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Mythical creatures and diseases
contents
- Sex addicted goats
- Ill lust?
- Felbuck and Heartbreaker
- The horror of Pan
- Cyclops and sirens
- Werewolves in madness
- Suffering vampires
- Nosferatu verballhornt the Greek Nosophoros
Sex addicted goats
Wine in excess has dangerous consequences - and where life proliferates, death comes into the world. Dionysus was for the Greeks the god of intoxication and fertility. He also embodied the cultivated nature, the cultivation of wine, as well as the uncontrolled nature, the unleashed lust, which is also not a taboo killing.
The historical connection between mythical creatures and diseases. Image: Kristin Gründler - fotolia The satyrs drink and dance with the sex god. Goats ears, goat horns and a giant penis grow this hybrid being: the horny bucks after the nymphs and their faces exaggerate human features; monkeys may have been a role model. Anyone who takes part in their dance is going crazy. The satyr play complained about the society and formed thus today's satire.
Ill lust?
The grotesque phallus of the goat men was already transmitted by the ancient authors to exaggerated lust; "Satyriasis" referred to such sexual suffering, and the doctor Aretaeus sketched this torment: From the "Satyriasis" afflicted thus exuded a "stubborn smell" and bore the burden of a permanent erection. Aretaeus was aware of the mythological background, because he wrote: "The disease has the name of" Satyriasis "because of the similarity with the figure of God (Satyros say Dionysus)." This sexual over-pressure, according to Aretoais, in a week to death.
A Roman physician of late antiquity, Caelius Aurelianus, defined the plague similarly nebulously: "The satyriasis consists in a strong desire for sexual intercourse under strong erection as a result of a pathological state of the body." What disease was meant? We do not know it until today. Aurelianus knew the origin: "But it is called after the satyrs, who one has to imagine as drunken and always ready to sexual intercourse demons, or even after the effect of a plant, which one calls" Satyrion ", because those who have them to themselves take, are stimulated under erection of the genitals for sexual desire. "
But the Greeks also knew a less agitated satyriasis: Aristotle called such a rash behind the ears. The plagued ones resembled in his eyes the pictures of the goat men.
Felbuck and Heartbreaker
The Christians transformed the lecherous bucks into devils, even certain sex became a satanic plague and the corporeal appeared in the shape of a goat. The intercourse with this devil's goat gave the witches their magic power: So in the fantasy of the sabbath, the goats of antiquity jumped around. Conrad Gessner, an animal researcher of the 16th century, suspected in Satyren real living beings; he classified them among the great apes, called them "Geissenmännlein," and the zoologists of modernity assumed our closest relatives to be the model for the goat demons: the first Latin name for the orangutan was logically Simia Satyrus.
Medicine used the term "satyriasis" to this day, and modern psychiatry understood it to mean a morbidly disturbed sexual drive: Casanova and Don Juan with goat piss as perfume are a little charmless - Casanova syndrome and Don Juanism, however, are clinically the same as being stubborn.
19th-century romantics and hippies of our time rediscovered the satyrs, marched to the beaches of Greek myths, and soon naked savages lay around in Crete, passing through their zooms and natural deodorants as satyrs.
The horror of Pan
The divine messenger Hermes and a nymph brought another deity into the mountains of Arcadia. Small horns grew on the forehead of the Pan, hair covered his body, like the satyr he put the nymph behind, but also coveted boys and goats. When the Pan grabbed a slumbering shepherd, she shook the panolepsy and paralyzed his senses. But the goat god also terrified whole masses of humans and animals so that they ran away in all directions. The shepherds knew the stampede, they saw animal herds that got out of hand, overran everything, and even toppled over hilltops. They explained this fear supernaturally: Pan terrified the animals and humans - so in panic. The Greeks called this state panikós, the French spoke of panic in the Middle Ages, and around 1500 panic also turned into German. The panic syndrome and the panic attacks recognized the modern psychiatry as mental disorders.
Cyclops and sirens
One-eyed giants made Zeus lightning thunder like thunder, and those round eyes, Greek Cyclopes, her only eye lay in the forehead. Did malformations be the model? This was suspected in 1836 by the French naturalist Geoffrey Saint-Hillaire. The medicine knows such human inlays and called them already in the early modern times Cyclops: A deformed skull merges both eye-sockets into a single eye and the eyeballs to an eye over the nose-root. Saint-Hillaire called this form "Cyclocéphallie". However, birth defects do not explain the gigantic growth of the ancient round eyes and not the eye of the doctor, but that of the paleontologist expands the view: The Cyclops of the Odyssey live in caves on an island, and Odysseus strays through the Mediterranean Sea - on Sicily and Cyprus once lived dwarf elephants; their proboscis attaches to the skull where the Cyclops's eye lies and these skulls lay in caves where the ancient Greeks probably found them. The skulls of pygmy elephants are still huge compared to humans. However, fantasy figures do not have to have a natural core.
The enlighteners of modernity saw in the monsters of the Middle Ages false interpretations of real observations; Positivism accepted only facts and proved to be a scientific Cyclops: without opening the second eye to the unconscious processes of the soul, he succumbed to his own sirens. Sirens, terrible human-shaped human birds lived in ancient myth by the sea; they stun the sailors of Ulysses with their magic voices, then they murder the infatuated. The siren howls of the fire department today honor the feathered Femme Fatales.
But how come the corpulent manatees, herbivorous aquatic mammals, to their Latin name "Sirenidae"; and what do newborns whose legs grow into a single "fishtail" have to do with male-eating birdwomen? Why does medicine call such malformations sirens? The purely factual medicine overlooked the quiet post of the historical tradition, because the scholars of the Middle Ages translated the old myths wrong: Konrad von Megenburg equated the sirens with mermaids and gave them scales instead of feathers. Ambroise de Paré formed in 1575 a one-footed monster fish girl without arms, but with wings. Finally, Geoffrey Saint-Hillaire described the malformed abdomen of infants, whose grown-up legs are indeed reminiscent of Andersen's mermaid, as siren-affection.
Werewolves in madness
People turn into wolves - people believed this from antiquity to modern times. Did illness and emotional state of emergency play into the werewolf myth? For example, one should become a wolf who rubbed his skin with an ointment of wolf fat, poppy, Christmas rose or datura.
The physician Rudolf Leubuscher suspected a "(...) perverse sensation of the peripheral skin nerves (...)" and concluded this from reports of many "werewolves" who claimed that their fur had grown inside. This "coat" could be related to consumption of the plant Eisenhut. Sergius Golovin, the myth narrator, wrote: "Even if one associates tiny amounts of akonite with our skin, a certain diminution of the feeling arises on it. If the person sleeps, he feels his skin somehow furry. "
Vlkodlak also called the Slovaks a drinker. Extreme behavior also led one to call someone a werewolf: frenzy and mental illness. From a historical distance, it is difficult to say whether people believed that the person in question became emotionally or physically transformed into an animal. Often they simply wrote to him to behave like this animal: if we "let the pig out" or "hungry like a wolf," no coat will grow. In some cases, Werewolf simply meant "grim wolf." Hallucinations of addicts take the form of animals. Alcoholics in Delirium Tremens see, according to Elias Canetti, "spiders, beetles, bugs, snakes, rats, dogs and undefined predators". The different senses are combined: "Mice and insects are not only seen, but also probed." Canetti has a suspicion that makes one speculate on the idea of being a wolf: The alcoholic in Delirium Tremens is separated from other people and thrown back on his body. In that, however, a "war" rages between bacteria that attack the cells. Does this seem to be a "dark feeling for these primitive conditions in the body?" Can also be found in the pictures of the delinver: "In the menageries, animals that do not exist appear in fantastic combinations (like) the creatures , with which Hieronymus Bosch populated his pictures. "Are wolf humans also a body perception in the drug intoxication?
Are wolf humans also a body perception in the drug intoxication? Image: Fernando Cortés - fotolia Our imaginary world reflects our experiences. Baring-Gould writes: "It is not surprising that the lycanthropist believed that he had transformed himself into an animal. The cases I have described are always shepherds, whose job inevitably entails clashing with wolves, and it is not surprising that they turn into wild animals and do deeds themselves in a state of temporary madness accuse those who were committed by the animals. "
As werewolves suspects were often starving. On the one hand, the established ones subordinated to these marginalized people anyway any wrongdoing. Today we still say "I'm hungry like a wolf" or "the wind howls". The ancient Teutons believed that a wolf really howled in the sky and hungry people develop fantasies about food. Those who fantasize in their hunger to devour sheep and at the same time believe that humans turn into animals also believe that he has become a wolf.
The obsession to be a wolf is pathological lycanthropy. Torture in the witch trial and mental terror also cause irritation as well as mental disorders. Were so-called werewolves so behavior-sensitive people? Dinzelbacher discusses an alleged werewolf, who presumably suffered from a mental disorder: "In 1603, the parliament of Bordeaux went against the fourteen-year-old shepherd Jean Grenier, who confessed to having used wolf skin and an ointment as he moved through forests and hamlets, animals and animals Killing children. "According to Dinzelbacher, digestion gives the boy's behavior:" Grenier's hands, his way of moving and eating are described as congruent with those of a wild animal, and the sight of wolves pleased him the most. " Girl named Marguerite reported: Jean claims to have sold his soul to the devil and to roam the area at night, but also during the day. Mostly he would eat dogs, but little girls tasted much better. A girl he would have eaten to the shoulders, he had been so hungry. This time, Marguerite said, Jean had not been herding sheep. But a wild beast had torn her clothes off with her teeth. She would have beaten the beast with her stick. The animal would have looked very similar to a wolf, but had been much larger, with a reddish coat and stubby tail. Provided the girl did not fantasize, it was probably a dog's attack.
Jean admitted everything. The Lord of the Woods sends him to feed children. His stepmother would have separated from his father because she had seen Jean steal a dog's paws and a child's fingers. However, his father explained that all the world knows the son as an idiot who claims to have been in bed with every girl in the village. The court president considered the defendant mentally retarded and his transformations the delusion of a moron. But it was proven that he had killed children. Joseph Görres (1776-1848) wrote: "Grenier really did work, as shown by the black claw-like nails, the polished teeth and the appetite for human flesh." Multiple murder, whether on four paws or two legs, usually meant death at that time. The court seems not to have been quite convinced, because the defendant did not land at the stake, but for life imprisonment in a monastery. He devoured raw meat and his fingernails splintered as he walked on his hands, his gaze gazing into the void, his mind unable to move mentally. He said that he continues to demand child meat and died in 1610. Baring-Gould suspects a disability in the "werewolf" Jean Grenier: "So Jean Grenier said a lot of true things, but they mingled with the drivel, his insanity corresponded. "
Blumenthal, who examined so-called wild people, came to the following conclusion: "Wild people do not necessarily live with the wolves. They are outsiders because they are locked up in themselves. They are barely able to differentiate their own environment and their own inner world, at least in a way that would be accessible to us. "
Leubuscher pointed out that with fever, the body feels changed, so that the limbs seem larger or smaller. In typhus, the patients said that their person was physically divided into two people. In fever, it seems as if the limbs are expanding or contracting.
Multiple personalities split consciousness content as a result of traumatic experiences. Sophia, a victim, reports: "At seven, older classmates abused me. This is the linchpin of the split and the multiple personality. As a young child, I dreamed of Alaschtika, who told me, "I am your real mother, and one day I will pick you up. After the abuse, Alaktjika disappeared, and I felt like an alien now, like the only one of my kind. When I'm in my main personality, I realize that if Alexa takes control or the seven-year-old girl does not. I change and do not notice the change. My voice is different, my writing is different. I wake up and do not know what she did like a drunk. When I wake up, I feel haunted by evil spirits. "Who was that?" I ask. And I answer, "I was that." But the person I am when I wake up was not. "People who suffer from trauma, borderline syndrome, or manic depression feel disconnected from their bodies, feel that there is something in them that they have no control over. The "bad wolf" is their own unconscious and many of them identify with the werewolf.
Suffering vampires
Werewolves are living people with magical powers. Ghosts are disembodied spirits. The vampires of cultural history, however, are extremely physical: they beat, bite and choke. They appear as decaying corpses, zombies were closer than twillight - beauties. The vampire, the Turkish Upir, is not a dream figure. Torn clothes or bruises bear witness to his presence. In the early Middle Ages, people were afraid of passing dead: cut off heads prove that these monsters were thought of as living corpses.
The Southeast Europe scientist Peter Kreuter examined vampire ideas in the Balkans and his result amazed: The vampire in Serbia, Montenegro or Albania is not a bloodsucker, but a strangler. There's a reason for that too. Vampires cause disease in traditional beliefs. An infection by a bite is but a modern idea. It requires knowledge of viruses and bacteria. In the Middle Ages, the bad air around an undead was enough to spread disease.
Medical explanations for vampire beliefs range from porphyria, an extremely rare disease associated with facial paralysis and photosensitivity, to rabies. In rabies, red secretions flow from body orifices, the eyes glisten feverishly, the tongue comes out of the throat and the teeth emerge. Only: Vampires of popular culture are dead and buried before they become vampires. Doctors who suspect porphyria and rabies behind the vampire belief, have in mind Count Dracula in the movie and know nothing about the completely different ideas of popular culture.
Nosferatu verballhornt the Greek Nosophoros
(Plaguebringer). Vampires and followers of the Middle Ages transmit disease, but not by a bite, but by calling the names of the victims, ringing the bells, or simply wandering around spreading 'bad air'. "Nosferatu - A Symphony of Horror" by Friedrich Murnau was published in 1922. Count Orlok, the vampire, is a bald, stiff figure and very inhuman. This creature brings the plague, as the Hamelin pied piper follow him the rodents. Orlok is a character from a nightmare, lifelike illuminated, "Nosferatu" one of the defining works of horror film. As a naturalized nightmare he recalls H.P. Lovecraft. Nature and occultism, dream and reality, human and animal merge in the count. No other vampire movie corresponds so much to the epidemic-maker of popular beliefs as the "Symphony of horror".
Some of the 'living dead' were probably not dead at all. In the Middle Ages, scholarly medicine reached only a few wealthy, the simple people were dependent on hangmen, herbalists or bathers. The bloodletting was often more likely to kill the patient than cure him. Tankred Koch calculated that the doctors tapped up to 2.5 liters of blood: the patients could be happy if they were only apparent. A woodcut of 1604 shows ghosts of pest mortals resurrected. It is likely that unconscious patients were buried with the dead in times of disease and returned. (Dr. Utz Anhalt)
Literature:
Utz Anhalt: The werewolf. Selected aspects of a figure in the history of myths with special regard to rabies. MA thesis History. E-text in the historicum net under witchcraft.
Norbert Borrmann: Vampirism or the yearning for immortality. Kreuzlingen / Munich 1998
Claude Lecouteux: The History of Vampires. Metamorphosis of a myth. Dusseldorf 2001
Christa A. Tuczay: The heart eaters. Vienna 2007.
Axel Karenberg: Amor, Äskulap & Co. Classical mythology in the language of modern medicine. Stuttgart 2005.