I'm currently reading James Burke and Robert Ornstein's book The Axemaker's Gift: Technology's Capture of Our Minds and Culture, about the rise of our technological society from the (on the whole) superstitious and non-scientific cultural milieu of the past, and one thing has struck me over and over. Prior to the more rational, evidence-based view of the world that came out of the Enlightenment, people must have been continuously terrified.
I mean, think about it. Epidemics happen, seemingly coming out of nowhere. The cause is unknown, the treatments ineffective at best. Some people survive, others die. There are storms, lightning strikes, earthquakes, blizzards, volcanoes; the latter, such as the 1783 eruption of Laki and the 1815 eruption of Tambora, had global consequences, harming people who had no idea that a volcano erupted hundreds or thousands of miles away. Here in the modern world, we have scientific explanations for at least the proximal causes of these events, even if (as I discussed in yesterday's post) the ultimate causes still leave people searching for answers.
But prior to modern science, they didn't even have proximal causes. It's no wonder they fell back on demons and witches and evil spirits. Put yourself in the place of someone who has no knowledge of microbiology during an outbreak of the bubonic plague. Unsurprising they tried to find some explanation, even if to our modern sensibilities the explanations they landed on seem crazy. I may not agree with C. S. Lewis's theology, but I have to admit he had a point in Mere Christianity:
Three hundred years ago people in England were putting witches to death... But surely the reason we do not execute witches is that we do not believe there are such things. If we did—if we really thought that there were people going about who had sold themselves to the devil and received supernatural powers from him in return and were using these powers to kill their neighbours or drive them mad or bring bad weather—surely we would all agree that if anyone deserved the death penalty, then these filthy quislings did? There is no difference of moral principle here: the difference is simply about matter of fact. It may be a great advance in knowledge not to believe in witches: there is no moral advance in not executing them when you do not think they are there. You would not call a man humane for ceasing to set mousetraps if he did so because he believed there were no mice in the house.
To return to James Burke, in his mind-blowing series The Day the Universe Changed, he makes the point forcefully that we like to congratulate ourselves on how much more advanced our minds are now as compared to our ancestors, when in reality it's our model for understanding the universe that has changed. Our minds themselves really haven't changed much. We're still trapped in a conceptual framework, just like the people in the past were; it's just a different one.
Which brings us to the strange case of Theiss of Kaltenbrun.
In 1692, an octogenarian was brought into a court in the town of Jürgensberg, then ruled by Sweden, now Zaube, Latvia. He was accused of robbing a church, but along the way, it came out that Theiss was "widely known in the area" for being a werewolf.
Asked about this, Theiss kind of shrugged and said, "Yeah, I am. So what?" Well, "so what" turned out to be the wrong thing to say, because back then, werewolves (along with witches and demons and so on) were considered to be the minions of hell, and as such, merited the death penalty. Questioned about this, he said that he'd been a werewolf for a while, but had given it up ten years earlier.
I find this kind of odd. I'd always thought that once a werewolf, always a werewolf, at least until you meet up with a silver bullet. But apparently Theiss decided to retire, and was getting along fine until the whole church robbery incident brought him back to the center of attention.
The judges were initially inclined to dismiss him as insane, but then it came out that he'd been involved in an altercation with a farmer from Lemburg (now Mālpils, Latvia). Theiss said the farmer was a Satan-worshiping witch, and one night when the farmer was off doing Bad Stuff, Theiss had (in wolf form) followed the farmer down to hell. The farmer attacked Theiss with a broomstick (of course), breaking Theiss's nose.
A local verified that Theiss had, indeed, had his nose broken, and that was considered sufficient evidence for believing the rest of his story.
So the judges inquired further, and some of the testimony is downright hilarious. Theiss and the other members of his pack, Theiss told them, liked to roam around local farms and kill and devour any farm animals they found. They always roasted it first, though. When one of the judges asked how a wolf could roast meat, Theiss told them they returned to human form while cooking, and that "they always added salt to their meat, but never had any bread to go with it."
Which, to judge by the scientific documentary An American Werewolf In London, is pretty genteel behavior, as compared to your average werewolf.
Here's where the case took an interesting turn, because Theiss admitted freely he was a werewolf, but said that he and his friends used their powers to fight evil. There was an entrance to hell in a swamp near Lemburg, he said, and the whole pack would enter hell and do battle with the demons and with any human witches they came across. They were, Theiss said, "God's Hounds." They'd more than once found food and livestock that the actual evil witches had carted off to hell in order to cause famine, and they'd brought it back and distributed it to the God-fearing farmers in the area.
And sure enough, the people in the area all corroborated that Theiss was known as a healer and a generous friend.
This put the judges in a serious quandary. They couldn't exactly condone his behavior; getting naked, turning into a wolf, and eating other people's livestock (roasted, and with salt) weren't exactly on the List of Approved Christian Pastimes as set forth by the church fathers. But still... could there be a good, God-recommended use for magical powers?
I'm reminded of the scene in Madeleine L'Engle's A Swiftly Tilting Planet where Pastor Mortmain is all set to hang Zylle Llawcae, whom he's declared to be a witch, and the Good Guys recite a spell that causes lightning to strike the gallows. Zylle's husband, Ritchie, shouts, "Do you think all power is of the devil? What we have just seen is the wrath of God!" And amazingly enough, given how these things usually went, everyone realizes that Pastor Mortmain is really the Bad Guy here.
Even more astonishingly, that's kind of how the case of Theiss of Kaltenbrun went. Well, almost. The judges were desperate to find something to convict him of, because they were afraid that if they didn't, they'd have everybody and his brother running around being werewolves. There was the matter of the church robbery, too, but what concerned them even more was the magical stuff. Ultimately they found a guy who was willing to swear that he'd heard Theiss use a magical charm that went, "Sun and Moon go over the sea, fetch back the soul that the devil had taken to hell and give the cattle back life and health which was taken from them." And although that was not an evil charm, per se, it didn't mention God, so it wasn't a prayer, and therefore was heretical. So for that and the robbery, they ruled that Theiss should be flogged and then exiled from the town.
Which, considering what could have happened, was a pretty lenient sentence.
What's interesting about this case is not just that it's based on a belief we now consider silly superstition, but that you can see the judges edging, ever so slowly, toward, "But who is it hurting?" Ironically, Theiss's trial was the same year as the Salem Witch Trials, which had a far more tragic outcome; but already you can see signs that the dogmatism of that time period was gradually eroding. These kinds of attitudes are very resistant to change -- today's Christian evangelicals haven't moved all that far from their Puritan predecessors, honestly -- but that the judges in Jürgensberg even hesitated when they heard Theiss say "Sure, I'm a werewolf" is significant.
Social and cultural shifts don't happen overnight, and they always trigger a backlash -- which, sadly, is what we're living through right now. But progress is real. We can wish it to move a little faster while still acknowledging that things are better now than they were when I was a kid back in 1970, and far far better than when my grandparents were kids in 1910. Our understanding of the natural world has helped, and just the fact of approaching the world through the lens of science and evidence means that we no longer have to fear what we don't understand. There's no need for evil spirits and demons and werewolves anymore; we've outgrown them.
Onward and upward.
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