The gods were silent

Dick Harrison´s “Digerdöden” is a book in Swedish about the Black Death, the worst plague epidemic in world history, which killed millions of people in Europe and the Middle East during the short period 1347-1352. The book is relatively short and should be seen as introductory, but it nevertheless manages to cover a lot of ground. It discusses what caused the epidemic and how it spread, the devastation in its wake, the vain attempts to stop it, and folklore associated with the disease.

The Black Death killed between one third and one half of Europe´s 14^th century population. In Scandinavia, Norway was particularly heavy hit, with many areas remaining almost depopulated for centuries. It´s not a pretty story, and it becomes even worse when we realize that literally nobody knew what caused the plague in the first place, and that no cure existed at the time anyway. The panic the Black Death must have caused would put any director of modern zombie flicks to shame. Strategies to deal with the pandemic and its aftermath included complete isolation, wild indulgence and reveling, prayer and financial contributions to the Church, and massive killing of Jews. Nothing helped. In Italy, the poor took advantage of the situation and hired themselves out as servants to rich people struck by the plague, demanding enormous sums in payment. Of course, this greed (or bizarre survival strategy) was short-lived, as the servants soon became infected as well. The only “positive” thing about the Black Death was that it killed both rich and poor at about equal rates!

Not even the clergy and the monks were safe from the mobs looking for scapegoats. At the Baltic island of Gotland, there were no Jews to blame for the epidemic, so instead a number of priests were burned at the stake accused of somehow collaborating with Jewish sorcerers. In Germany, mendicant Dominican friars were attacked as prime suspects. There was also a bizarre penitential movement known as the flagellants, consisting of men whipping themselves bloody during public processions in the hope that God would take pity on them. The flagellants often came into conflict with Church authorities, and some ended their lives at the stake. Harrison points out that the urban legends about child sacrifice being used to stop the plague could very well be true. There are several trustworthy reports from all over Europe about children, adults and animals being buried alive in this manner. The method had a certain grim logic: since the plague was personified in folk belief, attacking the personification (for instance, child-beggars from outside the community) was seen as a sure way of getting rid of the disease. According to another folk belief, a man could avoid death by helping the personified plague to cross a river, something the plague couldn´t do by itself. Harrison doesn´t say, but I wouldn´t be surprised if this belief led to killings too in the wake of a plague outburst.

The plague didn´t disappear in 1352, of course. It came back, over and over again, with the Great Plague of London in 1665 being a notorious outburst. In modern times, the plague became a Third World phenomenon, although it isn´t entirely clear why it so completely disappeared from Europe during the 19^th century. Stricter quarantine regulations, including at the Ottoman borders, and modern hygiene are two explanations. Harrison doesn´t believe biological explanations work. The black rat, the main vector of the bubonic plague, has been replaced in large parts of Europe by the brown rat, but when the plague disappeared from our continent, there were still many black rats around. Today, the plague has been almost eradicated among humans even in the Third World, and effective antibiotics exist. However, the plague isn´t gone – it lives on among rodent populations. In the United States, about ten persons get the disease each year, often from infected prairie dogs. However, unless Yersinia pestis (the plague bacterium) mutates in some diabolical fashion, we are probably relatively safe from *this* particular problem. Harrison ends on a cautionary note, pointing out that there are other infectious diseases out there. He probably had Ebola in mind when writing that sentence. (The book has 2019 as its publication date.)  

I have to say that this little book gave me the philosophical creeps, and made me even more positive towards Axial Age Gnosticism. Do we really want to live on this hellish planet? Or even atheism. The gods didn´t help anyone in 1347, did they? The shit will mutate. This will happen again. And the gods will remain silent…