Edward II was still licking his wounds after his defeat at Bannockburn 2 years earlier, a clerk from Oxford declared that he was the real Edward of Caernarvon. When questioned before the Justices, he pointed to a missing ear, explaining that he had been at play in the castle’s courtyard as a child, and when a pig bit his ear off, his nurse had switched him with a peasant boy, fearing the king’s anger over the incident. This pretender eventually revealed himself to be something of a crazy person, as during further investigations he produced a cat and confessed that his story was a lie, and that the cat, which was actually the Devil, had put him up to the charade. The Justices hanged him and, absurdly, hanged the cat as well.  Considering that even this lunatic’s story had been something of a scandal, perhaps it is not unreasonable for Edward III to take seriously the claims of a random Welsh pretender in Cologne. And after all, since we don’t know what information his interrogations uncovered, there seems little evidence that Edward II did not die at Berkeley Castle in 1327. But actually, there was one well-documented event that I omitted in my telling of Edward II’s imprisonment that may serve to cast some further doubt upon the idea that he was even at Berkeley when he was supposedly murdered there: the story of a jailbreak.

A depiction of Berkeley Castle, where Edward II was held captive, was liberated by the Dunhead gang, and supposedly later was killed, via Wikimedia Commons

At the time of Isabella and Mortimer’s coup, there existed a secret alliance of loyalists, led by brothers Thomas and Stephen Dunhead. Thomas Dunhead, a clergyman, had gone to Rome on Edward II’s behalf seeking approval for a divorce from Isabella, and after his failure and return, when Isabella landed her forces, he and his brother, both still loyal to their king, became fugitives. They gathered others to the king’s cause, forming a kind of outlaw band. The threat that this conspiracy would break Edward II out of jail was what precipitated his transfer from Kenilworth to Berkeley in the first place. Interestingly, there is evidence that, during the transfer, to throw the Dunhead conspiracy off their trail, before taking him to Berkeley, they took Edward II to Corfe Castle, the very place where years later Edmund, Earl of Kent, believed he remained, alive and well. However, all records show that Edward II was eventually imprisoned at Berkeley. Records also show, though, that the Dunhead gang discovered his imprisonment there and that, against all odds, managed to storm the fortified castle with no siege equipment. Reports describing the jailbreak specifically state that Edward II had been taken from his cell, and there is no explicit indication that they recaptured him before the Dunheads escaped. This is just assumed, since those in power continued on as if the king were still in their custody, and then some months later letting it be known that he had died at Berkeley. Certainly members of the Dunhead gang were eventually caught and indicted for “trying to free Edward of Caernarvon,” as Isabella carefully worded it, but the fact that the Dunheads had Berkeley in their control for long enough to loot the castle would seem to indicate that their raid had been in no way repelled, that they might have seized all they wanted from the castle before taking their leave, including the royal prisoner. Therefore, it seems at least possible, and I imagine might have seemed plausible to Edward III as he looked into the mystery three years later, that the Dunheads had successfully spirited away the former king from his prison, and that Isabella and Mortimer simply pretended they hadn’t and shortly thereafter produced a corpse so that if Edward II ever resurfaced, they could argue that he was a pretender, for the true Edward II was entombed at Gloucester. Could this be the truth that Edward III uncovered while interrogating those involved? Was it finally confirmed by Gurney on his deathbed? Is this why he chose not to pursue further justice in the matter, and years later was curious about a Welshman claiming to be his father? 

One further piece of evidence provides some reason to believe Edward II did not die at Berkeley, although with an alternate version of events. And while it may not prove its astonishing claims, it at least serves as strong evidence that his son, Edward III, suspected his father’s survival. Circa 1340, Edward III received a letter from a papal notary named Manuel Fieschi. In this letter, he explained that he met a hermit who claimed to be Edward II and took his confession. What he learned was that a guard of Edward’s at Berkeley had warned him of the assassins’ plans and offered to exchange clothes and trade places with him. This allowed Edward II to simply walk out of the castle, and when the assassins saw that the prisoner was not he, they murdered him and brought his body to Queen Isabella, who interred the guard in her husband’s tomb. After his escape, Fieschi’s letter claims he lived secretly under Maltravers’s nose at Corfe Castle for a year and a half. After hearing that his brother, the Earl of Kent, had been executed for believing he was alive at Corfe, he fled again, this time to Ireland, and began to disguise himself as a hermit. In this disguise, he made his way across the Continent, eventually seeking an audience with Pope John XXII. The Pope received him and honored him as King Edward II, and the Hermit King devoted himself thereafter to a religious pilgrimage, making his way to Cologne to visit the reliquary said to hold the bones of the Magi, the Three Kings present at the Nativity. Thereafter, he made his way to Italy, where he spent his years moving from one hermitage to another. This letter appears to provide accurate information regarding details about Edward II’s capture, and furthermore, its account of his hiding at Corfe Castle when the Earl of Kent believed he was there, as well as its suggestion that he was present in Cologne years later, perhaps when William the Welshman was there telling people he was Edward II, all give it a semblance of reliability. Moreover, the fact that two years after receiving the letter Edward III allowed Fieschi to keep certain lucrative English benefices at Ampleforth and Salisbury appears to show that the king didn’t think him a liar and may have even been rewarding him for the information he’d provided.

Edward III, son of Edward of Caernarvon and Isabella of France, who sought justice for Edward II’s murder and yet also seems to have been open to the idea that his father survived, via Wikimedia Commons

However, there are reasons both for and against crediting Fieschi and his claims. First, it seems suspect that Fieschi would freely give up secrets protected by the sacramental seal of confession, but there is some indication in the wording chosen by this papal lawyer that he might only be imparting information that was not part of the confession proper--that is, not sins for which the confessor was seeking absolution. And yet it still seems reckless that a fugitive Edward II would even risk revealing himself this way, even if he thought his secret safe with his confessor. Aside from this issue of plausibility, Fieschi’s letter is so accurate as to be almost unimpeachable, even displaying some inside knowledge of Edward II’s movements during the final days before his surrender to Lancaster. There are even hints that Fieschi had knowledge of the circuitous route taken by Edward’s captors to elude the Dunhead gang when transferring their prisoner to Berkeley. Oddly, though, when naming the assassins sent after the king, Fieschi names only Gurney and a henchman of Mortimer’s, Simon de Beresford, who had been hanged alongside Mortimer as complicit in his crimes but was not usually implicated as one of the assassins. Suspiciously, he excludes William Ockle entirely, who just happens to have been the one person who was still alive somewhere and might have contradicted the contents of his letter. Furthermore, as Paul Doherty wisely observes, it strains credulity that Roger Mortimer or the jailer Thomas Berkeley or his lieutenant John Maltravers would have put only a single guard on Edward II, especially one who sympathized with the king, and who happened to share the same physical stature and therefore wore clothes of a size that would fit the prisoner. Also implausible is the notion that a simple change of clothes would have sufficed to allow the easily recognizable king to stroll right out of the heavily guarded castle unchallenged. Nor is it easy to believe that , when the assassins realized the king had escaped, rather than raising the alarm and organizing a search, they settled on covering it up and faking the king’s death. In fact, the letter makes it sound like they actually pulled one over on Queen Isabella, as it states, “[T]he body of the said porter they presented to the wicked queen as if it were the body of your father,” but this line is problematic in numerous ways. First, it could be seen as exonerating the queen insofar as she wasn’t party to faking Edward II’s death, a choice perhaps made by Fieschi because of how consistently Edward III had defended his mother in these matters. However, the line calls her wicked, and the fact that the assassins reported to her directly implicates her as the mastermind of the murder plot. Of course, this does offer some explanation for why the assassins would even choose to take this course of action, perhaps because they were afraid of what Isabella would do to them if they reported the king’s escape, but it beggars belief that when they presented the guard’s body, Isabella would not have discerned that it was not her husband.

Then we have the scholarly assessment of the letter, and the investigation of its claims by Italian academics who assert that it is authentic. Constantino Nigra, in 1901, relied on the contents of the letter and what is known about Fieschi to argue that the letter is not a forgery, was truly written by Fieschi, and was written around the time it is supposed to have been written. Then 23 years later, Anna Benedetti, an Italian English professor building on a 1915 article by Hardwicke Rawnsley called “Did Edward II Escape to Italy?” began to trace the path of the Hermit King as outlined in the letter. One of the hermitages named in the letter, a castle called “Milasci,” she identified as Melazzo de Acqui, and today this tourist destination displays plaques commemorating Edward II’s stay there, although this is no proof of it being true. Another hermitage mentioned in the letter “Cecime,” proved more difficult to pinpoint. Benedetti settled on Cecime Sopra Voghera, a walled village in the Appenine Mountains, but there exists no castle there. Continuing her search, she found a secluded monastery nearby that fit the bill perfectly. She argues that King Edward II was likely buried in one of the churches owned by this monastery, for she found an empty and undecorated tomb in one of them. Now, Benedetti’s research goes much further than this. Like some other medievalist conspiracy theorists, she believes there are clues everywhere. Certain sculptures and details in the architecture, she says, provide a coded account of Edward the II’s life in hiding. Other historians have begged to differ, providing alternative interpretations of these so-called clues and presenting evidence that they are far too old to have been created for the purpose of telling Edward II’s tale. However, there does exist some testimony from locals suggesting there was a folk tradition in the area about an English king having lived in hiding there, a legend that if the testimony can be believed, actually predates not only the scholarly work identifying that region with Edward II’s place of hermitage but even predating the 1878 discovery of the Fieschi letter. 

A plaque at the Hermitage of St. Albert di Butrio suggesting Edward II may have lived there after his supposed death, via Atlas Obscura

Beyond these facts stands Fieschi’s reputation. If as Nigra argues we can trust that Fieschi wrote this letter, his credibility alone would seem to make it trustworthy. Fieschi was a high-ranking cleric, a canon and an arch-deacon, a notary of the Pope, and eventually, a Bishop. Nevertheless, Paul Doherty, in Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II, provides ample reason to doubt Fieschi’s character and his motives in penning the letter, pointing out that while he was a man of the cloth, he appears to have been far more interested in money than in matters of the spirit. He was a papal tax-collector, and even while away in Italy, he collected money from his various benefices, like an “absentee landlord,” as Doherty characterizes him. He points out that Fieschi had received more benefices and offices under Isabella and Mortimer than under Edward II, suggesting that the Iron Virago and her traitorous paramour may have been bribing him to act as their agent in the papal court, supporting their version of events, for example, when they put down the Earl of Kent’s conspiracy and attempted to quash the rumor that Edward II was still alive. Doherty suggests that when Edward III took power and thereafter began refusing benefices to foreigners and even charging them for any English property they might be granted, Fieschi was looking for a way to make himself just as useful to the new king. He had plenty of insider information about the Earl of Kent’s theories from having spent time in England and from acting as the Pope’s notary. While before, when he was being taken care of by Isabella and Mortimer, he likely supported the claim that Edward II was killed and entombed at Gloucester, later, to indicate to Edward III that he could pose a problem by resuscitating an old conspiracy theory, he might have written this letter in hopes that the new king would bribe him to keep the matter silent. And indeed, shortly afterward, Fieschi was awarded his first bishopric, and the matter of Fieschi’s Hermit King never came to light until the letter was discovered in the 19th century. 

This version of events is perfectly believable as an explanation of the letter, yet explaining away the letter does not necessarily disprove the theory of Edward II’s survival. Even Doherty, after casting such doubt on Fieschi’s letter, gives credence to the idea that Edward II may not have died at Berkeley, focusing instead on the suspicious circumstances of the Dunhead gang’s successful jailbreak as the likeliest way that Edward avoided death. He points to the fact that after the jailbreak, Roger Mortimer himself was obliged to leave the queen’s side and travel to Wales to deal with the matter of the escaped royal prisoner. It makes far more sense, then, if they could not manage to find Edward II, to simply pretend he was dead. It is in fact, a cunning play, whereas just assassinating him when they already had him imprisoned seems needlessly dangerous. In this light, almost everything in the story falls into place. A local wise woman was hired to do the embalming instead of a royal physician, who would surely have recognized that the corpse did not belong to the king. Indeed, perhaps the queen met with this embalmer not to discern whether she’d observed evidence of murder, but rather to investigate whether it truly was her husband’s corpse… or to make certain that the embalmer did not realize it was not the king’s body. And it further explains why the casket was kept so far away from viewers at the funeral, and why Edward II was not laid to rest with his father and grandfather at Westminster Abbey, for perhaps they knew that these were not the remains of the king and did not belong there. It also accounts for the fact that Isabella never honored her late husband’s tomb at Gloucester, for it wasn’t actually him buried there. Indeed, the fact that Edward III also never patronized his own father’s tomb would seem to indicate that he eventually learned this truth about the identity of the person entombed there. On the other hand, Anna Benedetti found some ornate candlesticks displayed at a museum in Turin that were said to have come from the monastery in Italy where she believes Edward II was really buried, and she asserts that they may have been gifts from Edward III to honor his father’s true resting place. They were engraved with lions, the symbol on the Arms of the House of Plantagenet. If this is true, then we can assume that the son finally solved the mystery of the fate of his father, the Hermit King. But of course, this is only one version of history, perhaps just as convincing as another. The truth may be somewhere in between or something that none have yet discovered.

Further Reading

Doherty, Paul. “Isabella and the Strange Death of Edward II.” Carroll & Graf, 2003.

Weir, Alison. “Queen Isabella: Treachery, Adultery, and Murder in Medieval England.” Ballantine, 2006.