Background: I had stopped in Firenze and entirely accidentally walked into the first exhibit of medieval torture devices organized for the present-day public. Weaving in the dim light between menacing inventions and horrified attendees, I found my own thoughts were immersed in the considerations below; what directed human aesthetics and engineering to this whole field of invention. In this article, written for the German sociological review Freibueter, my pursuit was the psychology of the designer, meant merely as an introduction to a theme some specialists could pursue. Instead of seeing any further serious follow-up, I found that the exhibit became a world-wide franchised tourist attraction, as postulated herein.
SECRET HISTORY
c 1983 Tristan Winter
In the years 1983 -1984 a consortium of fifteen European and American collectors of “implements of agricultural and antiquated craft” presented to the Italian public an exhibition of torture instruments. In the course of the exhibits tour a scandal gradually ensued, and the motives and effects of the show were called into question. The exhibit was denounced as serving little or no more cause than that of sadistic voyeurism. The press debated whether it indulged a morbid perversion of history or whether it served to enlighten the public as to the true scope of licensed barbarities, which, the presenters implied, could not be wholly relegated to the past.
The collection was chiefly centered around the means and methods of the Inquisition, the author of the catalogue having cited financial reasons for the ominous exclusion of modern torture devices. Over forty original and partially restored tools of the trade were displayed in such a manner that their functions and consequences could be deduced as clearly as possible without an actual demonstration. Contemporaneous graphics depicted other atrocities favored by history, and the accurate, if somewhat sociologically attenuated commentary of Roberto Held completed the picture of savage engineering.
What emerged from the presentation itself -allusively- was not so much a Humanistic critique of authorized barbarity but, rather, an unique and imposing sense of aesthetics; the aesthetics of pain, mutilation and physical violation. Faced with such a distinct branch of aesthetics, both the organizers and the press remained blind and dumb. What was still more resoundingly lacking in Held’s catalogue was the acknowledgment of an extensive psychological process necessary to the invention of such instruments.
History as a result became a series of personal afflictions. The safety valves of modern life enable us to imagine a world in which the individual can be easily compressed, elongated, inflated, deflated, corkscrewed, perforated, and steam-rolled at will, exactly like -and with equal impunity- a character in an animated cartoon. The physical anarchy of the cartoon universe does not, however, govern the ways of the human body, and the undeniable fact of our vulnerability proclaimed itself quite clearly to those who toured this Mostra di Strumenti di Tortura.
The consequences of mutilation have a tendency to present themselves in both an abstract and a direct form, often simultaneously. An amputated limb, for example, once detached from the living body is no longer relevant to the rule of life. It is regarded and disposed of as a superfluous piece of damaged machinery, or, more significantly, as an effluviant sacrifice, spoiled foodstuff, an inanimate object bereft of any sympathetic merit. Re-attachment and identification are both impossible.
Clinical disengagement -either practiced with immediacy as it was in times not so long ago, or with the anodyne of modern science- remains however a highly cerebral affair in the sphere of mutilation. Commencing with the speculations suggested us by the Italian exhibit, we find ourselves pursuing the reconstruction of a hidden history; the most coherent, the most suppressed biography of mankind is the history of mutilation.
We must firstly bear in mind the difference between inflicting death -that mirror of finality- upon another creature and the impulse for, or satisfaction gained by, violating another through the medium of life. Insofar as we are concerned with the notion of sanctified punishment in particular and the infliction of mutilation in general, the oft-termed ‘injustice’ of a death resulting from torture -by legal authority or individual whim- is a somehow strangely inadequate expression. Whereas one might wistfully term the murder of a man by authorized means ‘unjust,’ the moral tragedy arising from such torture is not the resultant death of the victim but rather the life, and what is imposed upon it. The sighs of ‘Ah, to be born only to die such a death!’ must be counterbalanced by the lament ‘Ah, to be born only to live such a life!‘
The object of basic torture is mutilation. The term encompasses therefore nearly every form of physical violation arising from institutionalized or individual action. But it also has an organic aspect; mutilation in its pure form refers to bodily misfortunes arising from accidental or natural catastrophes. It is accompanied by an immediacy of pain, is inextricably bound to the realm of animal fatalism, and embodies almost none of the psychological intricacy which distinguish its conscious forms.
Applied mutilation, on the other hand, is inherently elevated above the animal scheme, exclusively human in both its intellectual and physical aspects, a major fascination and motivational force in the human passage, dividing individuals and uniting the species with a form of neurological telepathy or anatomical clairvoyance. It arises from the sweet-sour gnashing of sexual monomania, or a masochistic vision of excruciating ecstasy. It is an exclusively human step beyond the limits of brute force. The primitive act of applying one’s fist or an adamantine intermediary to another man’s head (for example), and perhaps terminating their existence, is merely an instinctual manifestation of the wish to overcome -to be rid of- an obstacle in the way of one’s needs or desires.
What gives rise then to the educated construction of the means of applied mutilation? What satisfaction is there in the conscious violation of another creature? Is it, as Held maintains, “the innate cruelty of the species?” -Sheer bloodlust in the service of civilization?
In contradistinction to this acrimony from a shocked and irritated liberal, we are inclined to begin from the theory that there is an inherent block in the human being -a sort of psycho-physio symbiosis with his fellow man- against the physical violation of another; a collective awareness of the individual frailty, which, in reality restrains the majority of us from sticking knives in people’s bellies, or causes many to wince or vomit at the sight of those elements of the anatomy which are meant to remain concealed. The ideal state of this instinct would make mutilation perhaps even more than murder impossible. What psychological process then must lie behind the ability to overcome this natural revulsion? Held makes no effort to trace any evolution of other impulses over this taboo, possibly because the fascination of torture per se proved too blinding for him to see around.
Looking at the exhibit as a collection of gruesome utilities, as the organizers apparently did, we can limit ourselves to tracing a line of engineering developments -all the way up to the improved and electrified contributions of the 20th century. Looking at it as an indictment of human nature, or it’s embodiment in judicial institutions, as Held mincingly does, we may indeed content ourselves with voyeuristic indignation. Observing the instruments themselves however, from the fundamental one-celled contributions to the most elaborate and undeniably ornate apparati imaginable, we are confronted with what we earlier termed the aesthetics of torture.
Questions dash forth: What are the means employed in torture; how are these means executed; what are the inescapable results of their application; and, central to understanding the issue, with what intent is torture inflicted? The collection itself answered these questions with a somber self-evidence. -A few examples should suffice for the purpose of this limited essay.
One of the first instruments of bodily harm to be found in the exhibit is a German wheel -conforming exactly in appearance to a spoked cartwheel- dating from the year 1550. This simple object provided an inestimable source of public diversion throughout the Germanic countries until as late as the 18th century. Breaking by the wheel, as one might have heard mention of without ever quite realizing what it meant, consists of one strong man hurling the iron-rimmed wheel down upon the body of the stretched and bound victim again and again, until the body was pulped and shattered. As the main element of fun derived from the process was to subsequently lace the victim through the spokes of the wheel in as many configurations as possible and then hoist the creation atop a pole, the sole talent required of the executioner was enough marksmanship to keep his victim from actually expiring.[i] Efficacious though it may be, the imbecilic lack of cunning in the method of the Wheel only serves to enhance the startling ingenuity of most of the later devices. Barely brushing the perimeters of the aesthetic, the Wheel may be justly scorned as a relic of brute force.
On the other hand, the relatively high development of the scientific and proto-medical awareness in the medieval city of Nurenberg combined with traditional folk art to create the Eisen Jungfrau, vaguely known to English-speaking lands as the Iron Maiden. The mechanics of the Maiden, though apparently as simple as those of the Wheel (the instrument is recorded as being in use concurrently with the Wheel), bear testimony to an astounding degree of medical precision and sensual prescience. The device consists of a human-shaped sarcophagus lined on the interior with vicious metal spikes. The spikes, however, are arranged in such a way that the immured victim is pierced in every conceivable organ except those which are vital to their life. A 1515 document from the state archives in Nuremberg informs us that one fellow survived internment with full consciousness for two days, screaming until he actually perished. The exterior of the sarcophagus is thoughtfully decorated to represent the face and body of a maiden (Jungfrau in German, virgin in American) garbed in the traditional dress of her station, an unimpeachable virgin who deflowers her captives with excruciating precision. Even the most dull-witted pedant is awed by the sight of the Maiden, this Pygmalion principle in nightmare reverse.
With the example of the Iron Maiden thus before us, we find ourselves irrefutably beyond the limits of brute force, and inside a psychological labyrinth which leads us to the heart of the aesthetic origins, the question of design. Some human hand and mind actually sat down and created –designed– these tools of mutilation. Some human being (we confine ourselves to the individual for reasons of psychological concision) devoted their utmost imagination and erudition to the invention of these complex feats of engineering, these morbid conjunctions of art and science.
Who was responsible -whose responsibility was it- to invent such a thing as the Head Crusher, not simply a heavy object to plant on someone’s head, but a pre-industrial bolt and screw contraption fitted with an iron skull cap which, as the massive screw atop it is turned, shatters the teeth, crumples the facial bone structure and ultimately caves in the cranial shell? Which aspiring engineer put on to paper the blueprint for the Judas Cradle, a winch and pulley system that rocks, drops, or simply settles the victim upon the point of a wooden pyramid which pierces the crotch and nether regions? Who was it who took such aesthetic delight in their tubular pincers (used to rend genitalia) that they cast one in the exquisitely detailed form of a crocodile with such care?
It is nearly impossible to accept the image of a single person employed solely to sit before a drawing board day in and day out in some dank cellar, submitting drawings of violational architecture to his superiors for approval or experiment. Nonetheless, whether by collaboration or individual inspiration, the abundance of systematic means of inflicting physical damage, the complexity of mechanical and decorative innovation lavished upon these contraptions, all make clear the presence -at least psychologically- of a designer. Although this notion is central to, and perhaps the very point of departure in the history of applied mutilation, it has been inexplicably overlooked in writings on torture.
The first characteristic necessary to the invention of such methods is not, as some might hasten to believe, a mere sadistic nature -no more than it is the simple “collective desire,” or “thirst for blood” which Held mentions. It is, rather, a vivid and hypersensitive awareness of one’s own body, i.e., a masochistic vision, a brilliant elaboration of self-revelation. The vision -that almost sensate, perfectly detailed anticipation of pain- required to invent the means of mind-reeling agony must first come from the turning upon one’s self every detail. Masochism is the fundamental germ of sadism, and the macabre titillation of envisioning these agonies put into practice stems from the instinctive self-identification principle we mentioned above. The psycho-physio symbiosis intrinsic in the human nature, ideally adverse to violation, is the precise means by which man can create with such detailed inspiration the instruments of violation.
The shock of self-violation turns the visionary masochist into an imaginative sadist. Thus inspired, the electric anticipation of every result upon one’s own person, every twist of the screw, every passing of the razor through flesh, every gnashing of the crocodile’s teeth and every turn of the winch in the inventor’s creation is calculated by the fervid reaction of every fiber in his own mind and body. The semi-religious delirium of such fantasies inspire the designer to embellish his creations with more and more elaborate adjuncts, or demonic representations of ecstatic agony.
Although the psychological processes we have attributed to the role of a designer, or inventor, of methodological violation can be traced and reconstructed, the historical independence of such a role has never been established[ii], and the role of the applicator or executioner of these means must psychologically and practically overlap that of the inventive mind.
The psychology of the executioner’s role is fundamentally a direct development of the of the inventor’s. As we stated above, there is no concrete historical ground for singling out the role of the inventor; this is a matter of psychological phenomena, a preface, a predicate from which the aesthetics of torture might be tracked. The role of the applicator however by definition extends the psychological premise beyond the visionary to the participatory stage. Without losing sight of the possibility that the inventor and the applicator are embodied in the same man, a single instance of the application of one of these instruments of mutilation clearly separates the torturer from the tortured on the physical plane, thereby diminishing the symbiotic instinct in the first degree. The kernel of this alienation was already contained in the inventive stage, but it is only in practice that the impunity of the designer/now applicator is guaranteed -without eliminating the privilege of identifying with the victim, but simultaneously raising him above the solipsistic masochism of his vision.
Even at this late stage there remains an intermediary level between the purely visionary and the carnal relationship of the torturer to the victim, a cloudy terrain of half-equations and possibilities. The accepted Sadean cosmology of Heaven and Hell posits an eternal infliction of torture (to what creative extent we shall not investigate here). Sheer numbers -in blows, victims and permutations- become de Sade’s only recourse for maintaining gratification in the role of torturer, per force establishing an eternal relationship between the torturer and the tortured, perhaps unwittingly making them metaphysically equal and wholly interdependent. Although the torturer in our process remains a distinct entity, due to the vision of torture as a purely physical balance of power, the Sadean notion would create a psychological equality between the violator and victim.
The next concrete phase in the torturer/victim dichotomy is the institutionalization of mutilation as a sanctioned punitive measure. Having evolved from the imaginative abstraction of the inventive stage, through the physical delineation of the applicatory, torture now dons the intellectual cloak of judgment. So long as the means of mutilation are pursuant to the judicial method, the judicial role -those who pass judgment, those who legislate it- cannot be antiseptically separated from that of the inventive and applicatory stages. It is in fact the culmination of the previous steps, but it is only at this judicial stage that the torturer (read: judge) has attained a position in the equation wherein the remnants of the psycho-physio symbioses have been successfully deposed by intellectual abstraction.
The social organization of the physiological protection of the individual has always developed parallel to the social structuring of the physiological violation of the same, both being lauded as advancements of civilization in their eras. The degree of civilized advancement determines the degree of abstraction in not only the rationalizations but also the means of mutilation.
“One death is a tragedy, one million a statistic,” was the cheerful admonition of J. V. Stalin to a nation plagued by atrocities. Indeed, de Sade’s supremacy of quantity is finally made real only by the abstraction of individual agony. In the sewers of history this is reflected in the increasing abstraction of moral, social and physical authority. -One of the most pertinent characteristics of medieval justice was the direct correlation between the crime and the punishment; the offending part of the body was held directly accountable for its transgression. The sentence of being tied upside-down and sawn in half, vertically and beginning from the crotch, was a rebuke meted out to homosexuals[iii]. The Heretic’s Fork, a double-edged prong which was jammed in deep under the chin at one end and the sternum at the other, was designed for persuading heretics to mumble ‘I recant.’ The Pear, an ornately decorated pear-shaped apparatus which opened into three sections at the turn of a screw, was inserted into the mouths of heretical preachers, in the rectums of homosexuals and in the vaginas of women accused of sexual crimes (with the devil, or others)[iv]. Nearly each example from the Italian exhibition -and other sources- confirm this direct relationship of the castigation to the crime.
In the main, the policy of direct correlation of punishment to the part of the body that committed the crime -a policy which contradictorily abstracts the notion of the individual being but localizes the social one- stems from the immediacy of life in the Middle Ages. Instead of the (increasing) alienation of physical life since industrial times, the basic course of survival constantly confronted medieval man with a full awareness of his own body as reflected by others. Techniques of war, for example, involved direct participation in the lopping off of another’s head or limbs at a range which demanded visual assimilation of all the consequences. The primacy of sensuality was still in the balance of sexual repression.
While medieval punitive measures consisted of mutilating the offending part of the body, modern judicial methods are founded on the abstract mutilation of an offender’s time, which is clearly no less his life than his limbs are. The birth of modern penology coincided with the coming of the Industrial Age and its attendant steps in the process of alienation. Imprisonment, no less than the infliction of agony, is a form of mutilation, of violation. Prison warders need not subject their captives to physical horrors, Judges needn’t give a thought to their own pronouncements or their consequences, the public’s treasured impotence is limited to the spectatorship of legal sophistries, and the process remains that of the socially sanctioned mutilation of the individual[v].
In the field of mutilation, the accelerating historical rush towards alienation undermines both the orginal aesthetic and psychological dimensions of the pre-industrial heyday. Roaming gunmen in the night are but mercenaries of alienation; they have no thought of torturing anyone and would have to expand their imaginations to invent some prolonged or original means. There is nothing but the grim monkish silence of a poltergeist State to be found in an electric chair or a lethal injection, and the aesthetic value of a gas chamber can only be found in its emptiness. The seed of individual human psychology has been washed out of the means entirely. -Aesthetically, and as pronouncements, they might at best be equated with modern Installation Art.
The inverted political development of the Third World has established it as the last bastion of classical torture, but mankind’s fascination with disassembling the forbidden guarantees us bystanders that we have on offer the means to no end. Held’s exhibit might in fact have been assembled from the impetus of simple voyeurism, but it shows with clanging assurance that mankind’s secret history will march on even as it leaves us behind.
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Notes:
[i] Marksmanship was a major qualification in these primitive forms of punishment. There is in the exhibit a quaint Swiss watercolor (1552) depicting an irate crowd flinging stones at a headsman who’s been incompetently hacking away at his prisoner’s neck. Held attributes this to inebriation.
[ii] Joseph-Ignace Guillotine himself merely re-patented a machine of which there were already records of existence. Smaller versions of the guillotine were in use during the 14th century, and the Fallbrett, which has a wooden ‘blade’ and requires the repeated application of a sledge hammer to its top edge in order to severe the neck (quite sloppily), was certainly known in Germanic countries in the 15th century. Relevant to our consideration of prolonging pain through life, it should be noted that decapitation does not extinguish the consciousness of the mind or central nervous system upon severance. The visual plunge into the basket, the last view of the crowd as the head is held up for display, accompanied by an increasing roaring in the ears and a fading of sight into slow tones of sepia or scarlet is probably the fate of those who suffer this ‘painless death.’ The 1792 model was in vogue until 1981.
[iii] This was another means of prolonging excrutiation; the instrument was actually a rough-toothed timber saw. The victim did not lose consciousness until it reached his mid- or upper-torso.
[iv] The Pear is, along with the Iron Maiden, one of the most aesthetically advanced objects in the exhibit. It is cast in bronze with an attention to visual ornamentation surpassing description. It’s mechanism, when applied orally for example, crushed the dental structure laterally and could cave in the palate and even the nasal cavities, or destroy the tongue in its vertical course. A spike is cast into the end of each segment to ensure internal laceration. The consequences of the Pear in its rectal or vaginal application can be easily deduced.
[v] This is of course an ideal model of the punitive machinery. Incalculable physical torments await the victim of enlightened penology, and no judge guilty of sentencing others relishes the idea of atoning for his own sins in, say, the depths of the New Mexico prison system, where -aside from daily brutalities encouraged throughout the American reformatories- he might be subjected to execution by an electric drill, as was one case in the recent riots. -Indeed, it must be satisfying to abstractly sentence others to these rehabilitating institutions.