Hood, Bruce - Supersense

I think the answer lies with children’s developing essentialism, combined with a developing notion of spreading contamination. It is easy to see how such thinking can start to shape the way we respond to living things that we essentialize, most notably other humans. If essences are thought to be transferable, we will not consider ourselves isolated individuals but rather members of a tribe potentially joined to each other through beliefs in supernatural connectedness. We will see others in terms of the properties that make them essentially different from us. Such an idea suggests that some essential qualities are more likely to be transmitted than others. Youth, energy, beauty, temperament, strength, and even sexual preference are essential qualities that we attribute to others. Hence, we are more inclined to think that these qualities can be transmitted compared to, for example, hair colour, the ability to play chess, or political persuasion, which are more likely to be regarded as nonessential attributes of individuals that are more arbitrary and can change over time.

The more essential a quality is deemed to be, the greater the potential for contamination. Furthermore, as we have seen with the killer’s cardigan, this reasoning is always biased to assume a greater potential for negative compared to positive contamination, possibly because, as we saw with respect to disgust in the last chapter, evolution is more geared towards protecting us from harm by making us sensitive to threat. Nevertheless, there is plenty of evidence that the supernatural belief that we can absorb the good essences of others is common throughout our culture, practices and attitudes.

DRACULA WAS A GIRL

Let’s begin with a horror story. Horror stories often frighten us because they include abominations and violations of our intuitive essentialism. One of the most obvious examples in today’s popular culture is the vampire myth. Vampires have existed in folklore for thousands of years and are found throughout the world’s civilizations. Every culture has tales of the undead who seek vital essences from the living. Of all the various monsters created over the millennia, Bram Stoker’s story of Count Dracula, published in 1897, is the most famous.

It is often thought that Dracula was loosely based on the sixteenth-century Romanian prince Vlad Dracula, known more charmingly by his nickname ‘Vlad the Impaler’. Prince Vlad was particularly successful at defending Romania against the invading Turks and delighted at skewering his victims alive on sharpened wooden poles. However, it seems that Stoker took only the name for his character from the Romanian prince. The Irish author was no doubt more strongly influenced by events at Switzerland’s Lake Geneva in 1816, when a bunch of Gothic writers, including Mary Shelley, spent an evening in the house of Lord Byron and Dr John William Polidori dreaming up horror stories to frighten each other. Shelley came up with Frankenstein, another abomination tale of essentialist violation, whereas Byron told a tale of a vampire that was later published by Dr Polidori under Byron’s name. The creature described in Byron’s ‘The Vampyre’ was unmistakably Lord Byron himself, depicted as a fated nobleman with piercing eyes. However, the historian Raymond McNally thinks that Stoker’s Dracula was also strongly influenced by a woman, the sixteenth-century Transylvanian countess Erzsebet (Elisabeth) Báthory, who tortured and murdered 650 women and supposedly bathed in their blood to rejuvenate her beauty. 5This is why Count Dracula was an ancient Hungarian nobleman who had a passion for blood and never seemed to age.

The Countess Báthory was one of the most beautiful and intelligent women in Romania, but also the most depraved. According to the legend, one day she violently struck one of her servant girls across the ear, causing her to bleed onto Elisabeth’s hand. At first the countess was enraged, but she noted that as the blood dried her own skin seemed to take on the youthfulness of the younger woman. This was said to be the origin of her passion for bathing in the blood of young girls, who were trussed up, then had their throats slit and their bodies drained for the rejuvenating juice. At least the blood-lusting countess did have the courtesy to pay for the burials of her victims.

Eventually the body count mounted, and the local priest refused to bury any more of the girls from the castle who had died under suspicious circumstances. Undaunted, the countess and her servants gave up all pretense of secrecy and simply dumped the bodies in the neighbouring countryside. It was when four bodies were casually thrown over the castle walls in full sight of the locals that they eventually complained to the king.

When Romania’s King Matthias II, who also happened to owe Elisabeth money, was alerted to the sadistic activities of the countess, he saw a perfect opportunity to kill two birds with one stone, as it were. On 29 December 1610, he ordered a raid mounted on her castle, where further bodies of young girls were found. The arresting officer was Elisabeth’s own cousin, and in an effort to cover up the family scandal and save the countess, the four servants implicated in the murders were quickly tried and executed by being burned alive. One was mercifully spared the torments of the flame with a beheading. However, Countess Elisabeth Báthory never faced trial, and her cousin had her walled up in her castle, where she died three years later.

Countess Báthory was a sadistic killer, though it is doubtful that she actually took baths in her victims’ blood. When the records of eyewitness evidence given at the trials in 1611 surfaced two hundred years later, there was no mention of bathing in blood. Certainly, the countess had been drenched in it. She was more of a cannibal than a vampire, as she had been seen to bite chunks of flesh from the young girls, including their breasts. Maybe the legend of bathing in blood for vanity was more acceptable than the possibility that the beautiful, intelligent countess was really a depraved, psychotic murderer. 6

THE FOUNTAIN OF YOUTH

Bathing in blood to reduce the signs of ageing is just one of the folk myths that humans have generated in their search for eternal youth. Sometimes fact is stranger than fiction. As we grow old, we are increasingly concerned about how we are ageing, and most of us, given the opportunity, would prefer to look younger than older. One of the world’s most valuable industries is rejuvenating cosmetics. This business is estimated to be around £6.4 billion in the United Kingdom alone. The average British woman will spend £186,000 on cosmetics in her lifetime, and most of this will be on rejuvenating creams. 7

Almost all such cosmetic use is based on sympathetic magical beliefs. Various preparations are made from materials associated with vitality, such as the placenta or amniotic fluids. The infamous Tai Bao capsules of China are allegedly made from aborted human fetuses, though most capsules sold in traditional Chinese medicine are supposedly made with powdered human placenta. Whether human or animal, the claim of these rejuvenating products is that by applying ointments or swallowing capsules, you can halt, slow, or even reverse the signs of ageing. The fact of the matter is that few of these preparations have any active ingredients that can be absorbed through the skin. Moreover, our natural stomach acid easily destroys any such nutrients that we may swallow. Indeed, just like homeopathic medicines, many cosmetics have no active ingredients, thus avoiding the problem of satisfying the regulatory authorities. Still, the belief that the essence of youth can be imbibed is a very powerful one for most people.

In February 1998, the British viewing audience watched aghast when Channel 4 broadcast an episode of TV Dinners . In what is probably one of the most repugnant examples of exploitative TV, we saw the endearing celebrity chef Hugh Fearnley-Whittingstall devise a very special dinner for Rosie Clear to serve to her family and guests to celebrate the birth of her daughter, Indi-Mo Krebbs (no relation to the life-cycle guy). Fearnley-Whittingstall fried Mrs Clear’s placenta and made a pâté to be served on focaccia bread. While her husband Lee had seventeen helpings, the dinner guests were less enthusiastic. Meanwhile, the viewing public was running either to their toilets or to their telephones. Channel 4 received a deluge of complaints and was severely reprimanded by the British Broadcasting Standards Commission over what was regarded as an episode that ‘would have been disagreeable to many’. Why was the general public so upset? What was so wrong? Why were they morally dumbfounded? In an interview published some years later on his River Cottage website, Fearnley-Whittingstall identified the society’s supersense as the culprit: