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.

*

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.