Exhumations

An Overdue Update

by besslovejoy
New York City sunset
Times Square electronic sunset

I’ve recently been chastised for my absence from this blog (I won’t name names), and just when I thought no one was paying attention! I think all internet-enabled writers know the difficulty of juggling their paid work, creative projects, and social media efforts, which ideally overlap and cross-pollinate, but also distract from one another. Also, it’s hard to sit in a chair for more than ten hours a day. Nevertheless, I’ve been remiss in keeping all of you updated. Here’s a bit about what I’ve been up to:

The Order is about making death a part of your life. That means committing to staring down your death fears–whether it be your own death, the death of those you love, the pain of dying, the afterlife (or lack thereof), grief, corpses, bodily decomposition, or all of the above. Accepting that death itself is natural, but the death anxiety and terror of modern culture are not.

  • I’ve been working on editing a few projects for the Port Townsend publishers Feral House, including a fantastic forthcoming encyclopedia of black metal by Dayal Patterson. It’s got everything you want to know about the controversial genre, from the origin of corpse paint to the 70s glam metal band that inspired most of the Norwegian second wave. Feral House, of course, are the same folks who previously published Lords of Chaos, which both disturbed and fascinated the 18-year-old me.
  • Last but not least, congratulations to the curious and wondrous Atlas Obscura, the world’s most awesome travel-related website, on their re-design! You can see my spotlight on Einstein’s brain in their “Objects of Intrigue” series.

If you made it to the end of that, you get a gold star. Or maybe a skull in a jar, like the beautiful one (made of netting?) I saw at ABC Carpet & Home during the trip. More news, and skulls, soon!

Skull from ABC Carpet & Home (artist unknown)
Skull from ABC Carpet & Home (artist unknown)

Tycho Brahe’s Psychic Dwarf

by besslovejoy
Tycho Brahe, as depicted by Sara Drake of the Small Science Collective

On Monday, a team of Danish and Czech archaeologists unearthed the remains of 16th century astronomer Tycho Brahe from his tomb in Prague. The research is part science, part murder mystery: the Danish and Czech teams plan to use CT scanning, DNA testing and PIXE analysis to find out more about Brahe’s life and times as well as his cause of death. It seems the latter has never been quite clear, and some pretty nasty rumors have started to swirl about old Johannes Kepler. As the Scientific American blog Observations revealed:

…  Brahe is being disinterred starting November 15 for analysis for the second time since he was buried in Prague in 1601. Testing on hair samples taken from Brahe’s tomb the first time, in 1901, showed an abnormally high mercury content in the astronomer’s body, raising the possibility that he had been poisoned. But Brahe may well have met his fate by less malicious means; for centuries medical practitioners applied mercury as a treatment for maladies such as syphilis. …

The poison angle got a new look in 2004 in the book Heavenly Intrigue: Johannes Kepler, Tycho Brahe, and the Murder Behind One of History’s Greatest Scientific Discoveries. Not only was Brahe poisoned, contended Joshua and Anne-Lee Gilder, but all signs point to his famed protégé, Johannes Kepler, as the culprit.

Brahe’s body is being returned to his grave on November 19th, but we won’t know the results of the study until sometime in 2011. In the meantime, Brahe’s bones will spend a lot of time spread out in scenes like this one:

Professor Niels Lynnerup of Copenhagen University examining Brahe. Photo by Jacob C. Ravn, Aarhus University.

As a side note, the best part of the Observations post was the bit about Brahe’s psychic dwarf. The post quotes from the 1890 biography Tycho Brahe: a picture of scientific life and work in the sixteenth century by John Louis Emil Dreyer, which I’ll quote at a little more length here:

Two other inmates of Tycho’s house may also be mentioned here. One was a maid of the name of Live (or Liuva) Lauridsdatter, who afterwards lived with Tycho’s sister, Sophia, and later was a sort of quack-doctor at Copenhagen, where she also practised astrology, &c. She died unmarried in 1693, when she is said to have reached the ripe age of 124. The other was his fool or jester, a dwarf called Jeppe or Jep, who sat at Tycho’s feet when he was at table, and got a morsel now and then from his hand. He chattered incessantly, and, according to Longomontanus, was supposed to be gifted with second-sight, and his utterances were therefore listened to with some attention. Once Tycho had sent two of his assistants to Copenhagen, and on the day on which they were expected back the dwarf suddenly said during the meal,” See how your people are laving themselves in the sea.” On hearing this, Tycho, who feared that the assistants had been shipwrecked, sent a man to the top of the building to look out for them. The man came back soon after and said that he had seen a boat bottom upwards on the shore, and two men near it, dripping wet. … When any one was ill at Hveen, and the dwarf gave an opinion as to his chance of recovery or death, he always turned out to be right.

As it turns out, Jepp the Clairvoyant Dwarf has his own Facebook page, where his interests are said to include telling the future, riding drunken elks, hiding Tycho’s nose, and being dead.

Exhuming Former Leaders: The New Summer Pastime?

by besslovejoy
Simón Bolívar

Don’t go calling it a trend, but there were two politically-charged exhumations in the past week — both of national importance for their respective countries, and both to investigate suspicious deaths.

First, in Venezuela, Hugo Chavez had the remains of Simon Bolivar exhumed to investigate whether the independence hero was assassinated, possibly by poisoning (most historians think he died of tuberculosis). Chavez tweeted: “It’s not a skeleton. It’s the Great Bolivar, who has returned.”

Meanwhile, in Romania, the bodies of notorious former dictator Nicolae Ceausescu and his wife Elena were exhumed for DNA testing. The couple are said to have been executed by a firing squad in 1989 and buried in the Ghencea cemetery in Bucharest, but rumors have since swirled that they were secretly buried elsewhere, or somehow escaped death. According to a Telegraph article on the exhumation:

Their bloodied bodies were shown on TV after the firing squad had done its work but the actual execution took place so quickly that the cameraman failed to film the moment they were actually shot. The fact that the country’s new rulers opted to bury the Ceausescus secretly at night and under false names also fuelled doubts.

If the remains are confirmed to be genuine, the family wants to organise a proper funeral service, more than twenty years after the event, and to erect an imposing mausoleum for the infamous couple.

The Ceausescu story reminds me of the saga of Jesse James, exhumed in 1995 because of feuding claims by his descendants, and rumors that his death could have been faked. DNA analysis proved that the remains did in fact belong to James, which is frankly kind of disappointing. Lee Harvey Oswald was also exhumed just to make sure it was him and not a Soviet spy, and the results satisfied all but the most die-hard conspiracy theorists. Oh well, there’s always Elvis!