Read You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos Online
Authors: Robert Arthur
You Will Die: The Burden of Modern Taboos (8 page)
The respectful view of excrement in the West changed with the adoption of Christianity by the Roman Emperor Constantine in 312 A.D. Christianity and the other Abrahamic religions have demonized excrement.
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This disdain dates to the creation of the Jewish religion, when rival tribes of the Jews worshipped an array of nature-related gods, among them the dung god, Baal-Peor. Worshippers of Baal-Peor reportedly defecated before the idol’s mouth, which resembled an anus. To clearly distinguish itself from the nature religions it abhorred, Judaism established itself as strongly anti-scatological.
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Disdain of excrement pervades the Judeo-Christian tradition. According to most interpretations of the Bible, Adam and Eve did not defecate until their exile from the Garden of Eden, angels and other residents of heaven do not defecate, and the Israelites did not defecate during their forty years of wandering in the desert, because the manna provided from heaven was a perfect food.
In current practice, it is against Jewish law to think of holy matters when having an urge to defecate or during defecation. One can also not face toward or away from Jerusalem while defecating. Islam has a similar law regarding Mecca. A tragic example of excrement’s offensiveness in these traditions occurred in 44 A.D., when a Roman soldier exposed his rump and farted toward Jews celebrating the Passover in Jerusalem. This insult provoked a riot that reportedly caused ten thousand Jews to be trampled to death.
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There are exceptions in the Judeo-Christian heritage, such as the European friars who explained the Americas by claiming they were formed from the animal feces dumped from Noah’s ark.
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However, the overall treatment of excrement is damning compared to Eastern and pagan religions.
The Roman Empire’s coercive installation of Christianity in Europe at the end of the fourth century planted the seeds of the excrement taboo,
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but the idea of excrement being “bad” and “shameful” would not catch on for another 1,500 years. This delay was largely due to two reasons. First, the European masses held on to their pagan belief that nature was spiritual, although they did so under a Christian veneer. It took the brutality of the Inquisition and the witch hunts at the end of the
Middle Ages to forcefully extinguish this belief.
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Second, it is difficult for one to be ashamed of something that is everywhere, and in medieval cities excrement and its stench were everywhere.
Europe took a technological step backward during the Middle Ages and sanitation suffered greatly. Lacking the public facilities and underground sewers enjoyed by the Romans, townsfolk had to rely on tossing their excreta into the streets from their windows. “Loo,” slang for toilet, likely comes from the French term for “Beware the water.” It was yelled out to warn people below the window of an outgoing delivery. People below would shout, “Hold your hand,” and scurry off.
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When people were outdoors without the aid of a chamber pot, defecating in plain view of everyone was acceptable as late as the 1700s.
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With human and animal excrement and its accompanying stench all over the streets, contact with it was not the abomination it currently is. Della Casa wrote in his 1609 book of manners for noblemen:
It is far less proper to hold out the stinking [turd] for the other to smell, as some are wont, who even urge the other to do so, lifting the foul-smelling thing to his nostrils and saying, “I should like to know how much that stinks,” when it would be better to say, “Because it stinks do not smell it.”
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The wealthiest class could afford more privacy. When pressed to defecate in public they could rent a shielding cloak and a bucket from a street vendor who would wander the streets shouting out his service.
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When nobility retired to their castles, there were small “bathrooms” protruding over the moats. They allowed detritus to fall into the water below and added to the castles’ defenses by turning the moats into reeking cesspits. Dark stains running from these windows can still be seen on castles today.
There were a variety of methods by which the cities attempted to dispose of the waste filling their streets. In Nuremberg, Germany, open sewers went from each house to the river. At times the river was completely overburdened and at low tides the detritus would sit and fester. London used its rivers as well. London’s Fleet River was so overburdened that it stopped flowing and is now Fleet Street. Before it clogged
completely, the smell was so pungent that the monks of the White Friars complained to Parliament that the river’s toxic atmosphere had killed several monks.
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In Paris, feces were dumped outside the city walls. So much accumulated that the walls had to be extended so enemies could not use the mountains of feces as cannon positions.
Despite the dumping, Paris still had a problem, as the Duchess of Orleans commented around 1700:
Paris is a dreadful place. The streets smell so badly you cannot go out. The extreme heat is causing large quantities of meat and fish to rot in them, and this, coupled to the multitude of people who . . . in the street, produces a smell so detestable that it cannot be endured.
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Country folk fared no better. Between eighty to ninety percent of Europe’s population were rural peasants who lived in small villages isolated by miles of forest.
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Prosperous peasants lived in sprawling huts of wood, mud, and thatch. These structures served as barns as well as living quarters, so that pigs, hens, cattle, and humans lived under the same roof. All the people would sleep in one immense bed made of vermin-infested straw pallets. Peasant homes were dark, dank, and filthy, and each had a dung heap in the front yard that rivaled it in size. Less prosperous peasants lived in smaller windowless straw shacks with less livestock and less ordure.
In these surroundings, it was difficult to be ashamed of feces and candor extended to other excreta as well. In the 1500s the English and Dutch would toast someone’s health by drinking draughts of urine. Far from being coarse behavior, “drinking flapdragons” was an act of chivalry.
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Another old English tradition was for wedding guests to drink the bride’s urine. At a banquet celebrating the coronation of Anne Boleyn as the new English Queen in 1533, two handmaidens crouched beneath the table to handle her excretions, one with a chamber pot and another with a napkin.
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Flatus was also treated casually. Although it has been regarded as low comedy since at least the ancient Greeks,
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Western culture has not suppressed gaseous discharges in public until relatively recently. In fact, for thousands of years it was considered unhealthy to hold it back, even deadly. Uninhibited expulsion has been encouraged by such intellectual giants as Hippocrates (“the father of medicine”), Cicero, and Montaigne.
A DIRTY TRICK
The European Advantage
Spending centuries in medieval squalor gave Europeans a tolerance for diseases, such as smallpox, which the relatively clean American Indians lacked. European diseases destroyed Indian populations. When the Pilgrims landed in 1617, an unknown disease introduced to coastal New England by European fishermen only three years earlier had already killed over ninety percent of its Indian population.
—James Loewen,
Lies My Teacher Told Me
(1995), p. 70.
In the early Middle Ages diners belched and farted as loudly as they could to demonstrate their good health and to show gratitude toward their host.
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In the 1600s a European explorer of Africa’s Gambia River alluded to uninhibited European flatulence when writing about the Ashanti tribe:
[The Ashanti] are very careful not to let a fart, if anybody be by them. They wonder at our Netherlanders that use it so commonly, for they cannot abide that a man should fart before them, esteeming it to be a great shame and contempt done unto them.
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,
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This casual approach to farting was not limited to rugged explorers. In the 1700s the French royal court would have farting contests, engaged in by both men and women, with extra merit awarded to those who could light their gas aflame.
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But toward the end of this century Western attitudes toward excrement began to change.
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At the end of the 1700s the taboo on excrement began to tighten its grip for numerous reasons. First, by then Christianity had ruthlessly separated people from their affinity toward nature through the Inquisition and the witch trials.
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Second, around 1760 researchers began to associate certain smells with infections and contaminations. They would not understand germs’ relationship to disease for another hundred years, so their theories centered on types of vapors, with putrid ones being thought unhealthy.
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Third, as with the hanky, being odor-free became a status symbol. Poor people stank; people of means did not.
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With the rise of the middle class during the Industrial Revolution, more and more people had the means to be clean. This trend extended itself to one’s home and streets. The development of the modern toilet in the late 1700s made it technologically possible to reduce exposure to excrement and its funk.
Fourth, controlling the bodily functions was seen as an act of respect in the hierarchical society of the Middle Ages.
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What was fine to do in front of others was not fine to do in front of kings and dukes. A noted example of this was the case of Edward de Vere, the seventeenth Earl of Oxford. In the late 1500s the Earl broke wind as he bent to kiss the hand of Queen Elizabeth I at court. He was so embarrassed that he left England and traveled for seven years. When he returned the Queen welcomed him home and said, “My Lord, I had forgot the fart.”
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Yet as businessmen began to gain more power and the aristocracy fell, the clear-cut hierarchy began to melt. There was much greater social interdependence. Whereas before you only had to ingratiate yourself to a handful of people rarely, such as royalty, now you had to ingratiate yourself to a wide variety of people with whom you did business regularly—and it was wise to treat them all like royalty.
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Even with all this impetus for change, positive attitudes toward excrement did not exit quietly. Some intellectuals resisted what they saw as unnecessary elitist mannerisms. Gustave Flaubert, the author of the classic
Madame Bovary
, wrote in the mid-1800s, “Let diarrhea ‘drip into your boots, piss from the window, shout out shit,’ defecate in full view, fart hard, blow your cigar smoke in people’s faces . . . belch in people’s faces.”
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A number of the poor found the stale air comforting, which is understandable considering they spent their entire lives in it. Rumors claimed the use of chlorine to eliminate odors was a mass homicide plot against the underclass and in 1832 ragpickers in Paris protested against municipal sanitary measures by rioting and burning dung carts.
Despite the mounting evidence of excrement’s dangers, some doctors still insisted it was not harmful. The medical field had a long-established practice of using excrement as medicine, called “Filth Pharmacy.” One prominent adherent was Martin Luther, who reportedly ate a spoonful of his own feces daily for its remedial effect.
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Excreta from a variety of animals and humans (such as the dung of milk-feeding lambs, or urine of an undefiled boy) were prescribed for ingestion, injection, and inhalation. It also had long been customary for doctors to diagnose their patients by tasting small amounts of their stool.
All these doubters were silenced in 1857 when Louis Pasteur established the germ theory of disease. By this time the Victorian Age was underway and modesty regarding sex and excretion was already being taken to extremes. Although the Victorian Era is most noted for its repression of sex, excretion was repressed as well. Chamber pots were hidden in other furniture by the use of secret doors. Some of these devices played music when in use to draw attention away from the deed.
The Victorian obsession with regulating excrement also influenced its toilet training:
[Mothers in the early 1900s] were taught to commence toilet training as early as possible, to cut down on the drudgery of hand-washing diapers, and, more significantly, to instill early on a sense of order, cleanliness, and respect for authority. Starting as early as one month, they would set aside frequent blocks of time to hold the child over a pot or even strap them down and probe their rectum with soap sticks or glass or porcelain rods until they passed a stool. A rigid toilet regimen was seen as necessary to physical and mental health, and mothers who couldn’t toilet train their small infants, which was all of them, were told they were failures.
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They were all failures because it is now known that most children are physically incapable of toilet training until their eighteenth month. Before then the nerves used in controlling their excretory functions are not developed enough to resist bowel movements. Toilet training in this era was thus a disciplinary struggle between mothers and children that could last years. Sigmund Freud and other early psychoanalysts believed this strife had long-lasting psychological ramifications— one of them being the internalization that excrement is very bad.
