The Flagellants
Pain as devotion, and what pain does to the one who chooses it.
In the Texts
The bands of 1260 and 1349 scourged themselves in the squares twice a day for thirty-three and a half days, the years of Christ’s life, singing; Clement VI suppressed them in October 1349. The discipline survived in the orders, and the demonologists allowed it as a remedy against the flesh and warned of the devil in excess. The hair shirt and the scourge are in the Materia Medica as instruments.
What Medicine Makes of It
Pain releases the body’s opioids and endocannabinoids: stress-induced analgesia is reversed by naloxone (Willer, 1981), and the self-harmer’s relief, reported by one in six adolescents who cut (Swannell, 2014), is real and short, which is why it repeats. Glucklich (2001) reads religious pain as a technique for displacing the self; Konvalinka et al. (2011) measured the entrained heart rates of fire-walkers and their kin, and Xygalatas et al. (2013) the generosity that follows an extreme ritual: the bonding the flagellants described. The 1349 bands were also the plague’s panic and its pogroms.
The Evidence
- The flagellant movement rose in Perugia in 1260 and again with the Black Death in 1349, when bands of several hundred processed through Germany and the Low Countries scourging themselves twice daily for thirty-three and a half days; Clement VI’s bull of October 1349 suppressed them, and Cohn (1957) and Kieckhefer (1974) give the history.
- Pain of this kind releases endogenous opioids and endocannabinoids: stress-induced analgesia was shown in animals in the 1970s and the opioid component in people by its reversal with naloxone (Willer, Dehen, and Cambier, 1981); the runner’s high and the self-harmer’s relief share the mechanism.
- Glucklich (2001) reads the religious use of pain as a technique: the attention that pain commands displaces the self, which is the dissolution the flagellants sought, and the disciplina of the monastic rule used it in measured doses.
- Deliberate self-harm, cutting above all, is reported by about one in six adolescents (Swannell et al., 2014); the commonest reason given is relief from unbearable feeling, and the relief is real and short, which is why it repeats.
- The shared ritual added what the laboratory calls synchrony and the crowd: Konvalinka et al. (2011) measured the heart rates of fire-walkers and their relatives at a Spanish village festival and found them entrained; Xygalatas et al. (2013) found that those who had undergone a painful ritual in Mauritius gave more to the temple afterwards, and the bonding the flagellants reported is what the measurements predict.
Where They Part
The flagellant sought the dissolution of the self and found it in a neurochemistry he could not have named; the clinic sees self-harm and the historian a mass movement. The measured dose of the monastic rule, and the unmeasured dose of the square, are the difference between a practice and an epidemic.
In the Materia Medica
Sources
- Cohn, N. (1957). The Pursuit of the Millennium. Secker and Warburg.
- Glucklich, A. (2001). Sacred Pain: Hurting the Body for the Sake of the Soul. Oxford.
- Willer, J. C., Dehen, H., and Cambier, J. (1981). “Stress-induced analgesia in humans: endogenous opioids and naloxone-reversible depression of pain reflexes.” Science 212.
- Konvalinka, I., et al. (2011). “Synchronized arousal between performers and related spectators in a fire-walking ritual.” PNAS 108.
- Xygalatas, D., et al. (2013). “Extreme rituals promote prosociality.” Psychological Science 24.
Historical and interpretive; not medical advice.