The Marks on the Body
Stigmata, the witch’s mark, and what the mind does to the skin.
In the Texts
The body bore the signs on both sides: the witch’s mark that the pricker sought, insensible to the pin; the sacred names that appeared on the hand of the prioress of Loudun; and the wounds of Christ on the saints, from Francis in 1224 to the mystics of Canale’s own century. The manuals read every mark as a message.
What Medicine Makes of It
The medical literature has some four hundred stigmatics since Francis, nine in ten women, with the wounds placed where the subject’s own crucifix put them, in the palms in most centuries and in the wrists for a few modern cases after the anatomists moved the nails. Psychogenic purpura, bruising and bleeding under emotional stress without injury, is a recognised syndrome, and hypnotic suggestion has raised blisters in laboratory subjects, though not dependably; self-infliction, conscious or in dissociation, has been shown in several cases and cannot be excluded in most. The insensible patches of the witch-finders are the anaesthesia hysterica of the nineteenth-century wards and the functional sensory loss of today’s neurology. The skin is the organ the mind reaches most easily.
The Evidence
- Francis of Assisi in 1224 is the first recorded stigmatic; Harrison (1994) counts some 400 since, nearly all Catholic, nine in ten women, and most after the Franciscan model of wounds in the hands, feet, and side.
- Documented cases include Louise Lateau (1868–83), examined by the Belgian Academy, and Therese Neumann (1926–62); in every observed case the wounds appeared where the subject expected them, which has varied with the iconography of the Crucifixion.
- Psychogenic purpura, the Gardner-Diamond syndrome (1955), produces painful bruises without injury under emotional stress; and hypnotic suggestion has produced blisters and bleeding in experiments since the nineteenth century (Lechler, 1933), though not reliably.
- Self-infliction, conscious or dissociative, has been shown in several cases and cannot be excluded in most; the Church has canonised stigmatics for their lives, not their wounds, and treats the wounds with caution.
- The Rituale’s signs of possession and the Church’s signs of sanctity, the marks on the body, were read by the same physicians; Jorden and Weyer saw both as the body answering the mind.
Where They Part
The manuals read the mark as the devil’s or God’s signature; the clinic reads it as the mind’s, and has not explained how. The Church, which examines stigmatics more sceptically than their devotees, has never canonised anyone for the wounds alone.
In the Materia Medica
Sources
- Harrison, T. (1994). Stigmata: A Medieval Mystery in a Modern Age. St Martin’s Press.
- Gardner, F. H., and Diamond, L. K. (1955). “Autoerythrocyte sensitization: a form of purpura producing painful bruising following autosensitization to red blood cells in certain women.” Blood 10.
- Charcot, J.-M., and Richer, P. (1887). Les démoniaques dans l’art.
Historical and interpretive; not medical advice.