Category: History

On leeches and storms

For centuries, storms were one of the greatest nightmares for seafarers, leading to the invention of all kinds of devices and methods capable of predicting their appearance. But those methods were little less than mere superstitions, nothing practical, so a risky British doctor decided once and for all to create a “Tempest Prognosticator”.

The invention of George Merryweather, known as “Atmospheric Electromagnetic Telegraph, conducted by animal instinct”, was something like a barometer that, in order to offer its reading of the coming atmospheric weather, was based on nothing less than the “instinct” of leeches.

Good old George worked in North Yorkshire, near the coast, which led him to take a keen interest in the serious issue of storms, especially when many of his patients were seafarers. And what instruments did he use in his therapies? The usual in the mid-nineteenth century, namely, a whole arsenal of metal utensils and some very willful helpers, hungry, slippery and, for many, repulsive. They were leeches, very useful to “purify” the blood, thanks to their great sucking capacity. Although they have long since ceased to be used, the leeches have now become seen as an interesting source of chemicals for pharmacy applications.

In those days, no one was surprised to see doctors use leeches and other natural remedies. Merryweather was a very observant person, not only using leeches, but interested in her behavior. As time went by, after writing down impressions about his investigations with those little parasites, he thought he detected a pattern of curious behavior. It turned out that whenever a thunderstorm approached, the leeches were restless.

But this nineteenth-century doctor also liked machines. So, on second thought, he decided that such curious behavior could be exploited for practical purposes. In this way, he built his invention capable, in his words, of predicting storms, presenting it in 1851 to the Philosophical Society of Whitby.

The apparatus was rather strange. Basically it consisted of a set of bottles containing leeches and rainwater. When a storm approached, and according to the doctor’s affirmations, leeches felt the air charged with electricity and were shaken, climbing up the walls of the bottles to their mouths, capped by a metal mechanism that, when pressed by the leeches, transmitted the movement through a cord to a bell, thus warning of the arrival of a tempest.

During her experiments, Merryweather scored all the hits. Apparently, it didn’t seem to be working so badly, as he obtained official funding to improve the invention and managed to exhibit such a curious device at the Great Exhibition in London, at the legendary Crystal Palace, back in 1851. Regrettably for that restless inventor, the exhibition already featured more sophisticated and precise machines, the mercury barometers, with which he could not compete. However, his machine surprised by the strangeness of his conception.

More information: Dr. George Merryweather’s 1851 Tempest Prognosticator.

Évariste Galois: Death at dawn

Mathematics has been, and is, feared as well as admired by many people, only remembers the famous sentence of St. Augustine:

The good Christian should beware of mathematicians and all those who practice sacrilegious prediction, particularly when they proclaim the truth. Because there is a danger that these people, allied with the devil, can blind the souls of men and trap them in the nets of hell.

The lives of mathematicians have often been more exciting than the usual image of the world of numbers suggests. Many of the most great mathematicians were saddened by a sea of dilemmas and mental pathologies, probably due to the difficulties of their own search. A classic example of this is Georg Cantor, the mathematical genius who devised the arithmetic of transfinite numbers in the late 19th century. After many years of tireless mental activity, trying to tame the elusive concept of infinity, manic-depressive psychosis, what they now call bipolar disorder, put an end to their creative work.

Already in the 20th century, we must not forget Kurt Gödel, a great mathematician who revolutionized, and continues to revolutionize through his work, the concepts of logic. Gödel showed that mathematical methods accepted since the time of classical Greece were not suitable for discovering the truths concerning natural numbers. This discovery destroyed the foundations on which all mathematics had been built up until then. Thus, his work led to the rebirth of mathematics and the establishment of computation on solid foundations from which computers and all their applications have been developed. But his triumph over the world of logic was based on an interior life that was plunged into darkness. Throughout his entire existence he fought against an extreme hypochondria. It seems that, apart acute attacks, this evil did not hinder his creative work very much. However, it is curious that the father of the new logic was obsessed throughout his life with unreasonable matters, such as his diet, because he was afraid of suffering from poisoning, leading him to malnutrition because of his refusal to eat food, and to the ingestion of multiple pills for an imaginary heart disease.

Other times it is more earthly matters that finish with the work of the creative scientist. Something like this happened to Évariste Galois, a young mathematics genius, who died at the early age of 20, on May 30,1832. And it wasn’t because of illness or inevitable conflicts. The sad end of Galois came as a result of a duel.

At the age of seventeen, having studied mathematics for only two years, he had already published articles of great technical importance and had begun his research on the theory of equations that would eventually lead him to formulate a new great theory.

The night before the duel, the young mathematician wrote a passionate letter to his friend Auguste Chevalier, describing some of his new discoveries, asking him to disseminate the results in case they were of any use. The young man’s emotional state was pitiful. At dawn, Galois left his room at a pension in Paris, and confronted the political activist Pescheux d’Herbouville, near a pond, in a duel of honour. As a result of the tragic encounter, the young mathematician was shot in the abdomen, and left to his fate. After being found by a pedestrian, he died a day later at Cochin Hospital.

Fourteen years later, mathematician Joseph Liouville published the manuscripts Galois had left to Chevalier. This tragic event gave birth to one of the branches of mathematical sciences that has generated most results for the world of science, a field of research that is still being explored: group theory.

At the age of seventeen, Galois had failed for the second time the mathematics test to enter the École Polytechnique de Paris. For this reason he continued to study at the École Normale, from which he was expelled at the age of nineteen because of his political activities, which also led him to prison twice. Among all his passionate political games, he took time to revolutionize mathematics, but finally, an issue, possibly amorous, mixed with political conflicts, led to the death of the young Galois.

The Eleusinian Mysteries

In many parts of the Mediterranean basin there were annual religious festivals in which the consumption of some psychoactive substances was very important. None of these events were as impressive and lasting as the one held at Eleusis. For more than two thousand years, each September, an enigmatic festival was held near Athens. Greek mythology tells that in this place the goddess Demeter met her daughter Persephone, who had been kidnapped to the underworld by Pluto.

The festival, called the Eleusinian Mysteries, was also celebrated in a more limited way in spring, to greet the rebirth of nature. At harvest time, the great mysteries were celebrated. People from all over the old world attended this annual meeting with unwavering faith. What happened during the Eleusinian mysteries to captivate the people of two millennia? The classical texts do not clarify what happened during the ceremonies, since it was forbidden, under severe penalties, the diffusion of the rituals.

Given the ignorance of the psychoactive properties of many plants, historians have had serious difficulties in explaining the festivals of the eleusinian harvest. Inspirations or representations of a sexual or symbolic nature were considered, but it is clear that there was something else, something very powerful and captivating. Due to the lack of concrete information about the mysteries that have come to us, it is known that in Eleusis each participant ingested something “magical” that transformed his life forever, a potion that opened the doors of heaven to the Initiate. Gordon Wasson was one of the first to attack the problem from another front. During a conference in San Francisco in 1977, ethnobotanists said that psychoactive substances were eaten. This would be ergot from rye, a parasitic fungus that contains psychoactive LSD. The idea is not unattractive. In the Eleusinian Mysteries the cereal, a central element in the harvest feast, was present as the axis of the ceremony. The ergot grows in rye and other cereals, its consumption in concentrated form generates complex visions. With these indications Wasson came to a conclusion: ergot was the main ingredient in the beverage consumed in Eleusis.

But Wasson’s theory presents a problem. The ingestion of ergot, for example through infected wheat, is known to be unattractive. Ergot is toxic, for centuries there have been periodic epidemics in Europe during which thousands of people have died. The cause: bread made from flour obtained from cereals infected with ergot. Ergotism, the disease associated with these cases, generates symptoms such as vomiting, diarrhea, gangrene in extremities, convulsions and delusions. Some cases of historical diabolical possession can be explained, in light of pharmacology, based on the effects of toxic intake of ergot-contaminated flours, such as the burning of Salem witches.

Under the intuition of the English writer Robert Graves, psilocibic fungi could be the answer, not the ergot. The Eleusinian Mysteries would thus become the last human celebrations that took part in the divine Soma, before the arrival of Christianity would eliminate forever the last vestiges of archaic religion. Pindaro, the classical Greek poet, wrote about those who participated in the mysteries:

Happy of him who, having attended the rites, goes beyond the hollow Earth, because he knows the end of life and his divine principle.

The Rhine Sibyl

Hildegard von Bingen is one of the most enigmatic women in history. Despite having lived almost a thousand years ago, his figure is still present in European culture.

Diverse events commemorating the birth of St. Hildegard von Bingen, a medieval figure who continues to amaze us today, were held all over the world in 1998. The Benedictine abbess of the 12th century, from the lands of the Holy Roman Empire, has bequeathed us a gigantic work where she deals with the human and the divine. One of its most enigmatic aspects was its ability to predict, to have revelations and its gift for mystical visions. It is a unique case in history because there has never been another woman who had visions and revelations in a state of vigil. Hildegard was able to enter into ecstasy without losing consciousness, seeing, hearing and knowing simultaneously as he continued to be conscious in the earthly world. During her lifetime she was admired and respected by monarchs, popes, noble knights and learned friars, something unheard of for a woman in the Middle Ages. Today many claim it as a precursor and inspiration, from New age musicians to ecologists or feminists.

Time of monks and knights

The 12th century in Europe was an exciting time. The feudal lords extended their power over their vassals but new and radical social changes were already appearing on the horizon. These were times of political crisis in the Church, of crusades to liberate holy land and of struggles against “heresies” like the Cathars. Despite this, peace reigned throughout almost the entire old continent and this brought prosperity to the peasantry and merchants, with the bourgeoisie emerging as a new and rising social class. The Romanesque gave way to Gothic art in an unprecedented building impulse and began to return the lost knowledge of ancient Greeks and Romans in Arabic translations to illuminate again the dark landscape of the medieval. This is the age in which Hildegard was born, into a noble family. Always weak and prone to disease, he had, since he was three years old, the wonderful capacity for divine vision that he never abandoned. At the age of eight she was send to a monastery to be educated, and after a while she professed perpetual vows, becoming an abbess in 1136. In 1141, during a vision, he was commanded to write everything he had seen and heard. It was then that he became a fundamental figure in European society.

Scivias

The first writing where we find his visions is the Scivias or Sci via Dei (Know the ways of God). If anyone wanted to be sure to follow the “right path” and the salvation of his soul, he could read this book, full of metaphors and visual imagination to have a broad sample of the earthly and heavenly world. In this medieval bibliographic jewel, the first Sibila’s visions are told, supported by illustrations of intense chromaticism, very luminous, unique for the time and made by monks under the direction of Hildegard herself. It was written with the collaboration of the monk Volmar, one of the three secretary-counselors that the nun had throughout her life. He wrote to St. Bernard of Clairvaux seeking understanding and conformity. He recommended his work to Pope Eugene III. The pontiff sent a commission to examine it, and the conallusions were so favorable that he asked her to continue writing. From this moment on, and already more than fifty years old, she began a life full of activity. In 1150 he founded his own monastery in Rupersberg, Germany, which brought him great problems because his previous convent did not want to lose this point of attraction, visits and, of course, money.

Art and Science

In the Hildegard´s correspondence we can find the most varied topics, from Theology to councils of political order. It is surprising how freely he addressed these powerful men who sought his words. He never minced with his words and responded directly to all, whether king or servant, and always according to his own reasoning. It is curious to see how great rulers, unaccustomed to the displeasure, greatly respected the abbess. This respect was not toward her as a woman, impossible at that time, but as a direct messenger of God. She herself knew that only in this way could she find an echo, as a “seer” and not as a woman, so she often presented herself as “a poor ignorant woman”.

Among the occupations of an abbess at that time was caring for the community in her charge, both spiritually and physically. But Hildegard’s interest in medicine and science went far beyond that. Among his works we find medical writings such as Liber simplicis medicinas or Physica and Liber compositae medicinas or Cusae et curae, where he describes the human being in relation to natural elements, symptoms and treatments of diseases. He argues that the alteration of the natural environment can lead to illness (concept that preceded ecology), the importance of food in health and the use of plants as remedies. In addition, he commented on the influence of psychic states on bodily ills, as modern theories of psychology do today.

The celestial harmony

Music is one of the mainstays of the abbess of Ruperstsberg’s work. He considers it a means of communicating with God and a way to rejoice the spirit before the sorrows of this world, recovering lost harmony. Most of his compositions are bold and deviate from the styles of the time. They are works that cover wide registers, with very elaborate melodies, where music is as important as poetry. It can be said that they constitute compositions like the Gothic temples made music. Among his best-known creations is the beautiful cycle of songs from the “Symphony of the Harmony of Heavenly Revelations”. Today musicologists value his work very much, there are recordings of his complete work and curious mixes of his melodies with Techno and New age rhythms that may or may not like, but show the universal nature of his genius.

Incesant activity

During his last years, his fame continued to spread throughout the continent. Busy in a thousand tasks, unfolding an unstoppable activity, advising on spiritual matters, transcribing her visions, composing music and poetry, travelling, founding a new monastery…

She was the first and only woman in centuries authorized by the Church to preach, which she did on numerous tours of villages and temples in Germany. At the age of eighty came what was perhaps his worst experience: a conflict with the ecclesial authorities. The abbess had allowed the burial of an excommunicated nobleman in the Rupertsberg cemetery. Shortly before his death, man had reconciled himself with the Church, an action that escaped the knowledge of the clergy. Hildegard refused to comply with the episcopal order to exhume the body and remove it from consecrated land, alleging the final reconciliation of the deceased with God. They spent months of threats and prohibitions against their community. Finally, almost a year later, the archbishop, upon learning the details, lifted the penalties. It was the last victory of an exceptional woman in a difficult time. He died a few months later, on 17 September 1179.