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 14th 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 19th 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…
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