Supersense

CHAPTER SEVEN

WOULD YOU WILLINGLY RECEIVE A HEART TRANSPLANT FROM A MURDERER?

THE HUMAN BODY is made up of about two-thirds water. Maybe this explains our proclivity to describe other people with liquidized language, especially those with whom we may have to share some intimacy. Some people are slimy, while others are wet. Someone can be drippy, whereas another can just ooze charm. Is it a coincidence that these descriptions reflect comparisons with slime, a substance usually associated with disgust?

Like food, certain people can be yummy, whereas others can be revolting. And in the same way that essential reasoning influences how we feel about incorporating food into our bodies, the same goes for connecting with other people. When Granny ‘just wants to eat you all up’, not only is she comparing you to something delicious, she may want to absorb you!

When we reason about others, our judgements are coloured by our sense of essential connectedness. At one level, humans are tribal: we belong to one particular group and not another. But we also see ourselves as individuals willing to share certain levels of physical intimacy with the group and with specific significant others. Love, hatred, and disgust toward others are fuelled by gut responses that forge our strongest social relationships, and we intuitively think in an essential way about the nature of these connections.

We think like this because we need to justify our emotions in a tangible way. For example, in one study, adult subjects were told that they were to be given a vitamin shot to study the effects on visual tasks. In fact, some were given a shot of adrenaline, without their knowledge. Adrenaline is the naturally occurring hormone triggered during times of arousal. It makes you breathe faster, your heart races, and your palms sweat. What did the subjects make of their change in arousal? It all depended on the context. While they were in the room awaiting the fake visual test, they were asked to complete a mood questionnaire. At this point, a confederate of the experimenter who was pretending to be a genuine participant started acting either very happy or very irritated. The subjects who were unaware that their faster breathing, racing pulse, and sweaty palms had been caused by a drug reported feeling either angry or happy, depending on the state acted out by the confederate.¹ Do you remember the Numskulls from chapter 5? It was like the boss Numskull in the head office was receiving memos from all around the body telling him that something was up and that he had to send out a press release to explain why the body was feeling so aroused. Conscious experience was the spin doctor making sense of the messages.

In another study, an attractive female experimenter stopped and interviewed male subjects as they crossed a very narrow footbridge over a very deep ravine.² After the interview, she gave them her telephone number. The measure of interest was whether they called her later. Twice as many males whom she stopped in the middle of the bridge called her in comparison to males who had been interviewed at the side of the bridge. The explanation was as cunning as the finding: males who were interviewed in the middle of the high bridge were physiologically more aroused by the danger of the situation but misinterpreted this physical response as sexual attraction to the female interviewer. So our experience of emotions is a combination of bodily sensations and our attempts to interpret them. We try to make sense of our sensations.

When we encounter someone who triggers an emotional response, we apply the same interpretive processes. We may not be able to say exactly what it is that we either like or dislike about the person, but we have feelings about him or her. For example, have you ever felt uncomfortable in the presence of someone and not known exactly why? Maybe she stood too close to you, or maybe he shook your hand longer and harder than you expected. Or maybe the person touched your arm during the conversation. Physical contact can be either charming or repulsive. Why? I think the answer is that physical contact leads to the belief in potential contamination during social interaction. If the person is someone we are inclined toward, such as a potential mate or someone we respect, then the contact is welcomed. If it is someone we don’t like, then physical contact can be revolting. Both responses operate on the basis of psychological essentialism even when we are not fully aware of this threat of contamination. By assuming some exchange of essence, we can justify our response in terms of contamination. For example, members of the lowest caste in the Indian system were known as the ‘untouchables’: they were deemed to be so disgusting that a higher-caste member would be contaminated by contact with them. Although the term ‘untouchable’ was officially abolished in 1950, it still operates today as members from different castes maintain various degrees of physical separation.³ The same was true for the segregation that operated in the United States and the apartheid system of South Africa.

Calling people names such as ‘filth’ or ‘vermin’ not only dehumanizes them but also leads others to treat them as essentially different and contaminated. How else could a Hutu neighbour butcher a Tutsi child with a machete if not because the child had ceased to be human and become a cockroach?⁴ Essentialism justifies whether we embrace others or shun them by providing a physical reason for our actions. Our actions may be socially motivated and for the good of the group, but they also feel right. Where do these feelings come from, and how do we link them to others?

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.⁵ This 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:

It was quite interesting to see people getting very hot under the collar without being able to put their finger on what it was exactly that they were upset about. It was the exploration of a food taboo and I think that’s a very interesting area. No regrets, but it does get a little bit trying when people label you as ‘the placenta guy’, because there was a little bit more to it than that.⁸

Yes, there was a little bit more than that. Along with the placenta, the pâté featured shallots and garlic flambéed in red wine as well as a good sprig of supernaturalism.

THE TWIN WHO ABSORBED THE OTHER

It may seem beyond belief, but you really can absorb the physical essence of another person and incorporate them into your own body. In chapter 3, we briefly looked at the research on identical twins separated at birth and raised in different homes. Identical twins are spooky because they look like the same person, and this presents us with a problem. We naturally think of individuals as unique, in the same way we think of ourselves as unique individuals. That’s what the word ‘individual’ means. But identical twins, who come from one embryo that split in two, seem like two copies of the same person. Remarkably, this process can sometimes go in reverse. When two people become one, we are again presented with the problem of what it means to be an individual. In the American version of Ricky Gervais’s hit comedy The Office, the assistant to the regional manager is a character called Dwight Shrute. We are told that Dwight is a twin who absorbed his twin in the womb, and that gave him, as an adult, ‘the strength of a grown man and a baby’. Dwight may be fictional, but his claim is not.

When Lydia Fairchild was called in by Washington State social services in 2002, she assumed it was just a routine interview for the welfare support she had requested since separating from her partner, Jamie Townsend.⁹ The meeting turned out to be an interrogation and the beginning of a nightmare – truly something out of a Gothic horror story. Both Lydia and her partner were required to provide samples for DNA analysis to prove they were the parents of the children. When the results came back, Jamie was indeed the father, but Lydia was not the mother. At first Lydia thought that there must have been a mix-up, but she recalled a social worker saying to her, ‘Nope. DNA is 100 per cent foolproof, and it doesn’t lie.’ The authorities treated her as a criminal. They suspected a scam. Fairchild, pregnant with her third child, faced prosecution for benefit fraud and child abduction despite the fact that there were hospital records to prove that she had given birth to her two children. Prosecutors called for her children to be taken away into care, and when she was due to deliver her third child, the court ordered that a witness be present. Fairchild’s world was collapsing.

Luckily, someone else’s nightmare would be her salvation. Four years earlier in Boston, fifty-two-year-old Karen Keegan received a letter with the results of blood tests that she hoped would be an answer to her prayers.¹⁰ Karen was in need of a kidney transplant, and her family had undergone compatibility tests to see if any of them would make a suitable donor. Instead, she got quite a shock. The letter told her outright that two of her three sons could not be hers. They did not share her DNA and must have come from another woman. Suspicions were raised. Had there been a mix-up at the hospital? How could two of her sons have been swapped at birth? Karen knew she had given birth to all her boys. It is not something you forget easily or are likely to make up. Only after two years did doctors discover the answer. Karen was a chimera. The chimera is a mythological, fire-breathing, monstrous creature made up of the body of a lion and the body of a goat, fused together with a snake for a tail. However, in biology a chimera is an individual that hosts more than one source of unique DNA. How could this happen? The truth is stranger than any horror writer could imagine.

Early in her pregnancy, Karen’s mother had twin embryos developing inside her. She would have given birth to twin daughters, but something changed, and the two became one. Karen had absorbed her twin sister. Karen possessed two sets of separate genetic code in her body. Biologically, she is two people. When they repeated the tests, they found the other set of DNA that matched that of her two boys. The results of this amazing case were published in the New England Journal of Medicine in 2002.¹¹ Luckily for Lydia Fairchild, when Karen Keegan’s case came to light, prosecutors realized that they had made a terrible mistake. Further genetic tests were undertaken and, to Lydia’s relief, she too was found to be chimeric. The case was dropped, but so was the request for support benefits. Lydia and Jamie got back together again soon after the nightmare.

Rare cases of individuals who are biologically two people challenge our view of what it means to be a unique individual. We think of them as two people because our concepts of unique persons, or males and females, require that two individuals occupy two separate bodies. They cannot occupy the same body. This would be unacceptable for a mind designed to categorize individuals. And yet these individuals have only one body and one mind. This is why we are so perplexed.

Similarly, hermaphrodites and mosaics challenge our fundamental understanding of what it is to be a human being. They may be rare, but they are not supernatural. They are simply natural variations that occur in the random genetic crap shoot of life. But our intuitive biology simply does not readily allow for such exceptions to the rule. We treat these individuals as freaks because they violate our natural order. If identical twins look alike, then they must be telepathic. If some unfortunate sufferer has a skin disorder that makes him look like an alligator or an elephant, maybe he also behaves that way.

Ironically, the same intuitive biology that leads us to confusion when categorizing individuals readily leads us to beliefs about individuals that would be supernatural if true. We may treat others as unique because they occupy separate bodies, but essentialism also leads us to think that individuals have essential properties in their bodies that we can absorb into our own. This is no more dramatic than in the cases where we literally incorporate another person into our own body.

THE STRANGE TALE OF ARMIN MEIWES

The idea that you can absorb someone’s essence is a recurrent theme in explanations of cannibalism. However, cannibalism is a controversial topic among academics, who argue about whether it has really existed and why it may have been practiced.¹² The claim that it never existed seems undermined by research on the human prion disease Kuru, which is a variant of Creutzfeldt-Jakob disease, the human version of ‘mad cow’ disease.¹³ Kuru was particularly common among the Fore tribe of Papua New Guinea, where the word ‘kuru’ means ‘trembling with fear’. It is now thought that the disease was transmitted through the cannibalistic practice, up until the 1950s, of eating rather than burying dead relatives. Unfortunately, the most digestible but also most heavily contaminated portion of the deceased was the brain, which was prepared especially for women, who then easily transmitted the disease to their young children and babies. Women and children became the most vulnerable victims. Even though the cannibalistic practice was outlawed fifty years ago, the incubation period of Kuru is such that there were still new cases up until the 1990s, indicating that the disease had lain dormant in those children.¹⁴

The case for cannibalism is further strengthened by Richard Marlar, who has being going through the ‘motions’ of the ancient Puebloan Indians of the American Southwest known as the Anasazi. The motions are the poo that archaeologists found around campsites where the charred remains of human bones were found in cooking pots dating from around the twelfth century, which led to a controversy about whether the Anasazi had practiced cannibalism. This was resolved by biochemical analysis of the post-meal turds found at the campsite, which were shown to contain human protein. The only way that protein could have gotten there was if it had been eaten.¹⁵

So cannibalism was practised, but whether the idea was to absorb another’s essence is less straightforward, as the reasons for the practice varied. It also depended on whether the consumed were enemies or relatives and on how much of them was eaten. The Wari tribe of South America would eat tribe members as a funerary ritual, whereas the Kukukukus tribe of Papua New Guinea preferred to eat their enemies but smoke their relatives.¹⁶ When an enemy prisoner was captured, the men broke his legs with clubs so that he could not escape and then let the children play at stoning him to death. He was then chopped up, wrapped in bark, and cooked with vegetables in a traditional pit oven. If the victim was young, the muscular parts were given to the village boys to eat so they could absorb his power and valour. In contrast, deceased relatives were placed in their hut, where a fire was lit and the body was gradually smoked over the course of six weeks. In their belief system, the spirit was still present, and the survivors behaved accordingly, treating the leathery corpse as if it were still alive.

Such practices have long since disappeared, but every so often the taboo of cannibalism surfaces from the underbelly of human depravity. Following a tip-off about some weirdo posting ads on the Internet about wanting to eat men, the police raided the home of forty-two-year-old Armin Meiwes in the small German town of Rotenberg in 2002. What they found was truly grisly. Armin had a freezer containing human body parts and a video recording of the evening he killed and butchered his victim. That was just the beginning. The tale would develop into an even more shocking case of cannibalistic essentialism.¹⁷

A year earlier, Armin had advertised on an Internet chat room dedicated to sadomasochistic discussions, looking for a young man to slaughter and eat. Apparently, talking about cannibalistic fantasies is not that uncommon in Germany. Unbelievably, a forty-three-year-old Berlin engineer, Bernd Brandes, replied. In fact, Armin had half a dozen men come and visit him, but only Bernd apparently was willing to see it through to the end. Bernd harboured a real desire to be eaten. Following a brief e-mail exchange, they agreed to meet at Armin’s home.

On the fateful evening of March 9 at Armin’s house, Bernd Brandes swallowed twenty sleeping tablets downed with a half-bottle of schnapps. He then begged Armin to cut off his penis for both of them to eat. He wanted to be eaten alive! After an initial failed attempt with a blunt knife, Armin successfully cut it off. Bernd had difficulty eating his own manhood, as it was too chewy, and so Armin tried frying it with garlic but ended up burning the meal. Bleeding heavily, Bernd decided to take a bath. Meanwhile, Armin went downstairs to read a Star Trek novel. After a few hours, he returned upstairs to finish off Bernd with a kiss before stabbing him in the neck. He then butchered the body, putting the pieces in his freezer cabinet next to the frozen pizza. He buried the head in the garden. The whole incident was recorded on videotape, proving that Bernd Brandes had been not only a willing victim but also an encouraging one. By the time the police arrived in December 2002, Armin had eaten twenty kilograms of Bernd cooked in olive oil and garlic, washed down with South African red wine.

The media frenzy that followed brought up the obvious questions. Why did Armin do it? Armin claimed that from an early age he had wanted to eat another person. More disturbing to contemplate was how anyone could willingly want to be eaten. How could Bernd Brandes want such an horrific death or, for that matter, attempt to eat his own penis?

We can only speculate about Bernd’s motives, and getting answers from Armin is proving to be difficult. I have made several requests to set up a meeting with Armin Meiwes, who is now serving a life sentence in Germany, but so far these requests have been declined. However, the available reports and testimony indicate that both men had a perverse sense of essentialism, vitalism, and holism.

In his e-mail reply to the initial posting, Bernd said that he wanted to exist inside another man’s body. Clearly, he believed in an afterlife inside someone else. He was like the puppet mouse dead inside the alligator that children believed would still have a mental life. Armin held reciprocal supernatural beliefs about his victim. He wanted someone to live on inside him. During police interviews, Armin reported that Bernd tasted similar to pork, but that with every mouthful his memory of Bernd increased. He felt much better and more stable with Bernd inside him. He also reported that his English had improved. Bernd Brandes had spoken fluent English. In the most recent interview in 2007, Armin said that Bernd was still with him.¹⁸

CELLULAR MEMORIES

I may never get the opportunity to question Armin Meiwes about his supernatural beliefs, but I have spoken to the much more amiable and approachable Ian Gammons, who lives with his good wife, Lynda, in the small village of Weston in Lincolnshire, England. Lynda and Ian have been married for over thirty years and share an intimacy over and beyond what most couples can ever expect to achieve.¹⁹

In 2005 Ian was suffering from kidney failure when it was discovered that Lynda was a match and would make a suitable donor. She didn’t even hesitate, and the life-saving operation was a success. About two months after the operation, Lynda and Ian were out shopping when something peculiar happened. Ian turned to Lynda and said, ‘I am really enjoying this.’

Ian and Lynda have always been very close but very different in their interests. Ian is a typical male who hates shopping, gardening, cooking, and all the pursuits that Lynda loves. The idea of Ian enjoying shopping seemed too strange. Ian began to cook and to enjoy helping out in the garden. Previously, he would have simply heated up a frozen dinner. When Lynda raised the topic of getting a pet dog, Ian agreed despite having been a cat person all his life. And the similarities go beyond hobbies and tastes:

My experiences are still developing. I am becoming more intuitive and I have a greater awareness. In particular, we share many more dreams. Last night Lynda woke up and said that she had a weird dream of a white house in a green field by the sea. I had exactly the same dream. Is it true that our DNA is mixing? Is that how it could possibly happen?

Ian is a soft-spoken man who genuinely wants to know how to explain his experiences. He is not your typical New Age hippie talking about essences, vital life energies, or the connectedness of the cosmos. The only sensible answer, he feels, is that he and Lynda now share a link because part of her is inside him. He has absorbed part of his wife and is turning into her in a small way.

It’s not an uncommon report in transplant patients. Around one in three transplant patients believe that they inherit the psychological properties of the donor.²⁰ The most famous example was Claire Sylvia, who received the heart and lungs of a young man in the 1980s.²¹Following the operation, she developed a taste for drinking beer and eating chicken nuggets. For a ballerina, this was a strange departure. More bizarrely, she found herself attracted to short blonde women. The deceased’s girlfriend had been short and blond. And, yes, he liked beer and chicken nuggets, which were found in his coat following the motorcycle crash that killed him.

Such reports are claimed to be examples of cellular memories, a supernatural belief that the psychological aspects of an individual are stored in the organ tissue and can be transferred to the host recipient. Some claim that each cell of our body is connected. If the brain creates the mind and brain cells contain the psychological states of memory, then other cells in the body share this information. On the surface, something like Ian’s belief that he had incorporated Lynda’s mental states through her transplanted DNA does seem logical.

At one point, there seemed to be some scientific evidence for such a bizarre notion. James McConnell is a controversial figure in the science community. In the 1950s and 1960s, he was conducting experiments on simple worms to measure how long it took them to learn a maze.²² Having trained a bunch of these flatworms to slither around the maze, he then did something very unusual. He chopped the trained worms up into small pieces and fed them to untrained worms. These cannibal worms now learned to slither around the maze faster compared to other worms that had not been fed the cannibal diet.

Further studies with rodents seemed to suggest that naive animals fed the bodies of trained animals learn to run mazes more quickly.²³ How could this be if it was not cellular memory? It turns out that the training involved stressing the animal with electric shocks so that it would avoid repeating mistakes in the maze. Remember John Watson and Little Albert and conditioning behaviour? This kind of stress releases hormones that stay in the body. It’s one of the reasons slaughterhouses try to reduce the stress of livestock, because the changes associated with stress affect the quality of the meat. When the hearts and livers of trained mice were fed to novice mice, it produced a measurable difference in the latter’s performance in learning to avoid shock. Was this evidence of memory transfer? No. If mice that had never been trained on the maze were simply stressed by being rolled around in a jar and then killed and fed to other novice mice, these novice mice also showed improved learning on the maze.²⁴ It was not a memory that was imbibed, but a hormonally enriched heart or liver. As happens when you pop a pep pill to study for a test, you learn much faster if you are more aroused. No reputable scientist does this kind of research today. Still, this has not stopped the spread of the cellular memory hypothesis, which can still be found in school science textbooks.

One has to question the logic that motivated James McConnell to do such a bizarre experiment, but clearly he felt that knowledge could be transferred by ingesting the body of another. Like many examples of pseudoscience, it is difficult to make the distinction here between natural and supernatural reasoning, since McConnell’s hypothesis had surface credibility. Eating a trained animal made a difference on a memory task, so why not cellular memory? This line of research is now discredited by the scientific community but still cited as evidence for transplanted memories by those who believe in supernatural connectedness. Some case studies seem to stretch the bounds of credibility.²⁵ However inexplicable Ian and Lynda Gammons’s experiences may seem, they do not seem beyond coincidence or reason. More difficult to explain away are cases such as the little eight-year-old girl who received the heart of a murdered ten-year-old. It was claimed that she started to experience terrifying nightmares and was eventually able to provide a detailed description of the man who killed her donor, enabling the police to capture and convict the murderer.

Such stories are myths that perpetuate supernatural beliefs. Relatives, patients, and those considering organ transplantation must be influenced by intuitive essentialism. This explains why there is a willingness to believe that we can inherit the psychological properties of another person through their organs. While it may be comforting to the families of donors to think that some essence of their loved one lives on, it may even have a negative effect when it comes to organ donation. Eternal essence may be a comforting notion to some relatives, but it may persuade others not to give consent in the belief that the relative still lives on in another. And what about recipients? How do they psychologically adjust to having someone else’s organs inside them? In one case, a British teenager was forcibly given a heart transplant against her will because she feared that she would be ‘different’ with someone else’s heart.²⁶ She was more frightened of losing her own unique identity than by the prospect of certain death. Such is the power of essentialist beliefs.

The Swedish researcher Margareta Sanner has been asking people what they think about organ transplantation and getting some very interesting responses.²⁷ She found that moral contagion was a major factor (‘what if it comes from a sinful man?’), as were concerns about xenotransplantation – the substitution of animal organs for human ones. When offered a choice of different organs, adults typically responded, ‘The liver and kidney from a pig is okay, but I would only accept a human heart’, or, ‘Everything is in the heart; I neither want to give it nor take it.’ One participant even thought that ‘I would perhaps look more piggish with a pig’s kidney.’

We recently examined these sorts of beliefs in healthy students by asking them to rate the faces of twenty people for how attractive and how intelligent they looked and then for how happy the students thought they would be, if they were dying from cardiac failure, to receive a transplanted heart from each person.²⁸ Having initially rated the face of each potential donor on all these measures, we then told them that half the people in the pictures were convicted murderers and the other half worked as volunteers. They were then asked to repeat the ratings for attractiveness, intelligence, and willingness to receive the person’s donated heart. Not surprisingly, though all the ratings for murderers dropped, the biggest effect was on participants’ unwillingness to receive a heart transplant from a murderer. The participants may have thought that the evil of a murderer is a tangible property that can be stored and transferred in a simple pump of muscular tissue.

And what about bigotry and racism? In 1998 Northern General Hospital in Sheffield, South Yorkshire, was severely criticized for accepting the organs of a donor on the condition that they could only be transplanted into a white patient.²⁹ Following a similar case in which the family refused to allow the organs of a dead man to be transplanted into a nonwhite patient, the state of Florida passed a law banning such restrictions on organ donation.³⁰

One of Sanner’s most intriguing findings arose from her interviews with patients who had received a kidney transplant from a living donor compared to those who had received a kidney from a dead donor.³¹ Unlike Ian and Lynda Gammons, the patients with an organ from a living donor were much less concerned about incorporating aspects of the donor’s personality than were patients who had received a kidney from a dead donor. Maybe the recipients of living donors were better prepared (these operations are planned well in advance) and knew the donor was still alive and well and in full possession of his or her unique identity. But the recipients of an organ from a dead donor knew that the person was no longer around and wondered if part of that person lived on inside them.

Clearly, psychological essentialism influences the way we think: as a donor, we may continue to live on in another person’s body or, as a recipient, we may be changed by having another person inside of us. Such supernaturalism can even be found in that most common preoccupation of human behaviour: sex.

ESSENTIAL SEX

If you are male and over forty, you will understand why one of the first movies that had an enduring impact on me was Roger Vadim’s 1968 Barbarella.³² The opening sequence of Jane Fonda’s weightless striptease aroused strange feelings in most prepubescent boys like myself, but it was a sequence much later in the movie that left the biggest impression on me. On arriving on an evil planet, our heroine enters the palace of pleasures, where Amazonian women are sitting around on big cushions smoking from a giant hookah pipe. Inside the glass bowl swims a young man. The women are clearly high on the intoxicating smoke. When Barbarella asks what they are smoking, the answer is chilling. ‘Essence of man’ comes the reply. For a boy on the boundaries of sexual awareness, this was a terrifying revelation. Was sex all about having one’s essence absorbed?

Sex with another person is layered with essential, vitalistic, and holistic beliefs. It may be triggered by hormonally induced urges (feeling horny), sensory stimulation (smells, tastes, and sights), functional drives (I need to make a baby), and even cultural pressures (go on, it’s expected), but our thoughts during copulation and when we think about copulation are seeded with supernatural notions. Being at one. Soul mate. Achieving a sacred union. In what must be one of the most embarrassing moments for any member of the royal family, Prince Charles talked of reincarnating as his mistress’s tampon in a secretly taped telephone conversation to his lover. The nation was disgusted by the revelations from the ‘Camillagate’ tapes, and it may have been said as a joke, but such notions really just reflect a lover’s desire to be intimate and incorporated into the loved one’s body. This is because lovers want to achieve both a spiritual and physical union.

Even where people do it has a spiritual consequence. Recently a man and woman were arrested in an Italian cathedral after parishioners heard groaning coming from the confessional box. When the authorities pulled back the curtain, they found a woman down on her knees, but not in repentance. She was performing a sex act on the man whose groaning was due to carnal pleasure rather than moral angst. The couple argued that, as atheists, having sex in a church was no different to any other place. However, the church thought that the act was so sacrilegious that a special ceremony would be necessary to purify the box.³³ The box had been contaminated by the act. This sounds remarkably similar to the ‘Macbeth effect’ we encountered in chapter 2 and the use of exorcism rituals to cleanse places polluted by evil.

If you hold essentialist views, it is easy to understand how you might regard sex as potentially contaminating, with either positive or negative essential qualities, depending on how you view the other person. This is why rape is not only a physical abuse but also a psychological violation that leaves the victim feeling ‘dirty’. For many, sex outside of a partnership of two people, whether forced or complicit, is unacceptable because the essential integrity of our partner has been defiled. Consider how the various sex acts rank in order of their essential overtones. I don’t need to spell them out, but the more physical the contact, the penetration, and the exchange of bodily fluids, the more essentialist our attitudes to the acts are. Climax achieved through nonphysical contact with another may be perverted (dirty phone calls and even virtual sex when it arrives), but it is not as essentially disturbing as actual physical penetration.

Also, why do we find sex among the elderly generally disgusting and yet older people themselves are often still sexually active? Our overall preference to have sex with younger partners may be an evolutionary drive to mate with healthier, longer-living potential partners, but the disgust we feel when thinking about old people having sex is derived from essentialism. Such ageist beliefs are not trivial. The urge to have sex with younger partners leads to exploitation. The older, stronger, and more dominant seek out the more vulnerable for sex. This is because in many cultures sex with children is deemed to be a way to regain youth and vitality.

And look at what we actually do down there in the genital region. How can anyone enjoy the pleasures of a recreation area that has a sewage outlet running through it? We can only do it if we find the other person sexy. Otherwise, with a stranger we do not find sexy, it becomes totally disgusting. Why does sex with one partner invoke lust and the other disgust? My suspicion is that such attitudes stem from a psychological perspective rooted in the essentialist notion of a need to make a profound connection with another by spreading essential seed.

This kind of sexual supernatural reasoning is potentially dangerous. According to official statistics, nearly sixty children under the age of fifteen were raped every day in South Africa throughout 2001.³⁴ The actual figure is thought to be much higher, since only one in thirty-five cases are reported to police. Various bodies monitoring the situation believe that the victims are increasingly younger. One explanation for this trend is the so-called ‘virgin cure’ myth, which extends to raping babies.³⁵ In 2000 South Africa’s Medical Research Council reported that ‘belief that having sex with a virgin can cleanse a man of HIV has wide currency in sub-Saharan Africa’. A survey of over five hundred automobile workers revealed that one in five thought the virgin cure was true. The origin of the myth is sympathetic magic, and it can be traced back as far as medieval Europe. However, I fear that the pandemic of HIV/AIDS is only going to lead to an increase in the occurrence of such attacks as desperate sufferers try by any means to cure themselves. This is because education can have little impact on traditional belief systems. Despite having one of the most intensive programs of health education in the world on the causes and prevention of HIV/AIDS, studies reveal that South Africans still endorse both biological and supernatural explanations for the cause of the illness. These two belief systems – natural and supernatural – are not viewed by participants as inconsistent with one another but rather as complementary causal explanations. For example, people know that a biological virus causes HIV, but they argue that witchcraft is responsible for one person contracting the virus and not another.³⁶

THE WEAPON SALVE

Essentialism, vitalism, and sympathetic magic have a long history in medicine, For example, the medieval ‘weapon salve’ was a popular treatment for wounds of conflict.³⁷ This was the idea that acting on the weapon that had inflicted an injury could heal wounds. Here is a recipe for weapon salve from the renowned fifteenth-century Swiss alchemist Paracelsus:

Take of moss growing on the head of a thief who has been hanged and left in the air; of real mummy; of human blood, still warm – of each one ounce; of human suet, two ounces; of linseed oil, turpentine, and Armenian bole – of each two drachms. Mix all well in a mortar, and keep the salve in an oblong, narrow urn.

Once this ointment was prepared, it was important to recover the original weapon and dip it in the ointment. In the meantime, the wound was to be cleaned regularly with fresh water and bandages each day after the removal of ‘laudable pus’.

The logic of the weapon salve reveals a number of supernatural misconceptions. The weapon had a sympathetic connection with the wound by virtue of the fact that it had inflicted it. The various ingredients for the salve were chosen because they had sympathetic affinity with the healing process. Some ingredients may have been chosen because they were believed to counteract the negative aspects of infection by exerting antipathetic forces to cancel them out. The gruesome ingredients of the potion demonstrate essentialist thinking. The use of human tissue reflected the belief that it possesses essential forces that can affect the healing process. Particularly prized was the tissue from those who had died healthy and young; no one wanted rejuvenating fat and blood from either the ill or old. Hence, most recipes called for the use of those who had been executed, the younger and more virile the better, as the young had more life force in them than the sick and dying.

The weapon salve treatment did actually work, but not through any supernatural mechanism. Rather, simply cleaning the wound and replacing the bandages each day enabled the body to fight infection, which was the most common cause of death. However, those who practised the treatment believed that it worked for all the wrong reasons. A similar story would emerge in another extraordinary episode from the history of Western medicine.

THE GONAD DOCTORS

Apparently the idea came from his time working as an unqualified young doctor in a Kansas slaughterhouse, where he noted the sexual prowess of male goats. Dr John R. Brinkley, or ‘the goat gonad doctor’, reasoned that if one could transplant the gonads of billy goats into men whose libido was flagging, those parts that old age had rendered ineffective could be reinvigorated.³⁸ Brinkley’s reasoning was pure essentialism and vitalism coupled with a naive understanding that gonads are related to sexual function. The animal transplantation studies were originally conceived as an early application of sympathetic essentialist reasoning – like begets like. If male goats are horny, and your libido is dropping, then put a bit of billy in your works.

FIG. 16: The goat gonad doctor, John R. Brinkley. © KANSAS STATE HISTORICAL SOCIETY.

His first patient was an elderly farmer who complained of a low sex drive and was willing for Brinkley to try inserting a portion of goat gonads into his scrotum. Most individuals would be appalled at the notion of deliberately inserting animal tissue into their body, as opposed to their stomach, but when it comes to sex and ageing, human history is full of bizarre practices believed to enhance, improve, and prolong the sexual experience. By all accounts, Brinkley’s farmer not only survived the operation but also enjoyed a renewed lease on sexual life, fathering a son whom he decided to name, appropriately, Billy. John Brinkley’s meteoric rise to fame and wealth had begun. He would go on to perform thousands of such operations at around $750 a pop, and he became one of the most successful quacks in twentieth-century America. For $5,000, which was a huge amount back then, Brinkley transplanted human gonads harvested from young prisoners on death row. Over his lifetime, he would own mansions, planes, boats, and radio stations and stand twice for the governorship of Kansas. He even wore a ‘goatee’ beard to fit with his medical procedure. Eventually, the American Medical Association, frustrated at the extent and success of his goat gonad transplants, ran Brinkley out of the country, and he would eventually lose his fortune trying to re-establish his career abroad.

The notion that animal sexual glands would work as an elixir of life had been around for some time. In nineteenth-century Paris, the ageing Harvard physiologist Charles-Édouard Brown-Séquard had been making claims of rejuvenation from injecting himself with crushed guinea-pig and puppy testicles. Ouch, it makes me wince just to type this. Probably the most famous gonad doctor of the time was the Russian-born physician Serge Voronoff. He injected himself with Brown-Séquard’s liquidized pet bollocks, but with disappointing results. Voronoff then thought that perhaps the tissue should remain intact, so he perfected the transplantation or graft technique. Initially, he used the family jewels of young criminals and transplanted them straight into the sagging sacks of ageing millionaires who could afford the operation. When he ran out of obliging youthful crooks, he moved on to various monkeys and apes. World leaders, captains of industry, and ageing actors all paid handsomely for operations, and soon animal gonad grafting was taking place all over the Western world, except in England. The English, being strong pet lovers, had banned animal vivisection but deemed it perfectly acceptable to transplant another man’s bollocks.

Unlike Brinkley in the United States, Voronoff enjoyed the accolades of his fellow doctors in Europe for a period of time. In July 1923, The Times reported that at a meeting of seven hundred leading surgeons at the International Congress of Surgeons in London, Voronoff was applauded for developing the rejuvenation operaton that would make him a fortune substantial enough to afford an entourage of servants and mistresses.³⁹ However, as with Brinkley, eventually the tide of support changed when it became clear that Voronoff ’s claims could not be substantiated.

Although Voronoff ’s reputation was eventually destroyed, aspects of his research were sound. The testes produce the steroid hormone testosterone, which is an essential mechanism for the masculinization of males. In the womb, testosterone turns girl babies into boy babies. Without it, all boys would turn out to be little girls. That’s why we all have nipples. Over the course of the lifetime, testosterone plays a role in the so-called secondary sexual characteristics that appear around puberty with the change in the genitals, body mass, and hair. In old age, testosterone levels become depleted. Among other symptoms of old age, lowered testosterone can reduce the sexual libido, and so hormone replacement therapy is one controversial treatment for the so-called male menopause. It also forms part of the transitional female-to-male gender reassignment in women who want to be surgically transformed into men. However, in its modern use, synthetic manufactured hormones are used to avoid both the problem of rejection of animal tissues by the human immune system and the risk of transmitting animal disease into humans.

It was this risk that brought Voronoff out of his relative obscurity in 1999 when an article published in the science journal Nature theorized that his early gonad transplantations to rejuvenate the limp libidos of old wealthy men had inadvertently transmitted the deadly virus HIV from monkeys to man.⁴⁰ How ironic if true. Once again, the animals get their revenge on their superstitious tormentors.

Under normal circumstances, the cells from one animal cannot replace the cells of another. Even human-to-human transplantation requires compatibility and drugs to suppress the body’s natural immune defense to reject foreign invasion. The fact that gonad injections and transplantations seemed to work was due to the placebo belief that they would work. Although the logic behind the gonad doctors’ treatments was essentialist in nature, it would ultimately lead to the discovery of the underlying mechanism of the yet-unknown hormones. When Voronoff observed the effects of castration on men and animals, he saw how the absence produced an imbalance. He simply reasoned that replacing what was missing in an old man would redress the problem. A naive conception based on the sympathetic laws of magic led to a scientific reality.

HOLY WATER

When Charles I, the British king, was beheaded on a cold January morning in 1649, it was reported that the crowd surged forward to dip handkerchiefs into the royal blood as it dripped from the scaffold.⁴¹ If true, one possible explanation for this grisly reaction may have been the belief that royal blood had curative powers because kings and queens had a direct connection with God. Certainly, the ‘royal touch’ of a king or queen was thought to cure the skin disorder scrofula, a form of tuberculosis. Essential adoration of saints and kings continues to this day.

The most visited site in the Italian province of Umbria is the fortified medieval town of Assisi, home to the Basilica of St Francis of Assisi, where the remains of Italy’s most famous saint, St Francis of Assisi, can be found. The tomb of this thirteenth-century saint was not discovered until 1818, which is surprising considering that these were the remains of the individual responsible for the formation of the Franciscan order of monks. The original tomb had been concealed by a fifteenth-century pope, but when the mortal remains were rediscovered following nineteenth-century excavations, they were moved to the underground crypt that pilgrims can now visit today. On the day I was there, the temperature was a searing ninety-five degrees Fahrenheit outside in the blazing Tuscan sun, so, despite the hundreds of visitors crammed into the basilica, it was a welcome relief to file slowly into the cool underground crypt and shuffle past and around the large stone sarcophagus protected by a lattice iron frame.

The numbers were such that one had to simply go with the silent majority. There was no turning back. Whenever a whisper emerged in the crowd, a disembodied voice from some unseen church authority reprimanded and commanded us with a stern ‘Silenzio’. We were expected to maintain a reverential state. However, just as museums tell us, ‘Please do not touch’, it was understandable why visitors wanted to poke their hands through the iron grid to make physical contact with the ancient stone monument behind. Some were engaged in silent prayer as they touched the stone.

It was then that I witnessed something quite disturbing and essentialist in nature. A monk came in and watered the permanent flower arrangements at the front of the tomb. The water from the flowers started to trickle over the ancient stone. What I did not expect, and could not photograph because of the restrictions, was a sudden frenzy in those nearest to this part of the tomb. As if they had been parched beyond thirst by a desert sun, they pressed their faces against the grid trying to lick the water as it dribbled over the Holy Shrine. Fingers wetted by the excess water were licked in an effort to imbibe some of the vital fluid. Water that was probably drawn from an ordinary tap from the municipal supply only minutes earlier had become sacred by contact with the tomb. It was all too bizarre. Admiration and adoration had become essential contamination of ordinary water.

SACRED SOIL

Such essential thinking is at the heart of a business dream of Alan Jenkins and Pat Burke.⁴² I met them last year on a Dublin chat show, where they were talking about their new business venture, the Auld Sod Export Company. Alan is an elderly, more reserved man and maybe a little too serious, whereas Pat is a much younger, jovial agricultural scientist who enthused about the new product they were selling in the United States: Irish dirt. Not just any old dirt, but true, authentic Irish soil. Alan got the idea when he attended a funeral in Florida and overheard the relatives lamenting that the departed could not be buried in the auld country and that just a little sprinkle of Irish dirt on the coffin would have been a comfort.

Dirt is full of microbes and potential contaminants. US customs and agricultural import restrictions are some of the most stringent in the world, and so the dirt would have to be thoroughly sterilized to remove any potential biohazard. This was Pat’s role in the business – to produce the cleanest dirt in the world. Good enough to eat. It sells at $15 for a twelve-ounce bag, and one elderly New Yorker originally from Galway has ordered $100,000 worth so that he can have his Irish grave in Manhattan. The company is now branching out into shamrocks that can be grown in the United States in Irish dirt in time for the ever-popular St Patrick’s Day celebrations. The belief is that somewhere in what must be the most sterile soil on earth the essence of Ireland remains. With such potential for psychological essentialism at work in the large expatriate Irish American community. Alan and Pat may have struck pay dirt.

During the Second World War, Germany invaded Yugoslavia, and the royal family fled to exile in London. King Peter II, the last king of Yugoslavia, married Princess Alexandra of Greece in 1944, and they were expecting their first son the following year. Anxious about the heir to the throne not being born in his homeland, King Peter II made a special request to Winston Churchill. For a single day in the summer of 1945, the British prime minister, Sir Winston Churchill, conceded room 212 of Claridge’s Hotel in Brook Street, London, over to Yugoslavia so that Prince Alexander could be born in Yugoslav territory. A pot of Serbian soil was placed under his bed to add the essential ingredient to a political decision.⁴³

And how did our vampire from the beginning of this chapter move around and remain safe during the daylight hours? By travelling in coffins that contained the dirt from his native Transylvania, of course.

WHAT NEXT?

In this chapter we examined ways in which humans can experience or seek out an intimate connection with significant others supported by beliefs that they can absorb another person’s qualities. This experience can be either positive or negative depending on the properties that we believe we may incorporate. While biological contamination through viruses and microbial infection is a real mode of transference between individuals, we also believe that other non-physical properties such as vitality, morality, and even identity can similarly be transferred as if they were physical entities. Such beliefs may be based on a naturally developing notion of essences we infer when thinking about other individuals. I think these beliefs are a natural product of the way that we think about other people.

Essential reasoning comes from the gut as much as it comes from the mind. That’s because it’s based on intuitive feelings that stir the emotions.

Emotions are the fuel that fires the decisions we make. Without emotion, our decisions are cold and without feeling. This may be fine when choosing which newspaper to buy or socks to wear, but when it comes down to decisions about other people, emotions are important guides to how we think. If these people are significant others in our lives with whom we share some degree of interpersonal commitment, then emotions are essential – in that the relationship must have some emotional component to be significant and in that it is easier to understand the experience of emotion as coming from some inner truth about the person with whom we feel connected.

If our emotions towards others are based on essentialist reasoning, we should be able to demonstrate that the principles of essential contamination apply as well. Personal possessions, items of clothing, and former dwellings of significant others will take on something of the previous owner. In other words, we will start to treat inanimate things and objects as if they are tainted by the essence of significant others towards whom we hold some emotional stance. To do so, we have to see that other person as a unique individual.