Feature image: Witches At Their Incantations, 1646 by Salvator Rosa
Dead bodies have acquired a curious identity over the years, one that straddles a strange line between the grotesque and the magical. Their parts linger behind like relics: a pickled hand on a museum shelf, a lock of hair in a ring, a sheath of skin in a frame.
Perhaps we keep dead body parts around because they seduce us with their Otherness. Perhaps we have an obsession with things that mystify or terrify us. Or perhaps we need dead bodies because of their inherently magical properties. We’ve transformed them into items of clothing, used them as cures for our own disgusting ailments, and even consumed their flesh in the hopes of accessing some of their fabled magic.
Dead Men’s Hands and Shrinking Tumors
In the late 1700s, you could turn to dead bodies to cure a smattering of unsightly and uncomfortable ailments. For example, if you found yourself with a severe headache, you could take moss grown on a human skull, dry it, turn it into powder, and sniff it, and your headache would disappear. Other remedies, however, were a bit more intense. If you didn’t have access to a corpse, you had to be willing to steal a body or, at least, part of a body.
If you found yourself riddled with tumors or swollen glands, you might have been in the market for a dead man’s hand. All you had to do was rub the affected area nine times with the hand, and your tumors and swollen glands would vanish. This remedy worked even better if the hand belonged to someone who died a violent death, which made criminals popular candidates for supplying the right parts. Nurses frequently brought ailing children to the gallows of executed criminals for this exact reason.
Rotting Scrotums Filled with Gold
Dead body parts have also been worn as clothing, à la Buffalo Bill, because of the magical properties they were believed to bestow upon the wearer. Nábrók, which translates to ‘death underpants’ and better known as necropants, were part of Icelandic witchcraft in the 17th century. It was believed that by wearing pants made from the skin of a dead person, the wearer would cultivate an endless supply of money.
To create a pair of necropants, you needed to employ the help of a sorcerer. You also needed permission from a living man to use his body after his death, as a scrotum was integral to the magic of necropants.
Once the sorcerer had flayed the skin of the dead from the waist down, you had to make sure the pair of necropants fit you well. A good fit could be measured by how well the pants hugged your skin: they should have fit tightly, like a layer of latex.
Now here was the important part: you had to secure a coin from a poor widow and place this coin in the scrotum, along with a sketch of the magical symbol Nábrókarstafur (see below). Once these two items were in place, you left them there forever, ensuring you’d have balls filled with gold for eternity!
And if you tired of wearing the pants? Well, you’d have to say goodbye to your riches. In order to keep the magic flowing, someone would have needed to step into the pants as soon as you stepped out of them – or else the money-beckoning magic would be lost.
Dead Body Parts as Psychopomps
While consumption of dead human body parts sounds inherently ghoulish, sometimes it’s necessary to ensure a safe departure for the dead into the nether world. In the Amazon, the Wari’ people never buried their dead; ground burials were thought of as no less than horrifying. Cold and isolating, they could keep a soul trapped for eternity in the ground. To prevent this, the Wari’ ate their dead in the hopes that their souls would be released from the world of the living.
This ritual required a lot of time and coordination. The dead person’s next of kin would gather distant kin members from surrounding villages for the funeral, which could take several days, all the while the body continued to decompose. When everyone finally arrived, the body was roasted and shredded. Finally, the ritual could begin. As the dead’s family members sang funeral songs, distantly related family members and close friends would consume the slightly decayed, cooked meat. In cases of severe decomposition, only eating part of the body was sufficient to free the soul.
Today, however, the Wari’ no longer eat their dead and instead bury them as a result of pacification.
Our Lucky Rabbit’s – er, Human’s – Foot
For centuries, we’ve turned to the dead when the magic present in the living world wasn’t enough. Dead body parts were once promised to cure a terminal or disfiguring disease, were thought to bring good luck or fortune, and could even help the souls of the dead cross into the next world. Today, while we may no longer partake in these macabre rituals, we display their remnants in museums, or write about them in books, lest we forget that dead bodies have served us well, acting as our taboo, uncanny talismans.
Sources:
Featured image: Livre de la Vigne nostre Seigneur, France ca. 1450-1470. Bodleian Library, MS. Douce 134, fol. 47v. Via discardingimages.tumblr.com.
Gross, Francis. Superstitions: Omens, Charms, Cures 1787. Oxford: Bodleian Library, 2011. Print.
Grandhauser, Eric. “Necropants.” Atlas Obscura, 10 Oct. 2013. Web. 29 June 2016.
Robb, Alice. “Will Overpopulation and Resource Scarcity Drive Cannibalism?.” New Republic, 14 June 2014. Web. 29 June 2016.
“Wari’: Funerary Cannibalism.” Instituto Socioambiental. Web. 29 June 2016.
