Rabid Page 7
He went on to describe how he snookered the marks:
He would put a worm in his mouth, and let it be thought by those who had been touched by rabid dogs that he was a saludador and that he would heal them. And he would have a surgeon pierce the patient’s skin, allowing a little blood to spill, and then he would come, suck that blood, and afterwards add it to a bowl of water and, having stirred the two, would add the worm from his mouth, and as it was mixed with the blood that he had sucked, they thought and believed that he had taken it from the man’s body.
Chicanery like this, if indeed this confession was honest and not forced, was probably anomalous: folk healing never sustains itself entirely on the basis of bad faith, and no doubt the majority believed in their powers every bit as fervently as did their patients. By that time, medicine in Spain and Portugal had become licensed, normalized—from the physicians in official hospitals, which sprouted up over the sixteenth century, all the way down to the lowly “barber-surgeons,” who both shaved and operated on customers. But then as now, for reasons of cost and of idiosyncratic superstitious belief, many patients preferred unofficial practitioners such as saludadores. It did not hurt, of course, that in many cases the official medicine was no more effective. Certainly this was the case with rabies, which was no more curable (or even preventable) than it had been in the second century A.D.
Many Spaniards preferred their religion unofficial, too. We tend to think of the Inquisition as a totalitarian regime, at least on spiritual matters, but in fact it did little to temper the riot of local eccentricities across the lands it ruled. On two occasions during the 1570s, a Spanish royal office made a survey throughout the kingdom, asking two or more representatives from each town to answer a series of questions about its population and practices. Some of the questions involved religious belief: respondents were asked to detail the chapels in the town, the miracles that had taken place there, the holy and fast days observed there. The office wound up surveying 513 towns, representing a little more than 127,000 households; and the replies enumerated a remarkable diversity of religious practice. On the question of holy days, locally observed as part of a vow to some saint, there were more than fourteen hundred different vows spelled out, made to dozens of sactified figures. Residents of Cabezarados, which sits roughly halfway between Madrid and Córdoba in the outskirts of Ciudad Real, reported that they had recently lapsed in their vow to Saint Quiteria, causing a rabid wolf to kill a young man and bite a number of cows. “Since these events,” the royal chroniclers later wrote, “the townspeople have observed and do observe the old vow with much devotion and hold a solemn procession and feed all the poor in the town; and everyone from the town eats in the house of the mayordomo that day, each paying his share.”
In practice, the Inquisition in Spain took a stance toward the saludadores that one might call benign neglect. One intriguing reason for this, as the Spanish historian María Tausiet has documented, is that saludadores also had a reputation as crackerjack witch-hunters. Documents from the era show that many of them, despite their so-called marks of the devil, worked closely with both the inquisitorial and the secular justice systems in identifying witches. It was not uncommon for investigators to bring a saludador along with them as they swept into town. Inquisition records note that a healer named Andrés Mascarón condemned thirteen women in the village of Bielsa as witches, saying that “on seeing a witch he felt his flesh burn, and the older the witch the more it burned.” Four of these women were summarily hanged, and the rest sent into exile; the town paid him generously for his efforts.
One can infer, through this strange dual role of the saludador, the demonic nature of rabies as it was perceived at the time. The healer was the exorcist of hydrophobia, the diviner of witchcraft; he was, that is, the enemy of all the malign animal spirits that seized unawares the innocent human soul. So many of the superstitions that ran roughshod through the fevered medieval imagination had what was, at base, an animal element. In the next chapter, we chart the zoonotic idea as it manifested itself in two enduring terrors of bestial infection: the werewolf and the vampire.
* * *
* This travesty did not go unnoticed in the church’s reconstruction. The gilt frame of one enameled display bears a chronogram, or a Latin message carrying a date inside it, reading: “ConCVLCaVerVntsanCtIfICatIoneM”—or, “They have spurned that which is holy,” with the numerals spelling out 1568.
* That is, the hound should possess a head like that of a snake, a neck like that of a duck, feet like those of a cat, a tail like that of a rat, and so on. This, it should humbly be noted, perfectly describes our own dog Mia, a whippet.
† More morbidly, we have the story, handed down regarding the death of Mary, Queen of Scots (1587), that one of her executioners, while removing the garters from her corpse, “espied her little dogg which was crept under her clothes,” a poor creature that eventually “came and lay betweene her head and her shoulders.”
* In our most recent outbreak of swine flu, the pigs were not so lucky, particularly in the Muslim world: see Chapter 6.
* Another gastronomic treatment is supplied by Le ménagier de Paris, a fourteenth-century guide to domestic life that prescribes, at the end of a long list of recipes, a novel treatment for rabid dog bite. “Take a crust of bread,” it advises, “and write what follows: Bestera bestie nay brigonay dictera sagragan es domina siat siat siat.”
The Werewolf by Lucas Cranach, c. 1510–15.
3
A VIRUS WITH TEETH?
In September 1998, the journal Neurology—which usually consumes its column inches with such thrilling topics as “detection of elevated levels of α-synuclein oligomers in CSF from patients with Parkinson disease”—gave voice instead to an eccentric theory on a historical conundrum. Over four densely cited pages, a Spanish physician named Juan Gómez-Alonso put forward the argument that rabies, a subject dear to neurologists for its uniquely devastating effects upon the brain, might also serve as an explanation for one of our oldest horrors: the vampire, whose roots stretch back to ancient Greece but whose alleged romps through eastern Europe during the eighteenth century launched a mass fascination that continues to this day.
Gómez-Alonso’s hypothesis made headlines around the world, from Los Angeles to London to Sydney. Even Playboy weighed in, noting the doctor’s linking of both rabies and vampirism to hypersexuality. “Bite me!” the writer enthused. It’s easy to understand why the public’s interest was so piqued. Our myth of bloodsucking ghouls has proven remarkably durable throughout the last two hundred years of churning popular culture, sinking its teeth into everything from Victorian novels and Hollywood confections to Anne Rice’s wildly popular novels and, of course, the multiplatform tween juggernaut that is Stephenie Meyer’s Twilight series. We feel we owe a hearing to any theory that might explain the origins of these surprisingly unkillable undead.
Gómez-Alonso’s paper does raise many intriguing parallels between the vampire and the sufferer of hydrophobia. First, and most obvious, both rabies and vampirism spread from organism to organism through bites: not a small coincidence in man, an animal that does not instinctively use its teeth in aggression. Also, the throes of a rabies infection usually involve facial spasms, which can render an appearance—as a 1950 French medical text described it—of “the teeth clenched and the lips retracted as those of an animal.” Vampires were believed to possess the ability to become dogs at will, and in this form they would often kill the other dogs nearby. Male rabies patients, as Playboy was so excited to learn, are sometimes given to undue sexual abandon; vampires, meanwhile, rose from their graves to engage in sexual conquest. And finally, the life span of a vampire was said to be forty days, similar to the average duration of human rabies infections from the time of bite until death.
The doctor points out in passing that rabies might also account for the werewolf, or lycanthrope, that mythical human who changes wholly or partially into a wolf and preys upon his neighbors. Góm
ez-Alonso does not provide specifics, but the broad strokes of the comparison are obvious: the biting, the clenching teeth, the animal transformation, are all even more pronounced in the myth of the wolf-man. The parallel to rabies is, if anything, even more direct with lycanthropy, which is nothing more nor less than a man seized with an animal nature.
How much credence should we give to the link between rabies and the undead? In his paper, Dr. Gómez-Alonso goes so far as to assert that the vampires and werewolves in historical accounts were literally rabid humans, their symptoms misunderstood as supernatural by an unscientific populace. In propounding this theory—in attempting to explain away folkloric evil through science—the doctor joined a noble tradition that extends back at least to Europe’s great vampire boom, in the early part of the eighteenth century, when supposedly true-life tales of vampires from the East chilled the drawing rooms of England, Germany, and particularly France, where, as Voltaire famously wrote, “nothing was spoken of but vampires, from 1730 to 1735.” This was the self-described age of reason, after all, and its eminent minds, such as Voltaire and Rousseau, brooded over how seemingly respectable people could display such credulity toward popular hysterias. Thus even during the vampire’s heyday, men of reason gamely tried to offer scientific explanations; some saw vampires as victims of food poisoning or as opium fiends.
When one digs into historical accounts, however, such literalistic explanations seem far-fetched, to say the least. Werewolves, during the sixteenth century, were apprehended and would seem entirely lucid (and fully human) during what by accounts were lengthy interrogations and trials—not something that a rabies sufferer could have accomplished. In the accounts of vampires from the eighteenth century, observers would disinter real corpses that appeared, in the light of day, to be entirely dead, not writhing in any sort of rabic agony. And there is the unavoidable fact that rabies, for all the violence of its manifestation in humans, rarely prompts them to bite and also does not shed abundantly in their saliva as it does with dogs. Simply put, humans do not spread rabies.
Yet Dr. Gómez-Alonso’s theory, if questionable in its literal meaning, taps into a deeper metaphorical truth. So many of our most enduring horrors, the vampire and the werewolf included, have common narrative elements that derive naturally (in both senses of that word) from rabies. Just browse the horror-movie section of your local video store and see what’s on offer. It’s villains pouncing from the darkness, biting, lunging, tearing with claws. It’s contagion: a malevolence that creeps from victim to victim, spreading through bites, kisses, licks. It’s a familiar creature—a trusted soul, often residing within one’s own inner circle or even within one’s home—that becomes surprisingly and unaccountably infected by a savage animal evil. Going as far back as the days of lyssa, and even before, these fiendish tropes have been forever intertwined with rabies, a constant presence across continents and across eras. Indeed, for most of human history, among those who knew little or nothing of medicine, rabies was merely another horror story in the same genre: a scream heard today in the next town over, quite possibly to resound in one’s own town tomorrow.
In our more enchanted, pre-cinematic past, these types of stories spread not from the capacious minds and marketing budgets of Hollywood but out of tales told from house to house, town to town. These horrors were often related with the visceral sense (believed by both parties) that the menace in question was real and imminent. Stories evolved, too, as they spread, and so we can consider what remained after centuries of such “audience testing” as having a perverse sort of evolutionary fitness. It was not just the vampires and werewolves as such but a more generalized obsession with vicious half-human creatures, with dogs and wolves amok: girls (and boys) gone wild, familiar canids gone wrong.
The question, then, is not who the werewolves of the sixteenth century were, or the vampires of the eighteenth; the former were obviously victims of mass hysteria, the latter clearly corpses. The more relevant question is why: Why should it have been widely believed, and widely feared, that men were stalking the land as wolves? What is so terrifying about the vampire, a creature that, despite its human form, bites at the flesh of its victims? Why do dark forces so often manifest themselves in the shape of a dog? To such questions, our answer is the same as that of the good doctor Gómez-Alonso. The animal infection—the zoonotic idea—is mankind’s original horror, and its etiology traces back inevitably to the rabies virus. Before our saga of the world’s most diabolical virus careens into the nineteenth century, it is worth stopping for a moment to catalog the manifestations of this horror, from demon dogs to wolfish men and everything in between.
The original lycanthrope, from whose name the term derives, was Lycaon, the mythical first king of Arcadia. As the legend went, Zeus himself had descended to lodge in Lycaon’s palace, and the king decided upon a wicked test of his guest’s divinity. The king killed a boy and served him to Zeus at the table. On beholding the unappetizing cut he had been served, the god, immortally offended, slew fifty of Lycaon’s sons with lightning bolts. Then, for good measure, he changed Lycaon into a wolf—a transformation that Ovid, in his Metamorphoses, describes in undeniably rabid terms:
Frightened, [Lycaon] runs off to the silent fields
and howls aloud, attempting speech in vain;
foam gathers at the corners of his mouth;
he turns his lust for slaughter on the flocks,
and mangles them, rejoicing still in blood.
His garments now become a shaggy pelt;
his arms turn into legs, and he, to wolf,
while still retaining traces of the man:
greyness the same, the same cruel visage,
the same cold eyes and bestial appearance.
Such an account conveys the Homeric lyssa, the infection with wolfish rage, except in this case the wolfishness is rendered quite literally. Likewise, many other ancient accounts of men becoming wolves, or of men possessed by animals, seem to stem from the inhuman ferocity with which some warriors were said to comport themselves in battle. Old Norse gives us the legend of the berserkers, ferocious fighters who wore the skins of bears or wolves atop their armor. Their rage was seen as a species of demonic possession, during which time they became immune to pain; one description of their prebattle mien has them foaming at the mouth, barking like wolves, chewing on the rims of their shields and sometimes gnawing them clean through. Similarly, centuries of Irish lore tell of the Laighne Faelaidh, a race of men who take the form of wolves whenever they please, killing cattle and devouring the flesh raw. A number of ancient Indo-European tribal names, such as the Luvians, the Lucanians, and the Hyrcanians, mean some variant of “wolf-men.”
Some of the ancient accounts of wolf-men, and dog-men, shade into simple xenophobia. When Herodotus writes of the Neurians—a tribe in what is now eastern Europe, each member of which “changes himself, once in the year, into the form of a wolf,” remaining thus for several days before changing back—it reads as the assertion less of a fearsome ferocity than of a subhuman curiosity. Another ancient chronicler, Ctesias of Cnidus, offers an account of a half-human tribe in India: “It is said that there live in these mountains dog-headed men; they wear clothes made from animal skins, and speak no language but bark like dogs and recognize one another by these sounds…. They couple with their women on all fours like dogs; to unite otherwise is a shameful thing for them.” Strabo, a geographer from the first century B.C., wrote of the Cynamolgi, an Ethiopian tribe numbering some 120,000 dog-headed men who spoke in barks. Similarly, the Ch’i-tan, a tenth-century people in what is now Manchuria, believed that one of the regions to their north was “the Kingdom of Dogs,” whose inhabitants “have the bodies of men and the heads of dogs. They have long hair, they have no clothes, they overcome wild beasts with their bare hands, their language is the barking of dogs.” With some regularity did medieval maps place cynocephali, or “dog-headed men,” in the edges of the known world, a practice carried out not just by Christ
ian cartographers but also by their Muslim opposite numbers.
The easy explanation for such beliefs, and for the werewolf legend as well, is that these folk traditions employed the dog (and the wolf, her fierce or rabid cousin) as an expression of the so-called Other: that is, as a means by which to attribute a subhumanity to foreigners, outlaws, adherents to strange and scary creeds, and so on. And that explanation no doubt carries some truth. But isn’t it telling that the animal chosen for “otherness” is, in fact, the opposite of strange? Indeed, what makes the demon dog such a powerful source of dread is precisely how familiar, in all senses of that word, the canine presence can be. When human beings keep dogs by choice, the dogs become our constant, often silent companions, living with us inside our strongholds. We become complacent about the animal nature that lurks in them still. But with the intrusion of rabies (or a passing squirrel, for that matter), such slavering essence can return with sinister immediacy.
Since dogs and humans possess an almost biological familiarity, having coevolved over millennia, even a strange and semi-wild dog today will take liberties with an unfamiliar human that other creatures will not. Barbara Allen Woods, a folklorist at the University of California in the late 1950s, built a taxonomy for the thousands of different European oral legends in which the devil appears in dog form. Regarding one such legend type, in which a demonic dog stalks a traveler, she observes:
If there is any merit in the suggestion that legends of the devil in dog form are inspired by actual encounters with real dogs, it is most easily seen in stories about a night traveler who met with a demonic dog on the road one night. There is nothing extraordinary or mythical about such an incident. On the contrary it is entirely natural that a dog should be out trotting the deserted streets and paths…. Nor is it remarkable that a dog should follow a certain route; instead, it is typical of the canine species to make certain rounds. And it is perhaps least of all noteworthy that a stray dog encountered by chance should accompany a person for a time before jogging off on its own affairs. Yet, any or all of these normal characteristics can seem positively uncanny, especially when observed under eerie circumstances or in an anxious state of mind.