The Martyrdom of Saint Cecilia by Stefano Maderno

By Ann Neumann

“Unto the woman he said, I will greatly multiply thy sorrow and thy conception; in sorrow thou shalt bring forth children; and thy desire shall be to thy husband, and he shall rule over thee.” Genesis 3:16, KJV

In 1999 Phyllis Schlafly, the tireless conservative icon who at long last died in September at the age of 92, gave a talk at University of California, Berkeley, at the behest of the Young America Foundation. After most of the audience had left, Schlafly missed a step when leaving the podium and fell, cracking her hip.

“While I normally never share that part of the story,” Jiesi Zhao, director of the Center for Entrepreneurship & Free Enterprise at Young America Foundation, wrote at The Washington Times six years later, “I felt it appropriate to mention on the occasion of the celebration of her 90th birthday because of what I learned from [Schlafly] that day.” Schlafly remained calm, even smiled and waved goodbye to her hosts, as she was carried out on a stretcher. Zhao, who marvels at the benefit of bringing Schlafly to Berkeley (“the belly of the beast”), explains why the elder woman’s behavior that day was so instructive for women:

In the midst of the chaos and considerable pain caused by the fall, Mrs. Schlafly displayed her mental toughness and grace that has inspired conservative women for generations…. Mrs. Schlafly’s poise in that moment was an unexpected and important lesson for me. That day, unbeknownst to most of those in attendance, showed us the true meaning of being a strong and competent woman.

Truer words have never been spoken of Schlafly, whose considerable labors for her cause—the prolonged subservience of women to the confines of a mythic, “traditional” domestic order—were never fully rewarded by her conservative male counterparts. Real women, unlike those whimpering feminists relentlessly proclaiming the cost of their labors, suffer and toil in silence.
After Schlafly’s death, Corey Robin wrote at Jacobin that Schafly, “was a woman who managed to navigate — and amass — power in a man’s world, all the while denying that that was what women wanted at all.” He points to Catharine MacKinnon’s famous and sympathetic take-down of Schlafly in a 1982 debate about the Equal Rights Amendment. In that exchange, MacKinnon listed Schlafly’s exceptional achievements and qualifications: she had a law degree, had written nine books and “was instrumental in stopping a major social initiative to amend the Constitution just short of victory dead in its tracks,” writes Robin. And all this while raising six kids and getting no purchase with the paternalistic Republicans. MacKinnon concluded, “I charge that the Reagan Administration has discriminated against Phyllis Schlafly on the basis of her sex.” MacKinnon was right; no one can deny that Schlafly was a badass and an example of a warped kind of feminism. Yet Schlafly would have wanted it no other way. Her pride and investment in female rectitude employed a paradigm of suffering that was inseparable from the politics of gender. Thus, it is Schlafly’s resounding message of silent strength in the face of suffering and pain—literal pain, a cracked hip!—that conservative men and women extoll as “the true meaning of being a strong and competent woman.”

To be female means to bear pain: The challenge for women has always been to rewrite the narrative, to upend this equation. Female pain has a rich and old taxonomy; narratives of what women are expected to endure serve a seemingly endless number of social, medical, legal and religious purposes. Identifying them and countering them, decoupling gender from pain (and all of its uses), means tracking those purposes and countering them with new narratives.*

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Of course the story of women’s pain is also the story of original sin. For tempting Eve, the snake gets a forever in the dirt: “upon thy belly shalt thou go,” says Genesis 3:14. Man, because he “harkened unto the voice of thy wife,” gets a forever of agriculture, working for his bread, pulling “thorns also and thistles” (Genesis 3:18). (Actually, one could quibble that women likely made the bread and pulled a share of the weeds.) Women, in the Bible, get an eternal triple whammy: “sorrow” and pain in childbirth; to be heard, perhaps, but never heeded (Christianized Cassandras?); and the narrow, defining role as “mother of all living” (Genesis 3:20). The pain of childbirth is the punishment for thinking and speaking. Mother of all living sounds grand enough, but if you’re not pregnant or preparing to be so, ladies, you’ve strayed from your course.

Times have changed, you can say, wagging a finger at a two thousand year-old text. And they have, as evidenced by the power of Schlafly’s voice in a male-dominated political movement. It’s worth noting, though, the consistent emphasis on women’s obligation to suffer. Schlafly supported all kinds of pain, the kinds that reinforced the position of her male counterparts: the pain of women who were pregnant and didn’t want to be, or couldn’t afford to be, or were at risk of death; the physical and emotional pain of rape and domestic violence; the oppressed pain of the LGBTQ community. Schlafly wielded pain as a moral cudgel, deployed to maintain the narrow roles of behavior she and her political counterparts interpreted as moral. You venture beyond the hearth, the marriage bed, the modesty of appropriate female clothes, the confines of strict gender-sexual alignment and you are punished. Or, as a woman in my family used to say, “You don’t listen, you feel.”

The Fall and Expulsion from Garden of Eden by Michelangelo

Domestic and maternal labor, however taxing or painful, are, in Schlafly’s formula, what women were made for. A good woman bears pain, like she bears her children, with a smile and a wave. Trying to escape those “traditional” narratives, trying to avoid pain and oppression, deserves painful punishment. A life of pain, then, is the fate of a woman, no matter how good or bad. If only these stories had died with Schlafly.

Acceptance of pain as the natural, the only acceptable, female state has led to a gross disregard for female pain, not only in general culture but in our medical system. Women who want relief from pain are weak, crazy, vain, demanding, un-credible, overly-emotional, not legitimate women, or at least not good ones. Women’s tales of pain often fail to register for doctors, nurses—and even for women themselves. Last fall, in a story called “How Doctors Take Women’s Pain Less Seriously,” The Atlantic shared Joe Fassler’s account of his wife’s undiagnosed ovarian torsion—and the horrifying dismissal she received from medical practitioners when she told them she was in pain. Months later, The Atlantic was still receiving letters from readers which the publication posted online under the title: “Stories of Misunderstanding Women’s Pain.” “Misunderstanding,” when you read the letters, seems all too kind.

Take, for example, Victoria Sawyer who wrote that she had suffered with endometriosis for years; despite seeing female doctors, she found little sympathy. She was often dismissed or made to think it was all in her head. Another writer, Ruth, suffered for 40 years with dysmenorrhea which caused regular cramps, nausea and vomiting until she finally found a doctor who didn’t think her symptoms were psychosomatic. Another unnamed woman wrote in November that she had gained weight and suffered urinary problems. One doctor insisted that she was pregnant, despite her denial. Finally she found a doctor who diagnosed her with stage 1C ovarian cancer. A pregnant woman was admitted to a hospital doubled in pain. Staff refused to give her medication for fear that it would harm the “baby,” and sent her home. Her brother drove her to another hospital where doctors found that her pregnancy was ectopic, a dangerous condition in which the mother’s life is threatened and the fetus’ unviable. To read any one of the letters is heartbreaking, from the gaslighting by doctors (psychosomatic? “all in your head”?), to the resignation of women who have no choice but accept such dismissals. To read these accounts all together, with their expressions of loneliness and excruciation, it’s hard to deny that they signal an epidemic of disregard for female pain.

In his story, Fassler quotes the essayist Leslie Jamison’s “Grand Unified Theory of Female Pain” from the Virginia Quarterly Review.” He quotes:

The pain of women turns them into kittens and rabbits and sunsets and sordid red satin goddesses, pales them and bloodies them and starves them, delivers them to death camps and sends locks of their hair to the stars. Men put them on trains and under them. Violence turns them celestial. Age turns them old. We can’t look away. We can’t stop imagining new ways for them to hurt.

Our fascination with women under duress—as examples of real women, strong women, moral women—serve multiple social purposes. Not only does it keep women in their places, but is often used as a trope for catalyzing male action: damsels in distress. Women suffer so men can be manly. Women aren’t allowed to be healthy, happy, independent, engaged in their own action. It’s as though we’re more relatable if we need something–like a good saving. As though only pain makes women…women. The natural state of female being is pain and suffering—and that suffering maintains a social order and hierarchy that privileges men. Or, as the prevalent tagline of male headship goes in conservative Christian circles goes: Behind every strong man is a good woman.” She’s behind, she’s quiet, she’s subservient, and she suffers without bothering him in his great endeavors.

Take a minute to Google “images of female cancer sufferer” and you’ll get Jamison’s point. Or think of Mary Valle’s 2013 piece for this publication “Death Porn Body Nonsense,” in which she contends that, “Women are never good enough as we are, no matter what we do. Dying bravely seems like the only perfect option for us.” Valle notes the examples of the saints, often young women who are extolled for their purity and stoic endurance in the face of pain.

Even those who don’t abide a subservient moral role for women employ narratives of natural female behavior for the same purposes. Consider Jessi Klein’s widely-shared essay for The New York Times in July, “Get the Epidural,” in which she argues: “It’s interesting that no one cares very much about women doing anything ‘naturally’ until it involves their being in excruciating pain.” Women are never allowed to be their natural selves—without make up, unshaven, uncoiffed—unless they’re giving birth. Then the shaming of selfish women who want medication begins. With such disregard for women’s well being, it can be no wonder that the US maternal mortality rate has doubled since 1990. The good, natural women who don’t risk their well being—and perhaps their lives—we brand as unnatural, bad mothers who risk their child’s life for their own comfort. To be a woman is to be a mother, second to the needs of others, or to be a monster, selfish and unsafe. There is little room in this equation for anything in between; women know this better than anyone, which is why they ignore their own suffering or risk, sacrifice their lives for their families, or go down in shames.

We have all deeply internalized these messages–often in ways that glorify pain, making it noble, instructive or salvational. As a hospice volunteer I regularly encounter elders and caregivers who tell me that pain has a lesson for us. Platitudes surround the ill or old, usually women, like watchful family members: “God doesn’t give us more than we can handle,” “I’m stronger after cancer than I was before,” “Pain is a part of life.” The moral narrative of pain—the price of living, the punishment for sin, a lesson in strength and faith—is pervasive and hard to miss.

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So what’s wrong with applying a moral narrative to pain? The short answer is: nothing, if it alleviates that pain. We narrate our troubles and triumphs in order to make sense of them, to fit them into our life story. If giving a meaning to your pain makes it easier to bear, why not?

But the long answer is much more complicated. There are all kinds of pain, first of all. And who but the one in pain is to say how much is too much? Also this: If our culture tells women that they must suffer in silence, that pain is their plight, that no one cares what they endure, that propriety and acceptance require that they suffer, even that they become strong and confident women when they suffer, how then can women counter the expectation, the anticipation, of their pain? By changing the narrative. Women have long written against the horrors of disregard, glorification, and moralization of their pain. Sharing and encouraging these narratives works to counter the pain-enforcing ones. It creates community, magnifies voices, and dispels the outsider status of women willing to say they hurt.

V0017250 The birth of Benjamin and the death of Rachel. Oil painting
Credit: Wellcome Library, London. Wellcome Images
images@wellcome.ac.uk
http://wellcomeimages.org
The birth of Benjamin and the death of Rachel. Oil painting by D. Chiesura after Giovanni Battista Bettini, called il Cignaroli.
By: Giovanni Battista Bettiniafter: Domenico ChiesuraPublished: –
Copyrighted work available under Creative Commons Attribution only licence CC BY 4.0 http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

In “Monstrous Births,” an essay for The Hairpin, Sarah Blackwood tries to change the pain narrative by pointing us to other narratives, old and new. Blackwood challenges the empowerment narrative (think: power comes from pain) of modern childbirth and reminds us of the tales of the “amoral nature of birth” that brave women have written throughout the centuries:

Mary Wollstonecraft writing to Godwin while in the labor (with Mary Shelley) that would kill her (“I have no doubt of seeing the animal today”), or Harriet Jacobs wishing the children she bore in slavery dead, or the climactic birth scene that Kate Chopin refuses to narrate in The Awakening.

Blackwood is reminding us of the women who have dared to see their labor as something other than redeeming or strengthening, who have pointed to the horror of the adage that “‘all that matters is a healthy baby’ (perhaps the most misogynistic phrase in all of postpartum language).” By not acknowledging the danger and horror that is required of childbirth—and we’re as guilty of it today (with our en vogue “all natural” events, midwives and cases of coconut water in tow) as we were before epidurals—we’re perpetuating the story of the importance of women’s pain. Blackwood writes:

I think contemporary women (especially those who are keyed in to feminist discussions of birth) have a hard time listening to these kinds of stories: when birth is dangerous or wretched we think of it as gone “wrong” and we turn to thinkers like [Guide to Childbirth author Ina May] Gaskin to help us remember to trust the wisdom of our bodies. Bodies do have a sort of wisdom but it’s easy to lose track of how that wisdom is not moral. It’s the stories we tell about bodies that overlay them with moral values.

These narratives of moral pain come in all shapes and sizes—and they are destructive. They are rife with intentions, politics and repercussions; they distract doctors tending to endangered women in our emergency rooms; they influence juries listening to rape testimonies in our courts; they sway legislators who are one signature away from damning countless women to unnecessary and unwanted motherhood for the rest of their lives. Blackwood rightly wants us to liberate women’s pain from these moral narratives because a much more subtle argument about pain is necessary.

Surely some pains are unavoidable: the pain of grief at the death of a grandparent, a broken heart. But what narrative are we morally obligated to apply to those pains that are unnecessary? Anyone, like Phyllis Schlafly, who commits so much labor to the perpetuation and enforcement of the pain of others gives us ample cause to hope there is indeed a judicious God.

When advocates for reproductive justice proclaim, “trust women,” they point us to part of the problem. The writings of women like Klein and Blackwood help by giving new narrative voice to female suffering. Pushing moral justifications for women’s pain, like Schlafly’s biblical endorsements, to the background help too. By divorcing pain from ideas of punishment or unfavorable behavior or even female expectations, we can decouple gender and suffering.

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* From the August, 2015 “The Patient Body,” “How Ethics Saved the Life of Medicine”: “‘A life story doesn’t just say what happened,’ wrote Julie Beck in a recent article about the power of storytelling, ‘it says why it was important, what it means for who the person is, for who they’ll become, and for what happens next.’ When that person is a patient, the narrative becomes the joint project of both her and her doctor. The accuracy of that narrative determines nothing less than how she lives or when she dies. The practice of discerning illness—of crafting the right narrative—and making accurate prognoses is an ethical act that must weigh the value of life. It must be grounded in a foundational understanding of what our responsibilities are to each other.”

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Past “The Patient Body” columns can be found here.

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Ann Neumann is a contributing editor at The Revealer and Guernica magazine and a visiting scholar at The Center for Religion and Media, NYU. Neumann is the author of The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America (Beacon Press, 2016).

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Narratives of Female Pain appeared first on The Revealer.

By Patrick Blanchfield
2001 Photographs by the Blanchfields
2016 Photographs by Evan Simko-Bednarski

In the 9/11 Museum Preview Site and Gift Shop on Vesey Street, artifacts sit alongside souvenirs. A fire hose, bits of rubble, a pair of commemorative motorcycles – these relics are not for sale. The tchotchkes, though, are. Those items are geared towards all consumer demographics: clothing and plateware for adults, toy police cars and plush Service Dogs for kids. Above, projected onto a wall, a video of rebuilding efforts and interviews with survivors from their hospital beds. Playing over everything, the strains of a Philip Glass concerto.

What is remembered, what is forgotten? Which memories do we cling to as anchors, which do we allow to sink, and which surge up from beneath the surface, unbidden and unwanted? And how do we string together those memories into something meaningful?

Contemporary psychological research puts the development of a capacity for stable, long-term memory in children at around the age of seven; events that occur prior to that point are subject to what is known as “childhood amnesia.” This means that anyone born from the mid-nineties onwards has no direct autobiographical memory of 9/11, for historically indifferent reasons of neurobiology.

In the literature section of the gift shop, a glossy book promises to make 9/11 comprehensible for toddlers. It tells the story of a city of moles, hailing from all walks of life: Bigmoles (politicians), Starmoles (celebrities), more. The protagonist is a blue-collar Mole who is on hand when the two tallest spires in Mole City are attacked by roving dragons. While moles in office attire run screaming from the collapsing towers, he throws on his hardhat, grabs a shovel, and searches for survivors. His hard work and piety – throughout, he prays to “Overmole” – transform him from a lunch-bucket Everymole into a “Bravemole” who is just as important as his more glamorous peers. Once storytime is over and the kids tucked in, parents can turn to the 9/11 Commission Report, also on sale, which will explain September 11^th to them as a convoluted tale of institutional breakdowns and intelligence failures.

Looking at Evan’s photos side-by-side with those of my parents, what strikes me most is how little has actually changed. The streets are still full of uniformed police and camouflaged soldiers, bulldozers and construction equipment. They are no longer here for First Response and to clear away rubble, though. Instead, they’ve been deployed for security and omnipresent construction. Apart from that: there are more surveillance cameras than ever before; pencil towers rise on the skyline where previously there were tenements; fashions in clothes and cars have changed. But otherwise, all looks the same, even if it feels so different. The city rushes onwards. How could it not?

I think of a story told to me by someone I trust, and who was privy to the proceedings. After 9/11, a tenant in one of the few residential buildings near Ground Zero expressed reluctance to return to his deluxe apartment. Debris and body parts had landed on the parapet beneath his windows, but all that had been cleaned. The problem, he told the building’s Board, was the ghosts. He was a stockbroker, a consultant, a hedge-fund guy, some kind of Master of The Universe – but also a Buddhist. According to him, hungry ghosts, pretas, howled outside his window, full of rage and despair, streaming upward from the shattered hulks of the towers. Their pain was agonizing, and he was considering breaking his lease. But – if there was a way to lower his co-op fees, then, perhaps, he could be persuaded to stay…

One way or another, everyone, it seems, has a 9/11 story, real or imaginary. With the exception of the testimony of those directly touched by the event, and especially the experiences of those who grieve, I admit I have grown to find the sheer overwhelming number of such stories hard to bear. Part of this is a reaction against the political uses to which a national 9/11 narrative has been put; part of it is disgust at the insipid versions peddled by the culture industry – the Reign Over Mes, the Extremely Loud and Incredibly Closes. But more than anything else, I find myself chafing at the claim to self-evident value that we Americans seem to have attached to our confessional disclosure, our impulse to personalize the event, to make it about us. At its most benign, that “about us” is merely trivial: as though watching CNN on a September morning and thinking what everyone else was thinking and saying – “This changes everything” – was somehow unique or profound. But more insidious, I think, is the temptation to personalize in a way that makes everything all about us on our own terms. We want so badly to package 9/11 as what we want it to be – and accordingly to silo away the unpleasant details of what led to it, and what we claim it led us to do. The soft narcissism of spotlighting our individual participation in history, however peripheral, flows into selective remembering, and motivated forgetting.

In the 9/11 Museum, a quote from Virgil’s Aeneid looms large: NO DAY SHALL ERASE YOU FROM THE MEMORY OF TIME. The wall bearing the inscription separates visitors from the Repository that contains thousands of as-yet-unidentified human remains. It is a powerful statement – but also a disconcerting one, since the “you” in its original context refers not to civilians or innocent victims of wanton violence, but instead to a pair of mythical Trojan warriors who are slain in battle after themselves butchering scores of sleeping enemies.

When the memorial quotation was first made public, and some controversy ensued, the museum’s director appealed to the “museum’s overall commemorative context.” This context, it was argued, trumped the quote’s original one. But demarcating “context” is a slippery project. The boundaries of the museum’s walls, or of even Lower Manhattan, are not the only contexts. There are others. Fifteen years of global war, hundreds of thousands of civilians killed in Iraq alone, thousands of American and allied soldiers dead, more. As the company of the dead swells, and boots leave the ground in one theater only to touch back down a few years later, our capacity to differentiate individual campaigns threatens to break down. Possibly, in decades to come, remembering the distinctions between them will seem a merely academic matter – as relevant as the distinctions between the multiple wars of Rome and Carthage to which Virgil’s epic alludes.

NO DAY SHALL ERASE YOU FROM THE MEMORY OF TIME. We may stand in front of the museum’s inscription and try to forget, but this epitaph for the World Trade Center’s dead is inextricably yoked to unapologetic praise of killing in the service of imperial destiny. Perhaps this is the right quotation to use after all. 

In the past months, two major American airports have gone into lockdown in response to rumors of nonexistent mass shootings. Police have deployed and civilians have stampeded, some falling down staircases as they fled. In both instances – at LAX and JFK – the prompt for the panic turned out to be comparatively innocuous, everyday events: boisterous people watching televised sports, a man in an outlandish outfit. Yet travel ground to a halt nonetheless. The very real possibility of violence by either authorities or misguided Good Samaritans seems to have been averted largely out of luck.

These eruptions of collective hysteria suggest the sheer intensity of fear percolating just below our otherwise banal daily activities. We may spend $7 billion annually on the Transportation Security Administration, but beneath our orderly circulations of bodies and commerce, insecurity crackles like a live wire.

In his writings after the 9/11 attacks, Osama Bin Laden was frank about his agenda: to entangle the United States in foreign policy quagmires, to bleed its treasury dry, and, above all, to ignite the violence and venality he saw as existing beneath the surface of American society. What more efficient model of terrorism could there be, after all, than one that would lead your target to terrorize itself?

Fifteen years after 9/11, it seems incontrovertible that these goals have been realized, and that this state of affairs has been achieved. Perhaps we did not need Al Qaeda to get here; perhaps we would have gotten here on our own all along. Granted, Bin Laden’s other ambitions – like the withdrawal of American forces from Saudi Arabia, or the establishment of pan-Middle Eastern Salafist regimes – have not been realized. It would be incorrect, in this sense, to say that the terrorists have “won.” Airplanes still fly above Manhattan, and New Yorkers no longer reflexively duck. But we would be forgetting our own very recent past and ignoring our present if we did not concede how much, and how badly, we have lost.

An office in one of the World Trade Center properties on September 18, 2001

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Evan Simko-Bednarski is a journalist and documentary photographer living in Brooklyn, N.Y.  His work has appeared in The Nation, The Atlantic Wire, the Columbia Journalism Review, and elsewhere. He tweets as @simko_bednarski and his photography can be seen at http://www.simkobednarskiphoto.com/.

The post Brave Moles and Hungry Ghosts: 9/11 Memento Mori appeared first on The Revealer.

Earlier this summer, a cluster of headlines briefly flared up amid articles on Brexit, food riots in Venezuela, and the endless machinations behind the Republican Convention.

“Hundreds of Witches Hex Stanford Rapist Brock Turner.”

“Stanford Rapist Brock Turner Hexed by Angry Witches.”

“Will a Mass Witch Hex Really Make Brock Turner Impotent?”

Via Facebook

The articles were short, formulaic, and in agreement on a few basic points. The hex’s organizer, Melanie Elizabeth Hexen, was moved by the same rage at Turner’s scant six-month sentence as much of the feminist blogosphere. The hex itself was promoted over Facebook and drew in, by some estimates, as many as a thousand witches. As for the witches, no one much knew or cared who they were, but almost everyone had a different lurid detail of what they did. According to Vice, some anointed candles with their menstrual blood before tying them to a picture of Brock Turner and chanting maledictions. New York Magazine quoted one witch who casually admitted to “sourcing dog shit from the neighbor to throw the curse away with.” The New York Daily News was relatively restrained in its brief mention of pictures showing Turner’s mugshot engulfed in flames, but apparently thought better of it and added a stock photo of what seems to be a window display at Anthropologie for the Day of the Dead, featuring candles in a ring of skulls, a perfume bottle with a pink heart pasted on, and a demented canvas Pillsbury Dough Boy voodoo doll back from a rough night at an artisanal bondage club.

Most of the articles were written with the slightly-too-serious sincerity of a reporter who knows she doesn’t have to explain the joke to her audience. Only The Huffington Post even bothered to ask the question running beneath all of the articles: so are we supposed to take this seriously, or what? The answer it got back from Ben Radford, the deputy editor of Skeptical Inquirer was a reassuring “mostly not.” Curses, Radford explained, only work in cultures that actually believe in them. A hex or the evil eye might do something in Africa, Asia or Europe but in America a victim simply wouldn’t care. The sentiment behind the mass hex, he went on to add, was understandable and even admirable, but in twenty-first century America it amounted to another form of “slacktivism.”

That might have been the sum of the story — another marginal religious community discovered, gawked at, and dismissed — except for one strange detail. Like Radford, nearly all of the other articles pull back from dismissing witchcraft altogether when it touches on the experience of sexual assault. Most even end by respectfully quoting Hexen about her belief that many of the women participating would cast curses of special power because they themselves had been raped.

It might not seem like much to avoid mocking rape victims but it’s another tiny moment of respect amid a growing interest in witchcraft. The last year has seen articles on the rise of chaos magic and hipster witches in the trendier parts of Brooklyn, a new book on Salem by New Yorker writer Stacy Schiff, and a controversial memoir by Alex Mar about her time spent in American pagan communities. Witches aren’t respectable, exactly, but they’re not being dismissed out of hand either. This mainstream interest in witchcraft offers an opportunity to ask what it looks like when a culture first starts taking seriously a marginalized religious movement. What are the forms of analysis that are seen as respectful and what are the ones that are seen as dismissive or reductive?

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Stacy Schiff’s previously mentioned The Witches: Salem, 1692, is one of two recent volumes that offer some insight into this question. Schiff suggests that sympathetically understanding the role of witchcraft in our collective American imagination means grappling with how much we’ve gotten wrong. And we’ve gotten a lot wrong. Thanks to touchstones of education and culture such as Arthur Miller’s Crucible, we imagine the witch trials were the unremarkable outgrowth of a Puritan culture brined in bigotry and the Bible. But, the truth is, the Massachusetts Bay Colony was notoriously lenient when it came to accusations of witchcraft. Of the 103 trials that occurred in its history, only 25% ended in convictions and of that only six people were ever executed. We envision judges steeped in the lore of witchcraft, but at one point the governor of Massachusetts had to write to authorities in New York to ask if witches could assume the guise of an innocent person. Most of all, we confuse the sensationalistic for the interesting when we focus on accounts of women seducing men in their sleep, suffocating infants and flying to dance with the devil. Scapegoats always reflect the fears of their time, Schiff seems to think, and people will always betray those they love most in a terrorized society where silence means death.

If Schiff’s long, plodding book has a single thesis, it is that what we ought to find interesting about America’s iconic mass execution are the judges who sanctioned the trials and acted as the gatekeepers of terror. Her Salem is really a story about powerful men harnessing mob passions to further their own agendas — in this case, proving to skeptics back in England that the Massachusetts Bay Colony could govern itself after staging a coup against the royal governor three years before.

While her approach has merits, it ends by marginalizing the accused witches at the center of the story. When Schiff finally turns to the girls who started having visions, the explanation she offers for their behavior is at once remarkable and bizarre. She diagnoses them as hysterics. All of their hallucinations, contortions, and stammers, she argues, “conform precisely to what nineteenth-century neurologist Jean-Martin Charcot, with Freud following him, termed hysteria.” Charcot even had photographs of hysterics that matched the behavior of the Salem girls, she argues.

Hysteria, she confidently goes on to explain, still exists as a psychological diagnosis; we have just renamed it “conversion disorder” and redefined it as the body transforming feelings into physical symptoms. Everything the records tell us about the home life of the afflicted girls fits the classic conditions for that. Their home life was grim, filled with dark rumblings about the devil, monetary worries, and powerful intracommunity resentments. Even the weather was bad, Schiff tells us, cold, dark and bleak. The wonder is not that these adolescent girls in a patriarchal society translated their emotional suffocation into physical symptoms; the wonder is that so many powerful, educated men believed them.

This diagnosis, coming in 2015 from a respected biographer of underestimated women, is flabbergasting. To understand why, it’s worth stepping back to look at those images from Charcot.

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To be fair to Schiff, Charcot’s photographs of hysterics look like the sort of unworldly writhing you might picture happening in a darkened Salem meeting house. In one, a woman arcs her back, her mouth open in a rictus (a scream? a moan? silence?) half-buried by the pillows of her hospital bed. In another, a different woman clasps her hands in what looks like prayer, staring at a space above the photographer’s head with wondering, softly unfocused eyes. In a third, a woman’s back faces the camera, a thin cotton shirt lined with lace hooked around her elbows and pulled taut across her lower back to reveal the date traced in bold letters on her back by her doctor’s stylus; in a fourth, the date has been replaced by “SATAN.” Unfortunately for Schiff, the photographs she so confidently points to as evidence are as contested as any historical record we have.

Charcot hadn’t meant to build his career around hysteria. He was a pioneering neurologist born in 1825 in Paris, famous for discovering multiple sclerosis, ALS, and writing groundbreaking studies on Parkinson’s. His brilliance made it surprising when he swore to return to the mental hospital Salpêtrière at the end of his internship in 1852. At the time, Salpêtrière was a dumping ground for dispossessed women of all types, insane, crippled, pregnant, old, and violent alike. Charcot saw it as an opportunity to begin classifying an uncharted range of mental illnesses and, by bureaucratic accident, wound up in charge of hysterics.

Hysterics were notoriously baffling for their shifting array of symptoms, ranging from visions, seizures, localized paralysis, unstoppable laughing, temporary muteness, spots of insensibility on the skin, self-starvation and a tendency to deception, among others. For centuries, doctors had attributed this baffling array of symptoms to the uterus traveling inside the body and often recommended as a cure pregnancy to weight down the womb. The word itself memorializes this defunct theory; “hysteria” literally means “wandering womb.” By the time Charcot entered the scene, doctors had largely abandoned the old explanation of hysteria, but held fast to the intuition that hysteria had something to do with women and sexuality. While Charcot certainly wasn’t immune to those assumptions, he broke with conventional medical theories by insisting that hysteria was a neurological disease. If he could just isolate its stages, he might be able classify it as a biological disease like any other.

And this is where the problem with Schiff’s use of Charcot’s photographs begins. As part of his studies, Charcot gave public, wildly popular lectures on hysteria. To make his lectures work, he needed women who reliably exhibited the same sort of symptoms in the same, predictable order. So far as I am aware, there is no definitive evidence that Charcot colluded with his patients to deceive the public — not that he needed to. The incentives were all there for a patient to mold her symptoms to fit Charcot’s expectations, whether consciously or from the power of suggestion.

The best of his patients were stars on par with the most famous actresses of the day. To be sure, the work was often degrading and exploitative. Hysterics were hypnotized and made to play out the fantasies of the doctors in front of large crowds. There is a story of two doctors telling a woman under hypnosis that the right side of her body was married to the first doctor and the left side to the second. When the first doctor caressed the right side of her body, the patient would respond enthusiastically to her ‘husband.’ Yet as soon as his hand began creeping over to the left side of her body she would slap away his fingers. At other times, in a treatment calling back to old theories of hysteria as a problem of wandering wombs, hysterics were subjected to an “ovarian compressor” to calm their attacks, a vise of sorts with two screws that pushed down on the ovaries. (The ovarian compressor was seen as progress. Previously, doctors had climbed on top of women and punched them in the ovaries until their attacks subsided, but apparently that felt too much like assault for their consciences.)

For unruly patients, doctors always had the threat of sending them away from the comparatively humane ward for hysterics to the much grimmer hospital wing where the insane were kept. If that threat didn’t work, doctors could always leverage the power of a drug addiction. Women who were not on drugs when they entered were regularly dosed with ether until they often became physically dependent on it.

Even if a patient did not decide to cooperate, she still had the chance to attract the approving attention of doctors if hysterical attacks had a religious dimension. In Medical Muses, Asti Hustvedt tells the story of one of Charcot’s prize patients, Geneviève Basile Legrand, who became famous for exactly that reason. Poor, illegitimate, and raped at least twice, Geneviève was first committed to Salpêtrière in 1864 at twenty-one. When she arrived, her doctors were delighted to discover her symptoms were coupled with devout piety. She had visions of Jesus and attacks by demons? That just made her a modern-day Teresa of Ávila. She suffered from anorexia nervosa? So did Catherine of Siena. In a fit of self-mutilation she had snipped off her left nipple with a pair of scissors? It was the fanatical Russian sect, the Skoptzy, all over again. Of course, her propensity to scale the hospital walls and run away was unfortunate, especially since she would one day make that escape permanent, but in the meantime they had their very own religious fanatic to use in their battle against the authority of the Catholic Church. Geneviève proved that mystics and witches were just hysterics by a different name.

These are the circumstances under which Charcot’s photographs were taken; these are the women Schiff takes to be illustrating the symptoms of the young girls from Massachusetts. 324 years after Salem, Schiff uses eroticized photographs of coerced and captive women on a different continent to reach the same diagnostic conclusion as a nineteenth-century psychologist at war with the Catholic Church.

Old diagnoses are not necessarily bad diagnoses, except in this case. As soon as Charcot died, his theory of hysteria fell apart. Skeptics began questioning the orderly stages of hysterical attacks he had pieced together from his thrashing, wailing patients. His most famous student, a young Viennese doctor named Sigmund Freud, abandoned Charcot’s quest to find a neurological cause for hysteria altogether. Instead, he argued in his 1896 piece, “The Aetiology of Hysteria,” that every case of hysteria could be traced back to “premature sexual experiences” — that is, molestation. Hysteria was the psyche’s effort to protect itself from trauma, creating an outlet for pent-up, unacknowledged stress through physical symptoms. Freud eventually repudiated his early explanation, convinced that there was no way to separate repressed memories of assault from imagined ones, and unwilling to believe that sexual assault could exist on the scale his theory suggested.

In the years since, hysteria has largely fallen out of favor as a diagnosis, with one or two strange exceptions. Some of its most characteristic symptoms have now been recategorized as separate illnesses, like epilepsy, post-traumatic stress disorder, and schizophrenia. Other axiomatic beliefs, notably that hysteria was a feminine disorder, collapsed after millions of young men came home from World War I trembling and stuttering from shell shock. Schiff is right that something similar to hysteria persists under the name “conversion disorder,” but it is not at all clear how much Charcot would recognize of hysteria in this stripped-down disease or, for that matter, what Schiff gets out of making such an old and fraught diagnosis.

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It is strange to turn to a defunct category like hysteria to diagnose long-dead girls. It is absurd to imagine hysteria looked the same in 1692 Salem as in nineteenth-century France. It is naive to think photographs might offer unmediated proof of the past and something worse than that to think Charcot’s photographs might show us what hysteria “really looked like.” Schiff’s appeal to hysteria is all of these things and more, but it is also interesting.

From Charcot, to Freud, to the present, diagnosing women with hysteria has been overwhelmingly a way to delegitimize their religious experiences. A vision of Jesus no longer proves divine favor; it indicates a neurological disorder in Charcot’s case or some repressed sexual trauma, as in early Freud. Geneviève’s doctors, like the nineteenth-century German philosopher Ludwig Feuerbach who understood religion as imaginary compensation for real psychological lacks and Marx who called religion the opiate of the masses, were not sociopaths. They recognized that people turned to religion in response to real suffering and, in their own ways, respected that. But they also saw that recognition as the first step in stripping away religion’s power by addressing the socio-economic, psychological and medical causes that gave rise to belief. So it marks a genuine shift that Schiff invokes hysteria and popular presses reference the sexual assault of the witches who hexed Turner as sympathetic gestures that legitimized their religious experiences. Why she does it is a different question.

Is the answer that we now see assault survivors’ trauma as possessing some deeper truth we’re not comfortable dismissing? Is it that there’s an affinity between the language of mystical experiences we inherited from our Christian culture and the way we describe assault as an experience that breaks and molds the self? Is it a case of crass self-interest on the part of journalists who know they can mock witches but not assault survivors?

Whatever the case, it seems to suggest that the old Feuerbachian-Marxist line that religion offers imaginary compensation for real psychological needs is no longer taken as a criticism. I would be inclined to leave the puzzle as a commentary on the sorts of suffering that preoccupy us, if it weren’t for the peculiar case of Alex Mar, who blundered into the problem of poverty and inadvertently demonstrated that not every form of suffering wants recognition.

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If Schiff’s analysis and the reactions to Brock Turner’s hexers signal the expansion of sympathetic explanations for religious commitments to include trauma, Alex Mar’s book is a case study for understanding what sorts of analysis are received as dismissive and reductive, at least among the growing community of witches in America in 2016. To be fair, Mar meant to write that sympathetic account of witchcraft in America. The opening pages of Witches of America, her memoir about seeking spiritual belonging among various North American pagan practitioners, plead with the reader to take her subjects seriously. She doles out facts about her past carefully chosen to appeal to the initiated and the uninitiated alike. To the lay reader she offers a rueful smattering of shared cultural references as the sum total of her mental associations with witchcraft going into the project. (Halloween, Salem, The Wizard of Oz, blonde witches good, brunette witches bad.) To the witches in her audience, she shares a few stories about her parent’s backgrounds in Greece and Cuba respectively, including one about a no-nonsense aunt ringing up Mar’s mother to tell her that the ghost of their dead mother was roaming the apartment trying to warn her about a problem. The problem turned out to be breast cancer for Mar’s mother, caught and cured just in time. Throughout all of these tidbits, Mar seeds appealingly earnest confessions of her own longing for and lack of belief. “This hidden dimension of myself,” she writes, “this curiosity about the outer edges of belief, is not something I can recover from […] When I put my work aside, I have to admit that I am searching — hopefully, and with great reservation — for proof of something larger, whatever its name.”

However generous Mar intended to be, witches hated her book, flooding amazon.com with negative reviews and posting long diatribes calling her a spiritual tourist on sites like Patheos. Their complaints form a relatively coherent narrative: Mar is a privileged rich woman who gained the trust of witches under false pretenses, betrayed their secrets, and shamed their bodies. The image of Mar that emerges from her critics is brutal, unsympathetic and at least somewhat understandable.

The book starts out by focusing on Morpheus Ravenna, a thirty-something priestess known as a “Big Name Pagan.” Mar first introduces us to Morpheus carrying a tray of pre-made enchiladas across the trailer she lives in with her husband Shannon. Their house is off-grid, located on a piece of property from Shannon’s family that the two have turned into the first Pagan ritual space in North America. In those first few pages, Mar coolly describes Morpheus as a “skinny redhead” in baggy jeans, her disappointment in her shabby life tangible. That feeling changes when Mar sees Morpheus acting as a priestess for the first time. Morpheus glows and, with only one significant exception, holds that aura for the rest of the book. She suddenly becomes taller, more commanding, more present, and the for the first time Mar sees her as a powerful spiritual figure at the center of a strange, exotic world. Mar is bewitched — if not by witchcraft, at least by Morpheus.

Soon Mar decides to pursue Feri training, seen as the most rigorous form of witchcraft. Feri traces back to a vision had in Oregon by Victor Anderson in 1926. At the age of nine Anderson, mostly blind, stumbled across an older woman in the forest who initiated him into magic and sex, transformed into a vision of God, rubbed him with butter oil and salt, then went on her way. Morpheus, trained in the Feri tradition, puts Mar in touch with Karina, a salty middle-aged teacher who conducts most of her initial training sessions online. Almost at once Mar goes wrong with Karina, asking if she’s willing to waive her fee since she’s just a poor artist. Karina shoots back an email crisply explaining that she is a single mother on welfare who takes students to survive. Mar apologizes, reflecting uneasily that she had never thought that a powerful teacher might be poor.

If that were the only collision between Mar’s privilege and her subject matter, the book might have been received differently. What really scrapes the bone as Mar twists the knife, though, is when that privilege collides with bodies. The most offending passage comes when describing a ritual dance Morpheus leads, meant to exorcise “Shame, Fear, Obsession, Rage, and Greed.” After lingering over Morpheus’s “flat, white belly” under her cropped leather corset, Mar turns her gaze to the dancers. With each word Morpheus shouts to the crowd, she stabs the air with a sword. Witches flood the dance floor, stomping, howling, sobbing, confessing. As Morpheus calls out “shame,” Mar observes, “One very obese woman has chosen to go topless: her breasts are so pendulous they hang nearly to her navel, flattened into thick slabs. It’s clear the words mean something to her. She’s dancingit off, waving her arms, her skin rippling, and her long, frizzed-out hair akimbo. A large-bodied misfit.”

Mar is the least sympathetic narrator imaginable for this scene: beautiful and, by comparison, wealthy. She knows it, too, but her efforts to reckon with her privilege come down to excruciating meditations about being the only brunette in a private school full of blondes and the shame of being New Money in old Manhattan. It might be that there’s no good way for an upper-class Harvard graduate to write about witches living in trailers, but I suspect the real problem is that Mar can never quite convince herself that being poor and fat are compatible with genuine spiritual power. Even her adoration of Morpheus slips, just long enough for her to wonder if Morpheus believes desperately in witchcraft because it is the only thing that allows her to transcend her reality as “someone with a low-paying job, someone with little or no influence” who drives a busted truck to the Dollar Store.

The book ends on an ambiguous note, as Mar emerges euphoric from a ritual initiation in a swamp. We are meant to think it remains an open question for her whether or not she can fully commit to paganism, but judging by their reception of the book the pagans might not give her the option.

For all of Mar’s moments of condescension, it’s still not exactly clear why. On the face of it, it’s not so obvious that acknowledging the poverty of witches is more degrading than recognizing their trauma. Poverty and rape are both forms of suffering that occupy increasingly large spaces in public conversation. Both are still stigmatized to varying degrees and subject to moralizing by spectators. Just look at the coverage of indigent Trump supporters or the comments strangers leave on the New York Times about how the woman Turner assaulted should have avoided situations where her “virtue might be questioned.” So why were Mar’s readers so offended by her efforts to be transparent about the moments when the assumptions she had from her own privileged background collided with the poverty of her subjects? Why is it worse to suggest someone believes in a religion because she’s poor than because she was raped?

It might be a problem with Mar, not poverty. Her tone, the inadequacy of her efforts to account for her privilege, even her choice to write a book about the superstars of the pagan world, rather than more ordinary practitioners, all might be enough to explain the hostility of her readers. It might be that the social stigma for poverty is greater (though that seems unverifiable).     I suspect, though, that the deeper problem is that witchcraft, with its emphasis on spells and rites, invites some of the same expectations as the prosperity gospel. Morpheus’s low-paying job and rundown truck aren’t just facts about her life, or adversities to overcome; they’re data points against the efficacy of witchcraft. After all, why would a powerful priestess who knows spells to make a man fall in love live in an unheated trailer? Shouldn’t honest-to-god magic at least get you indoor plumbing? The whole conversation about poverty reduces witchcraft to utilitarian measures, where its value lies in what material gains a practitioner gets out of it. And so witches, understandably, bristle.

Mar dances around the topic by nodding to the idea that spiritual and temporal power are not synonymous, but she never really resolves for herself whether or not witches are deluding themselves. By acknowledging the material conditions of belief but never deciding if they matter, she inadvertently creates a tragic theory of religion. Morpheus believes because she has to, the implication runs. Her source of faith is deeper than Mar’s but compromised because of its desperation. Only Mar, freed from any material want, can experience pure religious longing, but because she lacks Morpheus’s driving desperation she can never reach the solace of true belief. The longing that she experienced as envy and solidarity with believers turns out to be another class marker, leaving the faith of witches a shabby and diminished consolation prize.

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I don’t have any good answers for the question, “Why witches now?” If I had to guess what thread runs through Schiff and the critics of Mar it would be the rejection of guilt and shame. The very desultoriness of Schiff’s explanation for why the witchcraft accusations started in the first place is in some sense a refusal to accept that the possessed girls bear responsibility for the trial, when it took the support of powerful men to legitimate their accusations. So too with Morpheus and the hipster witches of Brooklyn, who repeatedly reject language of sin and shame in favor of a vocabulary of power.

If that is all that’s going on, though, the rise of witches ultimately isn’t that interesting. Witchcraft becomes a stalking horse for feminism, which it has been in popular imagination for decades anyway. This incarnation of witchcraft might have a few more prurient details than the network-sanctioned versions in pop culture, like “Bewitched” and “Charmed,” but ultimately becomes a story about women fabricating a history of subversive spiritual practices to suit their present needs — mostly at the expense of the history of African witchcraft in the Americas that they so blithely appropriates. Who knows, the need for a new, feminist-friendly form of spirituality might even be strong enough to sustain the genealogy of witchcraft these practitioners pieced together for themselves, making it respectable. But that form of explanation ultimately comes at the expense of taking seriously religious experience as its own motivation.

And that last question is why I find it so hard to draw any definitive conclusions about the flurry of publications around witches lately. The respectful nods to assault in the pieces about Brock Turner’s hexers and Schiff’s surprisingly sympathetic invocation of hysteria might signal a shift to a more open-minded, feminist treatment of the relationship between trauma and religious commitment. It could mark a genuine change in what sort of explanations we see as disenchanting and a willingness to think that religious experience doesn’t have to be heroically painful to be authentic. But it might also just mean that reporters and scholars of religion are so very far removed from the idea that people might actually practice a religion because they believe it’s true that any set of practices can be treated with respect if we think the “real” motivation is persuasive enough. If religion is always about social bonds or collective effervescence or compensation for psychological lacks or economic inequality, it doesn’t really matter what a particular religion teaches, because the content of the religion isn’t what it’s “really about.” If that’s the case, witches aren’t suddenly being taken seriously; they’re just more visible because nobody else is being taken seriously either.

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Liane F. Carlson is Stewart Postdoctoral Fellow and Lecturer in Religion at Princeton University. She received her PhD in philosophy of religion from Columbia University in 2015. Her research interests include continental philosophy, with emphasis on theories of religion, embodiment, evil, and the intersection of religion and literature. 

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post Witches Are In: Changing how we treat women’s suffering and power appeared first on The Revealer.

Memorial to the dead, Père-Lachaise cemetery, Paris, 20th arr., France.

By Ann Neumann

The history of the work of the dead is a history of how they dwell in us—individually and communally. It is a history of how we imagine them to be, how they give meaning to our lives, how they structure public spaces, politics, and time. It is a history of the imagination, a history of how we invest the dead…with meaning. It is really the greatest possible history of the imagination. – Thomas Laqueur, The Work of the Dead

Last fall, the body of The Washington Post’s legendary editor, Ben Bradlee, was reinterred in a new mausoleum that his wife, Sally Quinn, a longtime religion columnist for the paper, had purchased just inside the entrance to Washington, DC’s exclusive Oak Hill cemetery. But a legal dustup concerning the placement of the “neo-Classical style mausoleum, made of gray-white granite and wrought iron,” challenges the permanence of Bradlee’s final resting place. The 22-acre cemetery is practically full and strapped with costly upkeep—which is why, despite historical preservation status, Quinn was granted permission to purchase the plot, the first of several new special plots along the historical cemetery’s entrance. Their price has been reported as up to half a million dollars each.

But the Cultural Landscape Foundation, an advocacy group for historical preservation in DC, has challenged Oak Hill’s sale of new plots along the entranceway. At first, the city sided with petitioners; later it concluded that Bradlee’s mausoleum was a worthy exception. Then it all got ugly:

In one moment of bluster, at a hearing in late June, Matthew Green, a lawyer for the city, went as far as to suggest that Washington was dealing with “ghoulish moves by an officious intermeddler.” That led to accusations of ad hominem attacks and an assertion by a lawyer for the petitioners, which also include the D.C. Preservation League, that the city was misrepresenting their motives.

The case is expected to conclude this month, but observers note that it could continue into the fall, marking one year since Bradlee’s body was moved to the mausoleum.

In the context of Washington, DC, where the clash of privilege and preservation is frequent, the legal case is commonplace; but in the context of history, the placement of Bradlee’s body raises fascinating questions about the legal, medical, political religious and social importance of corpses. The dead are busy, as it turns out, in their service to the living.

In his new book, The Work of the Dead: A Cultural History of Mortal Remains, Thomas Laqueur, a history professor at UC Berkeley, excavates these questions surrounding history and customs of the dead. We know—and have always known—that a corpse is no longer the person we once knew. It is refuse, vacant, and no matter what we do, it will ultimately rot way. And yet, as early as 10,000 BC, humans cared for bodies in some way. The dead are “mere matter, on the one hand,” Laqueur writes, “and beings who have a social existence, on the other.”

Laqueur took up the subject of the dead after decades of trying to find a way into the material. In the book’s introduction, he recounts the deaths in his own family and the “magic” of both knowing that a body has no value and yet that it is extremely important. He includes photos of his early ancestors’ graves, which he came across in Europe, and recounts the significance of their placement, proximity to particular other graves, and even his emotions upon locating them. The Work of the Dead comes from this long-fostered interest in what we do for the dead.

Prague Jewish Cemetery

Diogenes (ca. 412-323 B.C.E.) gives the book its thread: the “Dog Philosopher” told his students that when he died he wanted his corpse to be tossed over the city wall to be eaten by dogs. The tension of The Work of the Dead is that we all understand that Diogenes was right—when a person is gone from their body, a corpse no longer matters—and yet, Laqueur writes, Diogenes was also “existentially wrong, wrong in a way that defies all cultural logic.” The book provides us with a special lens on culture-making, a new way to think about how the dead shape culture, how they animate our personal and social history, marking our world with sacral influence whether or not we believe in anything at all.

Refreshingly, Laqueur doesn’t try to tell us what human attitudes toward the dead have been—from what he calls “deep time” through to today—but he does fill The Work of the Dead with stories that show us how practices have changed; stories that show what purposes the dead serve in society. He reserves his primary focus for Western Europe in the 18th to 20th centuries.

Largely until Christendom, we buried our dead where we could, sometimes with markers (particularly the more wealthy) but more commonly without: on farms, hilltops, or amidst trees. But with the advent of the Catholic Church, proximity to holiness gathered the community of the dead into churchyards. Surrounding churches and consecrated by the parish priest, the churchyard was often without markers of any kind, the bodies of the dead placed coffin-less under dirt mounds. They faced east to catch the first glimpse of the morning sun but also the first glimpse of the Son of God when He would return to collect His followers at Resurrection.

Churchyards were lumpy with the decaying bodies of the dead, gravediggers often turning up bones when they dug, bodies in all states of decay giving way to new corpses over the centuries. But the churchyard was also a community; everyone in the parish had a family member there and knew a place was reserved for them inside its boundaries. If one was not buried in a churchyard—often the fate of suicides, for instance, who were relegated to burial at crossroads—one lost membership in the community, cast out, alone for eternity.

To walk by the churchyard on the way to service was to remember and acknowledge those who had died. The landed families were afforded family plots or markers. Important members were given burial places inside the church itself, the closer to the altar the closer to God. Or closer to the saints, who could intercede on behalf of the dead. All burials had a fee and these special placements cost more, but on the whole, the churchyard was a place where burial was egalitarian, a community of jumbled bones with its own values and characteristics, not the lone bodies of individuals. “The reality of the spirit world, including the ghostly dead, stood as a bulwark against atheism and materialism,” writes Laqueur.

The Reformation brought new attention to the “idolatry” of the dead, the needy saints and their holy promises, but practices remained largely unchanged throughout religious upheavals. Martin Luther and his followers challenged indulgences, payments to the church for lesser penance or time in hell, but also the worship of the special dead, the saints. Between the Reformation (which began in the early 1500s) and the 1880s, such idolatry and payments may have ceased, but burial, the closer to the church altar the better, was still coveted.

Slowly, however, as parish bishops challenged the burial of Nonconformists, as science pressured prior understanding of health and the natural world, and as the Enlightenment established leading thinkers who were less beholden to the church, the old regime of the churchyard began to change. The late 1700s signaled “the end of an old regime of the dead and birth of a new one in which history came to challenge, if not replace, metaphysics in creating ‘a living solidarity with what is gone,’” writes Laqueur, citing the French thinker (and Jesuit) Michel de Certeau (1925-1986).

Laqueur recounts the details of two Enlightenment figures whose deaths helped end the old churchyard regime and begin the one of the cemetery. The deaths and burials of Voltaire in 1778 and David Hume in 1776 formed a turning point in the history of the dead, disrupting the “long tradition of judging the meaning of life by its end,” by last words, expressions of pain, and the rites and place of burial. Complicated negotiations with churchmen surrounded the deaths of both men, each (or their family members; Voltaire’s nephew was an abbe) giving up just enough conciliation to allow their bodies to be buried with honor, in the churchyard. The church still determined who was worthy of memory and who was not.

Voltaire and Hume had seemingly good deaths, despite their renowned antagonism of the church, a fact that consternated the public. Opponents claimed they were wicked men and impervious to the holy; the general public took their good deaths as a sign that the churchyard was no longer bounded by the old order. To most, here was proof that the churchyard–and indeed, any kind of good death at all–was not reserved only for those with standing in their bishop’s eyes. Or any bishop’s eyes. One could challenge the church and still get into the dirt (and presumably whatever afterlife one imagine) with honor. The tyranny of the bishops over burial had come to an end.

Highgate Cemetery in London

The new order was also ushered in with the help of those who campaigned for more hygienic cities at the turn of the 19th century. The smell of decaying bodies, they claimed, was a health hazard: a cause of illness and disease. Ideas of modernity beckoned and removal of the unsightly and unseemly was limiting social advancement. Bones poking up through churchyard soil, rotting bodies tumbled under the stones of church ails became unacceptable for progress.

It’s a concern that is still with us today, the health hazards of dead bodies, despite the fact that science has again and again proven the safety of corpses. But the new regime, the cemetery, promised vast landscaped acres filled with fresh air, monuments, mausoleums and views. The wealthy began constructing gardens that incorporated nostalgic effects of classical landscapes: streams were dammed, mausoleums to great ancient philosophers were built. Now the dead could keep eternal company with the world’s great dead, not just their neighbors.

New cemeteries, established as businesses, claimed the attention of families who wanted to be buried together, and of a public in thrall with the ability to buy honor and, perhaps, a higher class status with permanent plots for beloved and celebrated individuals. New saints were found: a community of respectable dead whose wealth or status was proclaimed by location, towering obelisk, or granite mausoleum. Race, origin, and religious creed were irrelevant if the money for a plot and a marker could be handed over.

The poor were also welcomed into these new places of the dead, their stacking in single plots subsidizing the expansive plots of the more wealthy. The cemetery was outside of congested cities, peaceful as a park, a place for quiet repose and contemplation. Today a variety of burial methods are available, if indeed a person chooses burial at all—and not cremation or to have their body donated to science or shot into space.

The Work of the Dead also examines our contemporary use of memorials and naming of the dead as a means of keeping the dead close, of making and remaking meaning from historical tragedies, of creating heroes out of those who have died. The power that the dead have over us today is very different from the power of the old churchyard regime. And yet it still shapes our understanding of events and enchants the world with the magic of memory. Diogenes is still right, but after so many centuries, our dead remain sacred members of society long after their bones have gone to dust.

Laqueur writes, “…what is modern about the work of the dead in our era is this: a protean magic that we believe despite ourselves. I think that death is not and never has been a mystery; the mystery is our capacity as a species, as collectivities and as individuals, to make so very much of absence and specifically of the poor, naked, inert dead body.” Cemeteries with names like Forest Lawn in Los Angeles or Green-wood in Brooklyn are the sprawling, modern—yet sacred—burial places of today.

Or, like Oak Hill in Washington, DC, where the widow of a famous newspaper editor has bought, with a vast amount of money, her husband’s place in a sacred pantheon of Washington’s who’s who, a mausoleum fitting for his outsized personality, accomplishments and scandals, an eternity in the company of others who can afford half million dollar plots. Location, as with all real estate purchases, also matters for burial. As in the old days of crypts beneath the church altar, Ben Bradlee will be close to what is most holy in Washington, DC, the forever community of his dead, but venerated and still commanding, peers.

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Past “The Patient Body” columns can be found here.

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Ann Neumann is a contributing editor at The Revealer and Guernica magazine and a visiting scholar at The Center for Religion and Media, NYU. Neumann is the author of The Good Death: An Exploration of Dying in America (Beacon Press, 2016).

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Published with support from the Henry R. Luce Initiative on Religion in International Affairs.

The post The Cultural Claims of the Dead appeared first on The Revealer.