“Each year the Egyptians sacrificed a young maiden to the Nile. When compassion gripped their hearts and they decided to interrupt this usage, the river’s fertilizing floods ceased and Egypt faced famine.
“So long as human sacrifices comprise a spectacle they ought never to be forbidden in a warlike society. Rome was mistress of the world all the while she had these cruel spectacles; she sank into decline and from there into slavery as soon as Christian morals managed to persuade her that there was more wrong in watching men slaughtered than beasts. But it was not humane sentiment that stood behind the arguments of Christ’s followers, it was their great fear lest, were the star of idolatry to rise again over the Empire, they themselves might be sacrificed during their adversaries’ amusements. That is why the rascals preached charity, that is why they fabricated the ridiculous myth of brotherhood, which I know, Juliette, others must surely have exploded to your satisfaction. What I have just advanced accounts for everything in this fine ethic which even the enemies of this pernicious religion have been timid enough and mad enough to respect. We continue.
“Almost all the savages of America kill their elders when the latter are seen to be ailing; ’tis a kindly act on the part of the son; the father curses him if he does not dispatch him when he becomes aged and helpless.
“In the South Seas there exists an island where women are killed once they have passed the age for engendering, as creatures henceforth useless to the world; and as a matter of fact, what more are they good for then?
“The peoples of the Barbary States have no law against the murder of their wives or their slaves; they are fully and authentically masters thereof.
“In no Asian harem is killing of the women outlawed; whoever murders his own down to the last has simply to purchase some more.
“It is an article of faith, on the island of Borneo, that all those persons a man kills will be his slaves in the next world; and as a result, the better a man wishes to be served after his death, the more he kills during his life.
“When the Tartars of exotic Karaskan espy a foreigner who has wit, riches, and fair looks, they kill him in order to appropriate his qualities to themselves and later generations.
“The custom in the kingdom of Tangut is for a young man, dagger in hand, to venture forth on certain days of the year, and to kill whomever he encounters, indiscriminately and with impunity; they who die by his hand, it is maintained, are assured of greatest happiness in the life after this.
“In Kachao there are murderers for hire, upon whom one calls in time of need: when you have someone to have killed, you engage one of these mercenaries and pay him his fee when the work is done.
“This reminds me of the story of the Old Man of the Mountain. That prince, who held in his power the lives of all other sovereigns, had simply to send one of his subjects on a visit to this or that foreign potentate, and the emissary would strike his quarry down upon meeting him.
“Professional assassins are available in Italy too, you may be sure: a wise government will always tolerate them. And no just government will claim an exclusive right to dispose of human life.
“In Zeeland, in the old days they used to sacrifice ninety-nine men each year to the gods of the country.
“When the Carthaginians saw the enemy at their gates they immolated two hundred children picked from the ranks of the higher nobility; one of their laws stipulated that only children of that caste were to be offered to Saturn. A fine was levied upon the mothers who during this ceremony betrayed the least hint of sorrow; the immolations took place before their eyes. Well-advised people who brand sentimentality as a crime!
“A Northern king, whose name escapes me at the moment, immolated nine of his children with the sole arm, he said, of extending his life at the expense of those from whom he took life away. Do not frown at this whimsical notion, but rather smile. For prejudices are pardonable when they produce pleasures.
“Shu Um-chi, father of a late Chinese emperor, had thirty men stabbed to death upon his mistress’ grave, to appease her manes.
“On his last voyage to Tahiti Cook discovered human sacrifices which had gone unnoticed by those who had preceded him on that island.
“As Herod, King of the Jews, lay on his deathbed he had all the Judean nobility convoked in the hippodrome of Jericho, then ordered his sister Salome to cause them to perish one and all at the moment he sighed out his ghost, so that he might be mourned universally and the Jews, weeping for their friends and kinsmen, be forced to sprinkle tears upon his ashes too. How strong must be that passion whose effects extend beyond the grave! Herod’s order, however, was not carried out.
“With his own hand Mahomet II cut off the head of his mistress, to demonstrate to his soldiers that his was not a heart to be softened by love; even so, he had just spent the night with Irene and slaked his desires.31 The same personage, suspecting that it was one of his masculine playthings who filched a cucumber out of his garden, had everyone in his seraglio paraded and bellies slit open till at last the fruit was found in the guilty one’s entrails…. Finding some faults in a painting of the decollation of John the Baptist, he had a slave summoned and smote off his head, and showed Bellini, a Venetian and the author of the painting he was criticizing, that he had imperfectly grasped Nature. ‘See here,’ said Mahomet, ‘this is how a severed head ought to look.’ Once again, it was this great man who, philosophically convinced that subjects exist for nought but the service of sovereigns’ passions, had one hundred thousand naked slaves made up into fascines and cast into the moats outside the walls of Constantinople at the time he was laying siege to that capital.
“Abdalkar, general of the king of Visapur, had a harem containing twelve hundred wives; he receives orders to lead his troops into the field; he fears lest his absence become a pretext for his wives’ infidelity; he has all their throats cut before him on the eve of his departure.
“The proscriptions of Marius and Sulla are masterpieces of cruelty; Sulla, butcher of half of Rome, dies a tranquil death at home in the midst of his loved ones. Let it now be maintained, after such examples, that a God watches over us and must punish crimes!
“Nero had ten or twelve thousand souls put to death in the circus because somebody, no telling just who, jeered at one of his drivers. It was during his reign that the amphitheater at Praeneste collapsed, causing the death of another twenty thousand people; who doubts that he was the cause of the accident, and that he arranged it as a lewd prank?
“Commodus dealt severely with Romans who read the life of Caligula, he threw them to the wild beasts. During his nighttime revels he amused himself mutilating passers-by; or else would collect fifteen or twenty unlucky creatures picked up at random in the street, have them bound fast, and then, wielding a mace or club, exterminate them for fun.
“The eighty thousand Roman captives Mithridates slew in his states, the Sicilian Vespers, the St. Bartholomew slaughters, the Dragonnades, the eighteen thousand Flemings the Duke of Alba beheaded to establish in the Low Countries a religion which abhors bloodshed: so many models of murder which prove that passions should always be generous in the taking of human life.
“Constantine, that so very stern emperor, so beloved of the Christians, assassinated his brother-in-law, his nephews, his wife, and his son.
“The natives of Florida tear their prisoners limb from limb; but to this practice sometimes add another, the very refined one of introducing an arrow into the anus and driving it in shoulder-high.
“There is nothing to equal the cruelty of the Indians toward theirs; the entire tribe must share in the pleasure of beating them to death; and while this is going forward, they are obliged to sing. Another refinement of cruelty: to deny victims even the solace of tears.
“Savages behave in the same way with captives. Their fingernails are torn out, their breasts and fingers torn off; their flesh is stripped away in ribbons from their bodies; their genitals are pricked with awls, it is usually women who take charge of
these tortures. They flog their victims, flay them; do, in a word, everything ferocity can invent to render the deaths of these wretches more frightful, and rejoice when they expire.
“And the child itself, does it not offer us the example of this ferocity which astounds us in adults? The child’s behavior proves that ferocity is natural: see it cruelly strangle a pet bird and laugh at the poor thing’s convulsions….
“Maori aboriginals are by no means alone in eating their enemies; others feed them to their dogs. Some revenge themselves upon pregnant women, slit open their bellies, snatch out the child, and dash its brains out upon the mother’s skull.
“The Heruli, the Germans, sacrificed all captives taken in war; the Scythians were content to immolate one out of every ten of them. For how long have the French not been massacring theirs? After the battle of Agincourt, that dark day for France, Edward [sic] slew them all.
“When Ghenghis Khan seized China, he had two million children killed before his eyes.
“Glance a little at the lives of the twelve Caesars, in Suetonius’ biography you’ll discover a thousand atrocities of this kind.
“Such is the scorn for the Pulias who form a caste in Malabar that they may be killed on sight. When one wishes to practice his skill at archery, he shoots at the first Pulia he finds, male or female, young or old.
“Provided they leave a coin on the corpse, the Russian, Danish, and Polish nobility have the right to kill serfs; the right estimation of a man’s life, whoever that man be, must always be in money, because money can serve as a reparation while blood repairs nothing. If lex talionis is odious at all, then ’tis surely so in this case; for the murderer may sometimes have a motive for committing his assassination, but you, simpleton children of Themis, you have none for committing yours. Your position is clear, it is strong? Ah, then answer me this question:
“What is it, according to you, that constitutes the crime in murder? The depriving a fellow being of his life? I deprive him of his life—and that is enough for you, who are not in the least concerned to know what kind of man he was I deprived of life; but if that man had committed a great many crimes himself, in killing him I do nothing worse than the law would do, and if I do evil, then so does the law: in which is it preferable to believe, the innocence of him who kills a criminal, or the infamy of the law that kills the criminal?
“In how many lands and over how many centuries have they not been immolating slaves upon the tombs of masters? Do these people, in your opinion, believe there to be anything of the crime in murder?
“Who can guess at the number of Indians the Spaniards slew in their conquest of the New World? From nothing but transporting the invaders’ baggage, two hundred thousand perished in the space of a single year.
“Octavian had three hundred persons butchered in Perugia, merely to fete the anniversary of Caesar’s death.
“A Calicut pirate cruising down the coast runs upon a Portuguese brigantine; he boards her, finds the crew all asleep, and cuts the throats of them all, because they dared take a nap while he was on a foray.
“Phalaris used to shut his victims up in a bull of bronze, so constructed as horribly to amplify the screams of the wretches imprisoned within. Strange invention of cruelty! and how much imagination it supposes in the tyrant who devised it!
“The Franks had the right of life and death over their wives, and exercised it without respite.
“The King of Ava detects rebellion in that handful of his subjects who have refused to pay their taxes; he has four thousand of them arrested and burns them all in the same great bonfire. There are never any revolutions in the states of a prince as enlightened as he.
“Eulins of Romagna learns that the city of Padua has risen against him; he claps chains on eleven thousand of these thoughtless townsmen and in the public square puts them to death in the most various and crudest manners.
“One of the many wives of the king of Achem lets out a cry while dreaming, and it wakes all the others; hubbub in the harem; the monarch inquires into the cause for the disturbance; nobody is able to give him a satisfactory answer; whereat he puts all the three thousand women to torture, he has them subjected to unbelievable torments; nothing is found out; the two hands and two feet are then hacked off each one of them, and they are all cast into a lake.32 The motive for this cruelty is not far to seek; it is undoubtedly of that kind which strikes bright sparks of lubricity into the soul of him who practices it.33
“In a word, murder is a passion, like gaming, wine, boys and women; never is it got rid of, once it has anchored in habit. No activity irritates as does this one, none prepares so much delight; it is impossible to weary of it; obstacles sharpen its flavor, and the relish for it we have in our heart goes to the point of fanaticism. You, Juliette, have experienced how wonderfully it combines with debauches, and appreciated the tart flavor it gives them. It exerts a puissant influence at once upon the mind and the body; it inflames all the senses, it enchants, it dazzles. Its impact upon the nervous system, the commotion it produces there is greater by far than that of any other voluptuous agent; one is never fond of this one save inordinately, furiously, one never indulges in it save ecstatically. The plotting of it titillates, the execution electrifies, the remembrance inspires, the temptation to repeat it is enormous, the desire to do this and nothing else, constantly, is overwhelming. The nearer a creature comes to us, the more it wakes our interest, the more directly it touches us, the more intimately, the more sacred its ties with us, the greater our delectation in immolating the victim. Refinements enter into the thing, as happens with all pleasures; from the moment this personal stamp is added, all limits are abolished, atrocity is wound, to its topmost pitch, for the sentiment that produces it exhales it in keeping with the increase or worsening of the torture; all one’s achievements now lie short of one’s intentions. The agonies leading to death must now be slow and abominable if they are to quicken the soul at all, and one wishes that the same life could revive a thousand times over, in order to have the pleasure of murdering it that often, and that thoroughly.
“Each murder is a commentary and critique of the others, each demands improvement in the next; it is shortly discovered that killing is not enough, one must kill in hideous style; and though one may be unaware of the fact, lewdness almost always has the direction of these matters.
“A rapid glance now at these simultaneously voluptuous and barbarous inventions. A sketch of them will not be displeasing to you, I know: there is always something interesting and sublime about the violent aspects of Nature.
“The Irish used to crush their victims beneath weights. The Norwegians would stave in their skulls…. The Gauls broke their backs…. The Celts drove a saber through their breastbones…. The Cimbrians disemboweled them or else roasted them in furnaces.
“The Roman emperors used to enjoy watching young Christian virgins being whipped; having their bubs and buttocks tweaked with red-hot pincers; into their wounds boiling oil or pitch would be poured, and the same liquids squirted into all the orifices of their bodies. They themselves would sometimes play at torturer, and the martyrdoms then became a great deal crueler; rarely would Nero cede to someone else the pleasure of immolating these hapless creatures.
“The Syrians flung their victims off mountain-tops. The Marseillais clubbed his to death, and was particularly wont to fasten on the poor, exhibiting a preference Nature always inspires.
“The blacks of the Calabar River district deliver up small children to birds of prey, which devour their flesh. The sight thereof is prodigiously cherished by savages.
“Historians tell us that in Mexico, the patient’s four limbs would be held by four priests, the high priest would open him from throat to navel, tear out his still-throbbing heart, and smear the gore over the idol; at other times the patient would be drawn forward and back over a keen-edged stone till it sawed into his belly and his entrails spilled out.
“In all this vast crowd of peoples covering our globe, h
ardly a one is found that has ever attached the slightest importance to human life, because the fact is that nothing less important exists.
“Into the urethral canal the Americans insert a twig covered with little thorns, which they twirl in one direction, then in the other, spinning it between their palms and keeping at it for a considerable length of time, to the appalling distress of the victim.
“The Iroquois affix the ends of their victim’s nerves to sticks and, by rotating these, wind out the nerves like string; in the course of the operation, the body twitches, bends, and is dislocated in an odd manner, and must be very exciting to watch.”
“You may be certain that it is,” Juliette remarked at this point, and went on to describe to the Holy Father the circumstances under which she had been able to witness this torture being performed; “the sight is overpowering; and you, my friend, could have gone for a swim in the downpour of fuck it cost me.”
“In the Philippines,” the Pope pursued, “a guilty woman is tied naked to a stake and facing the sun; it kills her in time.
“In Juida the belly is cut open, the entrails removed, the cavity stuffed with salt, the body hung out on a pole in the market place.
“The Quoias hurl javelins at the back, the body is then cut into quarters, and the dead man’s wife is forced to eat it.
“When the Tonkinese go each year to pick the arecas they poison one of the nuts which is then fed to a child, a happy harvest being ensured, they consider, by the immolation of this victim. Here again we find murder an act of religion.
“The Hurons suspend a cadaver above the patient, in such wise that all the filth that spills from this dead body may splash upon his face, and to this vexation such others are added as cause him to expire in due time.
“The fierce Cossacks of Ousk and those parts tie the patient to the tail of a horse, which is then ridden at a gallop over rough terrain; Queen Brunhilde, you will recall, died from a similar trial.
Juliette Page 93
