The child murder that gave voodoo its bad name

An engraving–probably made from a contemporary artist’s sketch–shows the eight Haitian “voodoo” devotees found guilty in February 1864 of the murder and cannibalism of a 12-year-old child. From Harper’s Weekly

It was a Saturday, market day in Port-au-Prince, and the chance to meet friends, gossip and shop had drawn large crowds to the Haitian capital. Sophisticated, French-educated members of the urban ruling class crammed into the market square beside illiterate farmers, a generation removed from slavery, who had walked in from the surrounding villages for a rare day out.

The whole of the country had assembled, and it was for this reason that Fabre Geffrard had chosen February 13, 1864, as the date for eight high-profile executions. Haiti’s reformist president wished to make an example of these four men and four women: because they had been found guilty of a hideous crime—abducting, murdering and cannibalizing a 12-year-old girl. And also because they represented everything Geffrard hoped to leave behind him as he molded his country into a modern nation: the backwardness of its hinterlands, its African past and, above all, its folk religion.

President Fabre Geffrard, whose efforts to reform Haiti ended in disappointment when he was accused of corruption and forced to flee the country by a violent coup.

Call that religion what you will—voodoo, vaudaux, vandaux, vodou (the last of these is generally preferred today)—Haiti’s history had long been intertwined with it. It had arrived in slave ships centuries earlier and flourished in backwoods maroon villages and in plantations that Christian priests never visited. In 1791, it was generally believed, a secret vodou ceremony had provided the spark for the violent uprising that liberated the country from its French masters: the single example of a successful slave rebellion in the history of the New World.

Outside Haiti, though, vodou was perceived as primitive and sanguinary. It was nothing but “West African superstition [and] serpent worship,” wrote the British traveler Hesketh Hesketh-Pritchard, who walked across the Haitian interior in 1899, and believers indulged in “their rites and their orgies with practical impunity.” For visiting Westerners of this sort, vodou’s popularity, in itself, was proof that the “black republic” could not claim to be civilized.

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In the cave of the witches

A photo sometimes said to depict members of Chiloé’s murderous society of warlocks—founded, so they claimed, in 1786 and destroyed by the great trial of 1880-81.

When the Sect needs a new Invunche, the Council of the Cave orders a Member to steal a boy child from six months to a year old. The Deformer, a permanent resident of the Cave, starts work at once. He disjoints the arms and legs and the hands and feet. Then begins the delicate task of altering the position of the head. Day after day, and for hours at a stretch, he twists the head with a tourniquet until it has rotated through an angle of 180, that is until the child can look straight down the line of its own vertebrae.

There remains one last operation, for which another specialist is needed. At full moon, the child is laid on a work-bench, lashed down with its head covered in a bag. The specialist cuts a deep incision under the right shoulder blade. Into the hole he inserts the right arm and sews up the wound with thread taken from the neck of a ewe. When it has healed the Invunche is complete.

The world’s last great witch trial took place as recently as 1880. It was held on the remote Chilean island of Chiloé, and featured remarkable allegations of mass murder, child mutilation and sorcery, all committed in the name of a strange sort of alternative government known as La Provincia Recta – ‘The Righteous Province’ – a sect of warlocks, based in a hidden cave and given to flying about the island wearing magical waistcoats stitched from the flayed skin of the recently deceased.

The native Chilotes believed these warlocks had real powers. Bruce Chatwin, in In Patagonia, wrote a memorable description of their rites and rituals. (And fans of Swamp Thing era Alan Moore will spot the source of one of his more disturbing plots.) But – truly unusual though the story is, was it ever rooted in reality? This week’s Smithsonian essay explores the evidence. But it’s not for the faint-hearted.

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The Monster of Glamis

“If you could even guess the nature of this castle’s secret,” said Claude Bowes-Lyon, 13th Earl of Strathmore, “you would get down on your knees and thank God it was not yours.”

That awful secret was once the talk of Europe. From perhaps the 1840s until 1905, the Earl’s ancestral seat at Glamis Castle, in the Scottish lowlands, was home to a “mystery of mysteries”—an enigma that involved a hidden room, a secret passage, solemn initiations, scandal, and shadowy figures glimpsed by night on castle battlements.

The conundrum engaged two generations of high society until, soon after 1900, the secret itself was lost. One version of the story holds that it was so terrible that the 13th Earl’s heir flatly refused to have it revealed to him. Yet the mystery of Glamis (pronounced “Glarms”) remains, kept alive by its association with royalty (the heir was grandfather to Elizabeth II) and by the fact that at least some members of the Bowes-Lyon family insisted it was real.

This celebrated historical mystery seems to be largely forgotten now, but as late as the 1970s it was chilling new generations as a staple of numerous ghost books. Come to think of it, paperback compilations of old ghost stories seem to have gone the way of the dodo as well, but those crumbly Armada books used to frighten me when I was young. Anyway, you can read the unexpurgated story over at Past Imperfect.

[This is a fully revised, expanded and updated account of a mystery first discussed here, featuring the fruits of much subsequent research.]

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The mystery of the five wounds

On September 14, 1224, a Saturday, Francis of Assisi—noted ascetic and holy man, future saint—was preparing to enter the second month of a retreat with a few close companions on Monte La Verna, overlooking the River Arno in Tuscany. Francis had spent the previous few weeks in prolonged contemplation of the suffering Jesus Christ on the cross, and he may well have been weak from protracted fasting. As he knelt to pray in the first light of dawn (notes the Fioretti—the ‘Little flowers of St Francis of Assisi,’ a collection of legends and stories about the saint),

he began to contemplate the Passion of Christ… and his fervor grew so strong within him that he became wholly transformed into Jesus through love and compassion…. While he was thus inflamed, he saw a seraph with six shining, fiery wings descend from heaven. This seraph drew near to St Francis in swift flight, so that he could see him clearly and recognize that he had the form of a man crucified… After a long period of secret converse, this mysterious vision faded, leaving… in his body a wonderful image and imprint of the Passion of Christ. For in the hands and feet of Saint Francis forthwith began to appear the marks of the nails in the same manner as he had seen them in the body of Jesus crucified.

In all, Francis found that he bore five marks: two on his palms and two on his feet, where the nails that fixed Christ to the cross were traditionally believed to have been hammered home, and the fifth on his side, where the Bible says Jesus had received a spear thrust from a Roman centurion.

Francis had been marked by the stigmata. But how? Had they been placed there by God? Or had the future saint inflicted the wounds on himself? Why are so many stigmatics women – and why are so few Protestants? The answers are revealing, and you can read more in this week’s Past Imperfect essay here.

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The wizard of Mauritius

In 1782, an unknown French engineer offered his government an invention better than radar: the ability to detect ships at distances of up to 700 miles. There were many who said that his ideas worked. But was Étienne Bottineau a genius, a fantasist or a fraud?

Pretty much nobody has heard of nauscopie these days. But two centuries ago, this long-forgotten “science of detecting ships and land at a distance” was the subject of considerable speculation. It was possible – so the theory went – for a practised eye to discern the approach of vessels while they were hundreds of miles away by careful study of minute changes that appeared in the atmosphere along the horizon; these were ‘meteors‘ that grew and shifted shape in ways that related directly to the number of ships sailing in company and their distance from the observer. But what these meteors looked like, and how they were to be interpreted, remained the carefully guarded secret of one man: Étienne Bottineau, a minor French engineer stationed on the Indian Ocean island of Mauritius.

Bottineau successfully completed an eight-month course of observations – predicting the arrival of well over a hundred ships in ways that persuaded the local governor that nauscopie was a genuine discovery. But when he sailed for France to sell the idea to a sceptical goverment, he ran smack into the onset of the French Revolution. It didn’t help that the one man who believed in Bottineau was Jean Paul Marat, the fanatical architect of the Terror that cost 200,000 men their lives. Nor that the only written evidence of his discovery ended up in a packet of papers confiscated by France’s secret postal police, the Cabinet Noir. But is it possible to reconstruct the lost science of nauscopie, and show whether it was fact or fiction?

Intrigued? You can read the full story here.

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Inside the Great Pyramid

The Great Pyramid–built for the Pharaoh Khufu in about 2570 B.C., sole survivor of the Seven Wonders of the ancient world, and still arguably the most mysterious structure on the planet.

No structure in the world is more mysterious than the Great Pyramid. But who first broke into its well-guarded interior, and when? And what did they find there?

A reinvestigation of a neglected mystery. Old Arab accounts say that it was the Caliph Ma’mun who first broke into the Great Pyramid in 820 AD – driving a new tunnel into the north face of the monument and, by an astounding coincidence, striking the interior network of passages at precisely the point where the hidden upper network of tunnels leading to the King’s Chamber branches off from the main descending passage.

How credible is this story? Why has every writer on the pyramids since the mid-nineteenth century misdated Ma’mun’s visit to Giza by more than a decade? And what exactly is the lost source for some of the most remarkable of the details given in traditional accounts?

Fresh research in medieval Muslim chronicles provides at least some of the answers… and you can read the full story here.

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“Tamám Shud”

Name: unknown. Cause of death: unknown. Occupation: unknown – but perhaps a former ballet dancer. Possessions: one pack of cigarettes (half filled with a different brand of smoke); one hidden pocket, concealing a scrap of paper with two words in Persian, torn from a rare first edition book; five lines written in an unknown code. Welcome to the world’s most perplexing cold case. Can you help to solve the mystery?

The discovery of a body on an Adelaide beach in December 1948 sparked an investigation that remains active to this day. Was the dead man a lover or a fighter – a new father or a spy? Why might an expert witness at the inquest suggest that he had habitually worn high-heeled shoes? Was Australia’s most eminent pathologist right conclude he had been killed by an ultra-rare muscle relaxant normally used to tip poison arrows in Somalia? And what of the mysterious phrase ‘Tamám Shud’? It’s from Omar Khayyam, but how is it that the two editions of the poet’s famous Rubaiyat that are central to the case seem not to actually exist?

It’s a fifty-one-star, gold-plated puzzler, all right. Confused? I’m afraid you probably still will be even after reading the full article here…

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Adventures in time #2: Three 1950s youths in a medieval plague village

Kersey in 1957. Although Jack Merriott's watercolor presents an idealized image of the village – it was commissioned for use in a railway advertising campaign – it does give an idea of just how 'old' Kersey must have looked to strangers in the year it became central to a 'timeslip' case.

Looking back, the really strange thing was the silence. The way the church bells stopped ringing as the little group of naval cadets neared the village. The way even the ducks stood quiet and motionless by the shallow stream that ran across the road where the main street began.

When Bill Laing and two other new recruits to the Royal Navy were ordered to take part in a routine map-reading exercise one October day in 1957, the aim was to find their way a few miles cross country to the Suffolk village of Kersey – not back in time to the village as it had been sometime between 1349 and 1420. But the strange, frightening and deserted place that the three boys encountered looked nothing like any 20th century hamlet. So where – and when – were they?

A reinvestigation of a little-known ´´timeslip´´ case kicks off the new Smithsonian blog Past Imperfect – and you can read the full article here.

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The dog that did bark in the night

Dog

Koestler

Reading the diaries of John Rae, the renowned controversialist and long-serving headmaster of Westminster School (1970-86), turns up an interesting anecdote that illustrates some of the problems that parapsychologists encounter outside the laboratory, where they are all too often at the mercy of unexpected variables – especially when they are too prone to believe.

Rae had attended a dinner at Blackheath, held by the biographer John Grigg and his wife, and arrived to discover that Arthur Koestler was also a guest. Koestler. an Austro-Hungarian by birth best known for his anti-Communist book Darkness At Noon (1940), was nearing the end of a complicated life; he had been diagnosed with Parkinson’s Disease five years earlier and more recently had contracted leukemia. This had boosted an already active interest in parapsychology and historical revisionism, which had led him to write such books as The Case of the Midwife Toad (on Paul Kammerer and coincidence) and the wildly controversial and, historically, deeply flawed The Thirteenth Tribe (which argued that the Ashkenazi Jews, who make up the great majority of modern day Israelis, were not originally German semites, but were descended from the inhabitants of the the 9th century middle Asian Khazar Empire).

By 1980, anyway, Koestler was a convinced believer in psychic phenomena who had already made arrangements, in his will, to leave a substantial legacy to Edinburgh University to fund a parapsychology department there. Hence the piquancy of Rae’s anecdote:

Before dinner the wooden stool on which I am sitting collapses and Koestler insists that he had heard the Griggs’ dog start barking a fraction of a second before the stool collapsed, as though I had communicated some form of early warning to the animal. This enables Koestler to lead an interesting discussion about various forms of extra-sensory perception. But it is cut short by John Grigg, who points out that the dog, whose name is Slippers, barked because it heard the telephone in the hall ring just before the stool collapsed. We are all rather disappointed, especially Koestler.

[Source: John Rae, The Old Boys’ Network: A Headmaster’s Diaries 1972-1986, entry for 17 March 1980. (London: Short Books 2010 pp.200-01)

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Tracking the trends via Google’s New Book Database

Anyone who suspects that Google, like Starbucks, is secretly planning to take over the world might well point to the search giant’s latest innovation and smile knowingly. That’s because Google has, with surprisingly little fanfare, released a new tool that exploits its unparalleled – and ever faster-growing – holdings of data, and promises to revolutionise the lives of linguists, lexicographers and English scholars, while simultaneously churning odd the odd bit of useful data for the rest of us. As today’s New York Times explains, the company’s latest launch is its New Book Database, containing 500 billion words culled from 5.2m digitised books. Quite a few of those words can already be accessed in their intended order via Google Books, but the NBD has another function – it allows users to search across time (the database covers the period 1800-2008) to track the changing popularity of individual words, and it allows them to compare the usage of several different words over the same period.

The NYT rather worthily put the new database to use comparing the frequency with which the likes of “men” and “women” feature (turns out the latter overtakes the former around 1986), but for our purposes it’s rather more revealing to track the progress of various Fortean topics. The results turn out to be informative. Take the frequency with which the phrase “Loch Ness Monster” appears, for example [top - you can click on all the graphs to see them in a much larger and more easily readable format].

Mentions of the LNM peak in the late 1930s – in fact surprisingly late in the 1930s, perhaps reflecting a delay in translating newspaper coverage into references in published books. The phrase then undergoes a sharp fall in popularity, only to revive in the 1950s and peak around 1977-78, at pretty much the time that optimism about the Rines underwater photos was at its height. What’s really striking is that the phrase continues to grow in popularity pretty much until 2000, despite a clear decline public interest in the subject. What does this indicate? That the words have passed into common currency, most probably, so that “Loch Ness Monster” is used as a metaphor nearly as often as it is as it is to refer to a – supposedly – living beast.

Here, anyway, are the results of some further searches. We can see how “UFO” swiftly overtook the earlier “Flying Saucer” [above], and or how the number of references to angels soared in the run-up to the Millennium. More interesting, perhaps, are searches that track the relative performance of terms against each other – witness the triumph of “Bigfoot” over “Abominable Snowman” and “Sasquatch” [right]. These can show up some quite significant long-term trends. Used intelligently, indeed, there’s probably a paper or two in the idea somewhere.

What is there to say, for example, about the ups and downs of this fairly random series of other Fortean phenomena [right]? What has caused the huge surge in the use of the word “teleportation”? Does this reflect nothing more than an abundance of borrowings in the science fiction literature (and a surfeit of Star Trek movies)? Is it linked to popular belief in UFO abductions? Or is something else altogether going on? And, while the numbers are probably too low to be statistically significant, can it be that more people are actually writing about ley lines now, in the 2000s, even though the Old Straight Track strikes most young Forteans as about as unashamedly 1970s as Slade and spandex loon pants?

What, finally, of the word “Fortean” itself [left]? Well, here the news is not so great. The NBD reveals a peak just after the year 2000, followed by what looks suspiciously like the beginnings of a long, sharp and irreversible decline. Anyway, the tool is easy to use and pretty addictive to play with. Feel free to give it a whirl at the site homepage, here.

UPDATE 24 October 2012. Google has released a significantly improved ngram viewer which makes more elaborate searches possible and smoothes out most of the data incongruities that marred the first release.

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